Thank you very much, Chair.
Thank you to the presenters.
I'm the MP for Sault Ste. Marie, a border town. Before this, I used to be on city council—for four terms. Back in the day, when non-Canadians were buying property in the area, the concern wasn't about housing availability. Quite frankly, it was about MPAC, the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation, which, as I'm sure you're aware, is the provincial arm that assesses properties.
Back in the day, they used to have assessors who would go out, take a look at your property and figure it out. They changed all of that. They cut a whole bunch of staff and went down to a model where they would take a look at how different properties would sell, what the value was and then create a circumference. It was driving up taxes because the local council would then set their mill rate against the assessed value of those properties going up.
Fast-forward to now. The housing market is super hot. My son looked at purchasing a bungalow about a year and a half ago and was outbid overnight by $85,000. It's hot all over Canada. It's not just happening in Sault Ste. Marie. I think what we're looking at are border communities, but really Canada is a border community to the United States. Ninety per cent of our population lives within 100 miles of the U.S. border.
I'm going to start with my first question to Thomas. I wanted to talk about the different exemptions that exist. If you want to talk about the exemptions and the tax that is there now, the intention is to make housing more affordable for Canadians. Is that happening? I'll start with Thomas.
It's a two-part question. In the second part, I really want you to drill down on what exemptions there are. We've been talking about rural versus urban, but what else is there?