Certainly, access to credit is a critical factor in driving up [Technical difficulty—Editor]. Home prices are market-driven. They are driven by what people can afford to pay. As much as the development industry would argue they are cost-based, I would argue they're market based, and then you would make sure the cost could be achieved. I think that having the access to credit has driven that up.
I did a chart. It's in the background paper you will get. If we look at the amount of borrowing, the median household could borrow over the last 20 years at the prevailing interest rate and the median income each year, that borrowing I am referring to was above the average house price, So we had people pulling that up, and therefore access to credit, mortgage credit in particular, has been a big factor.
Where OSFI and others got it wrong was around the macroprudential rules, trying to constrain access to credit to just sort of take the boil off the market, particularly after 2008-09.... The stress tests really impact first-time buyers more than they impact buyers who have existing equity. They don't need as much of a mortgage; they have all their accumulated equity. They're the ones who are driving the prices up, not the first-time buyers.
The first-time buyers are being closed out of the market, so we need to figure out a way to enable young kids to get into the market, because what will happen.... If you can't get into home ownership, you stay in the rental market. If you stay in the rental market, rents are going up, and the bottom end of the rental market is where things get hurt.
Try to think about housing as a system and recognize that what we do on the home ownership side affects the rental side. All of that is critically important.
I know this is not directly answering your question, but it is related to this. It's thinking about which parts of the housing system we want to help. Helping young buyers get into the market has an indirect benefit on the rental market, and can be very valuable. The policies that we've pursued over the last 20 years, or 10 years, particularly from 2015 to about now, have very much done the opposite and precluded them from the market.