Mr. Speaker, the member is an excellent colleague on the finance committee and he comes up with some great proposals going forward.
I think I did address in my speech, and I hope he heard it all, some of the solutions we have for bringing down the escalating prices of Canadian houses. One is to address money laundering.
Money laundering by foreign buyers in the Canadian marketplace is excessive. It is like any purchase: When there are a whole bunch of excess buyers in the marketplace, it inflates the cost. Those foreign buyers are coming here for one reason, and one reason only: because it is safe to launder money in Canada, more safe than it is in the rest of the G20. That money is arriving on the shores of Canada and going into one of the safest investments in Canada, housing.
Who is being impacted by that? It is people who work in Canada, who are having the housing that they usually occupy being bought as an investment and being occupied sometimes by people who do not work here or live here. That is a problem, and that is what we need to address more than anything else.
My colleague addressed the issue by saying the government needs to invest much more in this sector. The government invests in sectors because there is a short-term gap. This gap is growing, and it is not because we are not building enough in Canada. As I said in my speech, we spend a far greater percentage of our gross domestic product on residential housing than any other of the G7 countries. There is a reason for that: We are building the wrong kind of product. We are building product for investment, primarily foreign investment, that is not necessarily the right foreign investment we are looking for.