Thank you for the question. I think you added some useful context around the previous questions about whether or not we were living in a crisis in 2015.
In Hamilton, I have no reason to distrust that it is exactly the case you've just made. In my own community, things were very different. However, now in my small town—with a population of about 10,000 people—we're seeing homelessness for the first time. It's being driven by a number of different factors, not exclusively federal government policy, by the way, although I think federal government policy has an important role to play. This is where we see a sea change between the approach that we're taking and the one the previous Conservative government took, and I should, to be fair, point to the cuts that were made in the early 1990s under a Liberal government that actually discontinued investment in affordable housing for low-income Canadians.
Cities can't do this on their own. There are things for which they are uniquely responsible—zoning practices, permitting processes and infrastructure prioritization—but when we saw a lack of investment not only in housing but also in infrastructure for many years, with the exception of the post-financial crisis injection of cash for the building Canada fund, we saw cities that were not prepared to grow when they started to experience population growth. Population growth is a major part of the economic strategy of the Atlantic provinces, for example.
Without the investments we've been making in infrastructure, which have laid the track for community growth, we would be in a much worse position than we are today.
From my perspective, it's essential to work with municipalities so we can incentivize them to overcome the barriers that are uniquely within municipal jurisdiction, but also so we can partner from a funding point of view to build housing-enabling infrastructure.
To your question about having a strategy, if you have a problem and you don't have a strategy, you're never going to solve it. As the problem changes, my view is that the strategy too needs to change and that's why you've seen a new series of measures aimed at a wider array of homes than were uniquely the focus of the national housing strategy that was launched in 2017.