There's definitely going to be pricing pressures on real estate for the foreseeable future. I think there's a shortage of supply of housing almost everywhere, and it's been exacerbated by a number of different varying factors, especially in the already quite dense areas in Toronto and Vancouver. We've had internal migration to those areas. Immigration tends to flow to those regions as well. They're economic engines. That's generally where employment exists, so that's where people go. We are unable really to keep pace with demand with additional supply. It's something we definitely need to be spending more time thinking about.
It would probably be really beneficial for the government as a whole to start discussing emergency measures almost to create housing supply in all forms. Social housing is definitely needed and government-supported subsidized properties are needed, but almost rather than investing in something like a first-time homebuyers incentive plan, for example, where the government is owning a portion of equity, perhaps the government should actually become the primary investor in some commercial spaces that they themselves would resell to individuals. Oftentimes it's the investment that gets the property project kick-started in the private sector. If the government is comfortable owning property as a percentage, potentially it might want to think about owning projects to get them going—ultimately of course with the goal to provide that inventory back out to Canadians.
I think we really need to focus on trying to promote owner occupation of properties, though, rather than keeping properties potentially reserved for investor purchases. I understand that we are concerned about overall levels of indebtedness in Canada, but by continuing to address the supply-demand imbalance by adding demand tapping measures, we're always seemingly excluding young and upcoming folks, or the people at the bottom of the economic ladder, who frankly need the most support, and the people who are really transitioning from what would be social or community housing through rental housing and then onto that first rung of the ladder. As we continue to make it more difficult to extend credit to those folks, we are effectively keeping those properties on sale, as it were, for investor purchases, and those people still need to live somewhere. They're definitely going to be renting from those now sort of amateur landlords, and as the supply there becomes continually constrained, we're actually not assisting their monthly carrying costs at all.