Thank you, Ms. Demers.
Mr. Villeneuve, this program is very popular with some developers, such as non-profit developers, but also with many contractors that have shifted from condo construction to rental housing construction in the last few years.
However, since these are often businesses that have a lot of assets and need a lot of loans, the challenge is that they now need to be assessed for financial viability by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, or CMHC. What we're hearing from our members and partners is that there's very little transparency, that it's opaque and unpredictable. That's limiting these businesses' capacity for growth at a time when we need more housing both in Quebec and in the rest of Canada.
We do appreciate these efforts. This program keeps project financing costs from getting too high, because CMHC provides funding during the riskiest phases for lenders. However, long-term predictability is a challenge, because for many contractors, it's very hard to know whether they're going to qualify or what they need to do to qualify.
For that reason, there's a lot that CMHC needs to do to offer builders more predictability.