With respect to the administrative cost for the financing for housing programs—that's the rental construction finance initiative and the national housing co-investment fund—I estimated that to be over $300,000 per application. That's not a very precise figure because CMHC was not able to provide a breakdown of its administrative costs by function within financing for housing. Those two programs account for the vast majority of budgetary expenditures, so I assumed that the administrative costs are attributable to them.
They also weren't able to provide administrative costs for prior years, so I had to assume that the administrative costs of $36 million in 2019 were typical of 2018 to 2020. I took that total administrative cost and divided it by the total number of applications that have been approved, including those that had received conditional approval, because I assumed that some of those administrative costs were incurred up front. It's dividing it over a larger number of applications than is shown elsewhere in the report.
That's how I estimated the administrative cost per application. It's more to flag it as something that should be considered in the designing of programs like the national housing co-investment fund to monitor the administrative burden and determine whether it's necessary.