When I look at what I see as an opportunity for changes that the government could make, aside from the barriers that exist with taking security on reserve and somehow figuring out a way to change that entirely, I have some other thoughts and general ideas that potentially could be used. For example, currently with the ministerial loan guarantees program, you can have one, two or three houses being approved for a community. Really, you're going to continue having significant housing shortage supply issues in these communities, because that's not the number of houses they need. They need a lot more houses than that.
Rather than dedicating this funding amount to so few homes, make it possible to redirect that funding to repay infrastructure financing, so actually lending money to build more than two or three homes in order to build 10 or 20 homes at a time, but using that annual funding as a source of repayment for those loans. That way, you're getting out the supply up front versus houses being built over 25 years. You're getting the houses up front and the repayment is happening over 25 years.
Another idea is incentivizing your own home, or owning your own home. Home ownership, I do think, is key. I've talked about our home loan program. I think it's key to alleviating some of the pressures on the housing shortages, because then you would have a multiple supply of housing. You have one on the government side, either through the indigenous government or our federal government, and then, on the other side, from the individual indigenous person, who's getting a loan and who's building their own home. It increases the supply of housing, because it's coming from different sources.
However, if, in your community, home ownership is not that popular or it's just not seen that often, and your best alternative to owning your home is living in one that has very little cost associated with it, I think it's important to encourage home ownership at the leadership level. When we talk about government changes, this could also be at the indigenous government level, where you see chief and council, elders, business leaders, all of these leadership people in the community, encouraging others to do the same for home ownership.
Another thought is reducing the cost differential. We talked about building homes in northern Canada or in more remote communities. The difference in the cost of building a home in Winnipeg versus northern Saskatchewan is substantial. That can also be very discouraging when you want to build your own home. Again, this comes to funding, but providing some sort of funding for this gap, to take away that barrier of the difference in the cost, I think is another opportunity to encourage home ownership.
My last one, which I feel is not groundbreaking, is around multi-unit residential buildings. Building more of these mid-rise buildings with smaller units would really increase supply. I think the standard of single family homes in our communities, detached homes, provides housing for a family, but we do have young people, elders; we have people who just want to live alone. Bachelor units, one-bedroom units, I think would be helpful and would appeal to a broader range of people. They would be more affordable and potentially also lead to more home ownership.