I think you've just answered the question as you asked it.
Obviously, we need a clear and consistent understanding—as we've all said, I think, all of the deputants so far—of who needs what housing where and at what cost. In order to do that, in order to make intergovernmental agreements with provinces and territories and municipalities and regions, we need to be talking the same language. A lot of definitions of affordability, including definitions used in the NHS-CMHC programs, have used a proportion of market rent, but unfortunately market rent has very little to do with what people can afford to pay. The definition of affordable housing that has been in place in Canada for four, five or six decades has to do with the 30% rule: no more than 30% of before-tax household income on housing costs, including energy, so that's rent, mortgage and energy costs.
It's not a perfect definition, but it's a solid definition. It's a definition used internationally. It should be a definition that's used, and it's mentioned in Bill C-20. The problem with Bill-20, as my colleague Mr. Sullivan has said, is that it isn't explicit about affordable to whom. All housing is affordable to someone. The definitions we've been talking about at the housing assessment resource tools project focus on the majority of Canada—the bottom three income bands: low, moderate and median. We include, as Build Canada Homes does, an unfortunate category, which is very low income. At the moment, those who are on fixed incomes, like pensions and social assistance, quite often don't have enough money to rent a room, let alone a self-contained home, and that's a problem.
We need to look at those four income bands in terms of, I would argue, any form of government subsidy. We don't right now. We give a lot of money to programs that deliver...and I'm sorry but ACLP is one of them. In terms of the vast majority of housing, we don't know, actually, because CMHC doesn't keep track of it, whether those are apartment units that can be afforded only by the top two income quintiles or not, so that is a problem. It's a problem in terms of the efficiency and effectiveness of government subsidies.