I absolutely agree with you. What I'm happy about with the rapid housing initiative is that it was a two-page application form with a turnaround time that was very tight. That is something we need to aim for. We have to do our due diligence of course, because there's a lot of money on the table, but compressing and simplifying the application process would see a lot of smaller cities and smaller projects get to the finish line more quickly.
We've changed CMHC from being a referee in this process to being a coach, and its frontline workers are helping to realize projects faster. That's why the compression on the turnaround times and the co-investment funds have been realized.
We also know there have been various demands from different players in the system to transfer the money to the provinces, let them distribute it to the cities and have the cities go to the front line. Think of housing money like water. The more people touch it, the smaller it gets and the more administrative costs are built into the transfer from partner to partner to partner before it hits the person it's supposed to help, which is the homeless individual. We've worked very hard to find ways of working with provinces, territories and indigenous-led governments to get the money directly to frontline service providers so the dollars are not administered four or five times before they hit a person's monthly cheque to pay for housing.
One of the breakthroughs on rapid housing—and it's worked really well in Quebec, in particular—is this relationship between the federal government and frontline providers. We're working in a coordinated fashion with the provinces, but getting the money directly to those projects and fitting it into the systems that Quebec and cities have designed. That is allowing us to get the dollars with less and less handling into the hands of the people who are actually doing the building and the people who are actually moving into the units we're constructing. It's a priority.