Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to greet the witnesses and thank them for being here and for their precious co-operation.
We are talking about a population of 12,000 people with a high birth rate. It is reasonable to assume that families are quite large and have four, five or six people per family. From 2,000 to 3,000 homes were built over a 30-year period. Given the conditions that have been described to us, after 30 years they are outdated or are in very bad shape.
Have you investigated best practices? I will tell you why I am asking you that. It will give you time to think about it.
In the work I used to do, I had the opportunity to travel in the north but I never went, as opposed to you. However, when I saw photographs I thought that those homes were completely inappropriate given the reality of the north—they are even inappropriate to the south. You can imagine the difficulty there is in adapting something to northern realities when we can't even adapt it to southern conditions. However, there are architects and engineers with good brains, artists, people who do manual labour and are very creative.
Have you tried to survey the best practices to design buildings that would be better adapted to the location and conditions as regards their architecture and the materials used?