Thank you for the question, Mr. Chair.
To start off, I would point out that the Canadian Forces housing agency housing stock is an option that is made available to the Canadian Forces members. It is not mandatory for them to occupy those houses. It's a personal choice in each individual's personal case.
The 7,000 basically covers off.... Sorry, I will back up a little. The Auditor General conducted an audit in 2015 of the Department of National Defence's housing program. As a result of that, DND identified that its housing requirements should be respecting seven principles. The principles are what we use to derive that number of the 7,000 extra houses.
I would point out it was never the intent of the department—and I believe it still is not—that we would be owning 7,000 houses. The intent was the requirement and not the departmental ownership. To make it a little clearer, we know how many roofs we need to put over heads, from our perspective. We don't have to own that, so we are looking to try to partner with local developers and with industry to see if there are any opportunities for us to get into some form of a partnership to get those roofs that we want to have available in a faster way.
I would remind everybody that we are operating in the same environment as the rest of the Canadians who are also looking for houses. It is proving to be a bit challenging.