Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the guests, not only today, but throughout this study that we're doing on housing.
I can't help but sit here listening and thinking that if this were a weekly television show, it would be called “The Blame Game”. Most of our witnesses have been from central Canada. I happen to represent a riding in Calgary, Alberta. I think many of the things I've heard from many of the witnesses have been the same kinds of things that I hear about in Alberta. Municipalities are blamed for delays by developers. Municipalities then turn around and blame the province and say that it's not municipalities holding things up, but various departments of government.
We tie all of that in to the fact that we have a federal government that for six or seven years has been spending a lot of money and talking a lot about how much money they've been spending on housing, but we have had really no concrete evidence of what has been accomplished. It's one thing to say how much money you spend; it's another thing to talk about results. We really have seen no verified results. Ministers are picking numbers out of the air, but don't have any backup as to where those numbers come from.
I guess I'm a little bit where Mr. Pomeroy was in the first session today.
The first question we should be asking ourselves is this: Is this acceleration fund even required? It seems to me like our issue is not necessarily about more money. It's a question of not being able to get through all of the various rules and regulations to actually have the money at the end of the day get to where it needs to go.
I would throw the question out there and say that I really like the idea of Mr. Pomeroy, which was that we should be studying whether this fund is even required. What are some other things we could be doing to get rid of the problems that seem to be pretty prevalent in this industry, literally, across the country?
I throw that out to any one of the guests and ask them to comment on it.