When we look at the infrastructure we have in the country—and we have over a trillion dollars of assets—we see that the majority of it, 71%, is in public infrastructure. Our ability to be good custodians requires good planning. We need to have asset managers who understand the infrastructure that they have, the state it's in, and the state of the environment that it's living in now and into the future.
The Canada community-building fund is a predictable, stable source of funding so that communities can actually save from one year to the next, and they can plan against.... It also supports planning, so they can actually use that to be able to do asset management plans. They can use it to understand the technology that they need in order to invest, and understand where the investments need to be made. It's a very flexible program. It has a number of different asset classes that it can invest in for the hard infrastructure, but it also supports the capacity that you're talking about, to do the thinking and the thought leadership to be able to put the plan in place so that they're making the right investments at the right time.
Going back to the integration of housing and infrastructure together, as we look at the need for housing, we have to have that core infrastructure in place to be able to support the increased number of houses, so the water infrastructure you're talking about is critical, and the minister mentioned that as well. We are hearing about that from different communities: What are the dependencies to be able to make that a realization?
The investments that we've been making—since 2015, $79 billion in investments from this department in those types of infrastructure—are really important.