Yes, all the time. A lot of the time municipal plans are actually in place and fine, and a development is going to start, and then the Nimbyism starts. The development actually complies with the plan, but local politics enter, and as I was saying earlier, for municipal officials it can be hard. You're caught as an elected official. The plan says to build something. Let's say it's supposed to be a 10-storey building. The community finds out, and then they start fighting it. You're in a tough position.
For the leadership from the federal government to say we need 3.5 million homes built over the next decade, that's a really important number. We need to double housing starts. It can't all just be new greenfield developments. Some of it has to be infill, so then you get provincial governments weighing in.
I'll take the opposite view. I think municipalities need help because the local politics are tough, so when the provincial government comes in and says, “We need to do something, and this includes infill,” that's an important message as well. At the local level, we need things like as-of-right zoning, where you don't get to go back to city hall to fight it, because once it's zoned for six storeys, the fact that a six-storey building is going in can't be fought. There's no discussion anymore on a main thoroughfare. If a six-storey is supposed to go in, it's going to go in. As much as we're saying that it's a challenge for us at the municipal level, there's no question that municipal politicians are in a tricky spot too.
I would say that higher levels of government can lend a hand by saying, “These are the targets we need. It involves intensification. I think we all need to work on this together,” and help explain to Canadians what new vibrant communities can look like too. There are some wonderful intensification projects that bring new people into a community, new shops, new stores, things that never would have been able to be there if we didn't have more people living there, and of course they bring in the transportation and the public transit at the same time.