Yes. I am very familiar, Ms. Dzerowicz, with your riding because our ridings neighbour each other. It is a wonderful, vibrant community that is lucky to be home to many new Canadians.
I do think that a strength of our country is that, notwithstanding the very legitimate and significant partisan differences that we are hearing today, we do have a strong national consensus in support of immigration. As a Canadian, as a citizen, as a person, I really believe that immigration enriches our country culturally and socially. As finance minister, I am absolutely convinced of the way that immigration and our country's openness to immigration is a tremendous economic strength. That has been the case throughout Canada's history. It is particularly the case today when western industrialized societies, including our own, are experiencing a real demographic challenge that manifests itself in labour shortages.
I think it would be fair to say that there is no industrialized country in the world as open to immigrants as Canada is. That is a huge economic strength. It gives us huge advantages when it comes to meeting the demographic challenge. If I could, for a moment, speak to everyone here and to all Canadians.... I think we can't take our success hitherto in welcoming immigrants for granted. As a country, we need to understand how much our well-being and prosperity have been based on being a society that welcomes immigrants, and we need to always think about how to maintain that.
Some of the housing measures in this bill are really important in that regard. We're a growing country. We need to build homes for new Canadians, and we need to be sure that Canadians already here have a place to live, too.