Madam Speaker, one of the things the government could be doing is working to establish a non-profit acquisition fund. A lot of non-profits have great experience running housing complexes and know how to get the job done, but they find out too late that a building with affordable units might have been available or on the market. Corporate landlords, who are better connected and have deeper pockets, find out sooner; by the time there is more public knowledge of that building coming up on the market, it has already been scooped up. Therefore, providing a notice period for that kind of sale and making funds available for competent non-profits to be able to swoop in and compete with some of these big corporate landlords is a really important piece of the puzzle.
Also, we can look at the idea, as they have done in New Zealand, of having escalating down payments. As a person owns more properties, they would be required to put up more instead of just leveraging equity out of their existing properties for the same amount of down payment. This is another way to try to have a bit of control over really excessive investment activity in the residential housing space.
These are just some of the ideas out there about what government could do. The non-profit acquisition fund, obviously, does involve some government investment, but different rules around escalating down payments do not. Therefore, that is an example of something the government could be doing right now that does not cost money and could help have a cooling effect on the residential housing market.