Thank you for the question. I think it's a really important one.
You'll appreciate that, from a technical point of view, other levels of government are listed in the Constitution as having jurisdiction over housing issues. We want to play a leadership role federally, because we see that there is a problem that has reached a national scale, despite the fact that it may not officially fall into section 91 of the Constitution. We have an opportunity to make a difference, and we can leverage the federal spending power to incentivize the kind of change that we want to see.
That was the rationale for the housing accelerator fund, which you alluded to. We've incentivized municipal change by putting federal money on the table. Lo and behold, as the funding rolls out, you see the rapid adoption of new policies at a municipal level.
We can adopt a similar approach in dealing with provinces and territories. They absolutely must play a role, not only in the policies that will help get housing built, but in the policies that are going to help get infrastructure built, so the homes people live in are not storage units for their families at night, but a place where they can live as part of a thriving community where they can fully participate in life in Canada.
We're proposing, going forward, attaching housing conditionalities to certain federal transfers that go to provinces. You've mentioned the public transit funding that we've been investing in over the last number of years. Going forward, the model will include agreements with metro areas that may leverage provincial funding as well. You can bet your bottom dollar that we're going to see that there will be high density near large transit stations and more density near smaller ones.
You can look at opportunities like the Canada community-building fund, which we will be renewing in advance of the upcoming fiscal year. Primarily, that is a flow-through of federal money through provinces to municipalities. There are some exceptions where we deal directly with a municipality, like the City of Toronto, for example. However, we have an opportunity to attach housing conditionality to some of those transfers.
These are items that we are dealing with in real time. As we launch the next round of negotiations with metro region transit providers or provincial governments, we intend to say that it's not enough for them to put a certain number of dollars on the table. They need to demonstrate that this money is going to enable more housing.
Frankly, we need to do that internally to our own government as well, in working with Crown corporations and with different government departments. Maybe not as a condition of a funding transfer, perhaps for obvious reasons, but we need to constantly ask ourselves questions about what more we can be doing within our departments and within other levels of government to leverage a positive social outcome—in this case, when it comes to building more homes for Canadians.