I think reducing costs is definitely important. If we want to have housing that's less expensive, it doesn't make sense to replace older housing with new housing that, after you subtract all the costs of constructing it, including taxes and development charges, is worth less than what was there before.
If we want to replace houses with apartment buildings, for example, which provide more housing for people, or even replace houses with multiplexes, we should be looking seriously at the whole list of costs. Those include everything from materials and labour to things that are directly under the control of governments at different levels federally, provincially and locally.
I think Mike Moffatt's kind of back-of-the-envelope estimate was that removing the GST from new rental housing would, over 10 years, result in 200,000 to 300,000 additional homes being built on top of what would be built under business as usual.
As I said, there definitely are strong incentives for local governments to keep pushing up development charges.
Another change in the recent budget was accelerating depreciation on new rental housing so that it could be depreciated over 10 years instead of 25 years. What I've heard from people who work in the industry is that this is also really helpful. What's even more helpful is that it's the kind of thing that cannot be easily just taken back by other levels of government.
In terms of how to convince New Brunswick to remove the HST on new rental housing, again, I guess it comes back to persuasion and kind of pointing the finger. I mean, how do you say we need more housing...? I think, in New Brunswick, the situation is pretty bad. There's no rent control, and people are moving there.