Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you, Minister and Deputy Minister, for joining us today.
Minister, I was very pleased, as many of us were, to see the discussion of federal lands in budget 2024 being positioned as a part of the solution to the provision of housing, including affordable housing in Canada.
You and I have discussed my proposal to use Canada Post lands on the Halifax peninsula, so thank you for keeping that in focus.
This idea of leveraging federal lands to address the housing crisis, through my lens, accomplishes two key things: It can mitigate the cost of land in transactions, which is a huge driver of cost for the end-user, but it's also going to improve the supply of land that's already serviced.
With those two things in mind, could you lay out for us what your department's plan is to use federal lands? While you're answering, could you also mention the challenges the program faces, the big opportunities that you see and what you think some of the timelines might be?