Thank you so much.
I want to let you know, Mrs. Volk, that this committee is empowered to study and report on the mandate, management and operations of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, so you may get questions, but it's because we feel a responsibility to make sure that CMHC is being governed appropriately.
I want to go back to my introduction about the idea of changing culture. I was really looking forward to meeting you today. I was really looking forward to a culture change at CMHC. The past CEO came to this committee and let us know that the expertise on getting affordable housing built had really bottomed out at CMHC. I was hoping that your new leadership would reinvest in that need. I did hear that there has been a reallocation of policy staff out of your office, so I wonder if you could highlight if that is true.
I also wanted to go back to some testimony we had from a very well-known housing advocate, Steve Pomeroy, who said:
Certainly federal spending powers are a very important tool, but we have now got to the point of the national housing strategy where less than 10% of all the funding is going through the provincial mechanisms where the expertise largely was.
I recently met with the housing minister for B.C., who also said that this mechanism of 90% going through the federal government is not working. The provincial governments are ready to get acting, but this money is being withheld from them.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about Steve Pomeroy's recommendation, which is rebalancing and ramping up some of the programs that are funded under the bilateral agreements and allocating that to the provinces so they can get it going. They're the ones with the expertise.