Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I perked up when I saw this motion. Even though I'm not a member of this committee, I have a real interest in where this motion could go. Where it could go is toward the issue of housing. There's been a tremendous amount of discussion about the use of federal buildings for housing.
In that regard, in my community of Surrey there's been an awful lot of work done with the rapid housing initiative. It basically involves taking an existing building and repurposing it for living units. It's been particularly good for low-income people or people who are just unhomed, if you will. If this motion is adopted and the study goes ahead, I hope you look at the overall strategy for that. With the rapid housing initiative itself, something like $14 million was invested in Surrey to make this happen. Dozens and dozens of units resulted from that.
The other thing is a caution. It's very tempting to say, well, the government owns these buildings; it owns all this land, and we have a housing shortage in Canada. There's no doubt about that, although in my community they're building like crazy. A caution here is to not necessarily say that a piece of property or a building will be suitable for housing when you're looking at the overall urban development aspects of it. In our community, there are pieces of federal land that are out in the countryside. Yes, you could go in there, and you could probably build 300 townhomes on one, but they would be a long, long way from public transit. They would force people to use motor vehicles to get around. That works against some of the community development aspects that I think we should be aiming for when we look at an overall and very comprehensive 360-degree housing strategy.
The other piece of that, of course, then goes to the issue of municipal zoning. Especially in British Columbia, we have not only municipal zoning but also the agricultural land reserve, which means to say that if you have a piece of farmland, you can't just flip that over and build houses or a warehouse or anything else.
These are all the kinds of considerations we need to look at if indeed the intention of a motion like this is to go forward and talk about housing. The disposition of public property for something that on the surface looks really good could turn out to be pretty messy when it got down to the local level, just simply because of these factors that have to be thought about as we go forward with something like that.
That's it, Mr. Chair. Thank you.