Some municipalities are better than others. My sense is that no one I've met who serves on a municipal council says they want to block housing, but you do see that some of the attitudes that are reflected in certain districts at a given council table reveal themselves to be in an anti-housing position because they don't want to have an apartment building in the community where they live.
My experience with the housing accelerator fund has been illuminating, because it has demonstrated to me that communities across Canada want to embrace the growth opportunity, but it comes with certain challenges, and having a federal incentive on the table makes it easier for them to address those challenges.
What I was blown away by when we published the list of best practices that emerged through the early applications we assessed through the housing accelerator fund was the degree to which communities were willing to increase their ambition when it came to doing the things that we know will produce more houses, including adopting four-unit, as-of-right zoning, more density near post-secondary institutions and transit stations and digital permitting processes that will speed up the process.
We started getting letters and phone calls from municipalities that were saying, “What more can we do in order to give ourselves a chance to succeed in the housing accelerator fund?” The cream rose to the top. There are other good applications from some of the communities you've mentioned that may not have qualified because so many of the competitor communities decided they wanted to do even more.
We have a $400-million top-up in the recent federal budget that's going to allow us to partner with additional municipalities. We're going to work with those most ambitious cities. From my perspective, although I have gotten into a few disagreements with municipalities across the country, overwhelmingly my experience has been one of willing partners who want to do more but need help.
We need to have different levels of government pulling in the same direction. I find that although you may find yourself in a disagreement once in a while, if you don't have the conversation or you shut down the possibility of the conversation at the outset, you miss out on an opportunity to make a meaningful difference.