Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thanks so much to the witnesses today.
I want to thank the witnesses from the City of Hamilton for giving us that inside view, and I want to go back to something Mr. Thorne said.
Mr. Thorne, I'm going to ask you a question on this. You mentioned having a clarified goal. I'm not sure that the housing accelerator fund has a clarified goal.
I'm looking at what it was initially described as: housing supply to be increased in the largest cities everywhere in the country; creating 100,000 new middle-class homes by 2024-25; application-based to offer municipalities the opportunity to grow housing supply, increase densification and speed up approval times and these sorts of things.
Really, what the conversation has been about in this committee over the last few weeks is the need to address the core housing needs of the communities, and it has really moved towards rental housing and not-for-profit housing, which is not the same thing as the way the housing accelerator fund was positioned at the beginning. I think we really need to get an idea of what this housing accelerator fund needs to do, because I'd like to focus specifically on the rental housing.
In our testimony back on May 16, we heard from the executive director of the Neighbourhood Land Trust about the fact that we need to start protecting some of the affordable rental housing that already exists. I heard it again today. I would just ask you, Mr. Thorne, if you could give us a little more information for testimony around what you think the housing accelerator fund can do to protect purpose-built rental, low-income rental and rental that is going to address core needs in the community, and how saving or protecting that could be faster than new construction.