Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Ms. Houle, thank you for being with us this morning. Thanks as well for all the work you and your team have done. It's absolutely important.
I'm going to say a little about the financialization and commodification of the real estate stock and housing in general in Canada. Your office recently released a report on financialization, unless I'm mistaken, and it was the National Housing Council that published it. I want to be sure I'm assigning responsibility to the right organizations.
In the 1990s, the federal government, in a way, began to abandon its investments in social housing and truly affordable housing.
In addition, people began to view housing as a source of income, in some instances rightly so. For example, people who have no pension fund invest in housing. For them, buying a duplex or triplex is a way to save for their old age. However, there are also all those large corporations that have enormous property holdings and tall apartment towers with hundreds, even thousands, of doors.
What's the impact of this dual phenomenon: the federal government's abandoning its investment in housing and the financialization of the market?