I'd be happy to take a stab at that.
You make some very interesting comments to frame your question. Of course, you spoke about the reality we face in Canada, which is that almost everything falls into the jurisdictional quagmire because, sadly, when the British government gave us the British North America Act of 1867, a lot of things were pretty fuzzy. Housing, in fact, is not mentioned in the BNA Act. Property is mentioned, but housing is of course more than just property.
We're not alone in this. Australia has also a federal government; however, they have come up with a mechanism to get beyond the jurisdictional struggle. They have what's called the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement, which is a five-year agreement that provides funding.
It sets the roles of their states, which are equivalent to our provinces, and of the national government. They've been able to get beyond some of the curse of federalism that I know all of you struggle with because it's part of the reality of where Canada is. So I think there are some models that we can actually look to and say that if they can do it in Australia, then perhaps we can here in Canada.
To your question, as I read that clause I didn't see it as saying that we want to bring subprime mortgages to Canada—the NINJA mortgages, which means no income and no job or assets. I read it as speaking directly to the issue you mentioned in terms of the Mennonites.
I work with a group of Mennonites in the Kitchener area who are very actively developing homes. They find that with the patchwork of funding available from the feds, the provinces, the municipalities, and so on, they can get anywhere from 25% or 30%--sometimes 40%--of the actual construction cost, which means that for the rest of the cost they have to fund-raise or try to get private financing.
When they have gone to the banks, strangely enough, even though some banks have demonstrated in the past year a pretty bad record in terms of risk, the banks have often refused to give money to organizations that are developing non-profit housing because it doesn't fit within their business model. As I read this clause, it's not saying that we want to write a bunch of dodgy loans to people who we know aren't going to be able to pay them. That was the problem in the United States; we don't want to do that. It's saying that organizations that are providing housing should be given access to credit and that the federal government should play a role.
A friend of mine who is an economist, Hugh Mackenzie, of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, has noted that since the recession started it's increasingly hard for private sector and non-profit groups to get access to credit, but governments still can.