Human Resources committee  I'm not entirely sure which jurisdictions you're speaking of there. Some jurisdictions like Australia and the U.K. use tax mechanisms to encourage small investors to invest by allowing them to depreciate their asset against their income or use depreciation against their income.

Human Resources committee  No. Rent control is very good for tenants, but as I'm sure my industry colleagues would suggest, if we suppress rents too much, they simply won't build. We saw that through the 1990s despite the fact that rent regulation was removed. In Ontario's case, rent regulation was removed in 1998 at the behest of the industry on the promise that if you deregulate we will build.

Human Resources committee  Through you, Chair, an affordability metric like 30% is a relative metric. It depends on people's income, so it varies across income bands. I think moving to a more explicit affordability criterion, as the U.S. has used for many years.... They defined affordability relative to a percentage of median income.

Human Resources committee  Through you, Chair, yes, international students have become a very, very significant factor in demand. We saw over 650,000 international student visas issued last year. They do displace people in the local rental market. While a non-profit organization working in collaboration with the university could potentially utilize current programs of the national housing strategy, it's not something that's promoted or encouraged.

Human Resources committee  At that time, in terms of rent increases, again, in the 1970s we had a significant number of federal programs that supported rental construction. We had the assisted rental program and the multiple unit residence building mechanism, as well as significant funding for social housing, so we had quite a high level of production of rental housing—the peak years of rental production.

Human Resources committee  Yes, but “yes, but”, in the sense that I've generally been a proponent of vacancy decontrol, because I thought that it did create balance. While existing tenants were protected, it allowed investors to generate returns. Because of the excessive increase we've seen in the last few years, I've changed my view on that, and I think we do need to think temporarily about some way to suppress these very large increases.

Human Resources committee  Yes, and I think that has happened. The national housing strategy was a massive re-engagement of the federal government in 2017 and starting in 2018, but I think the weakness of the national housing strategy is that it has been very much a federal housing strategy and has not engaged the provinces to the degree to which it should and, therefore, lever additional provincial resources to assist in attacking this problem.

Human Resources committee  You can address the subsidy in two ways: by providing upfront capital grants and by reducing the amount of mortgage [Technical difficulty—Editor] that projects have to carry. That has the same effect as giving them a bigger mortgage. You gave them payments to help pay their mortgage, which is the way we used to do things.

Human Resources committee  I assume that question is still to me.

Human Resources committee  On the one hand, it sends direct, limited fiscal resources to those most in need. The problem here is that we have a systemic problem in the housing system. If young households can't afford to buy a home, then they clog up the rental market and add demand, and we're seeing an increase in rents.

Human Resources committee  If you recall, in the 1970s we had extremely high inflation. You think it's bad now. It was three times worse back then, with inflation of 13% or 14% and mortgage rates of 20% or 21% in the late 1970s. As part of an anti-inflationary program, the federal government put in place wage and price controls, where it was trying to address the situation in the same way that currently the Bank of Canada is doing through interest rate increases.

Human Resources committee  Thank you for the question. I will respond in English, if that's okay. Yes, I think there is a need. As the industry representatives have indicated, they are very good at building supply. They can't create housing at affordable levels, simply because it doesn't make a business case and it doesn't make sense.

Human Resources committee  Through you, Chair, in that report, I looked at the number of units renting at affordable levels. I used the benchmark of $750, which is equivalent to affordability for an income of less than $30,000 a year, and found the loss that I mentioned in the opening remarks of $550,000.

Human Resources committee  Yes, absolutely. It is a partnership and I think discussions between the affordable housing sector and the industry have been very constructive and positive. Clearly to meet construction targets, we need the private sector to build those units. The challenge with just focusing on supply is that it doesn't meet the affordability crisis, so we need to actually do both, add supply and figure out ways to make that new supply more affordable, which is where you layer in various government subsidy mechanisms, which Dan Dixon has spoken about.

Human Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, for inviting me to this important discussion. In my work as an academic and a researcher in this area, a number of my studies have been cited by other witnesses, particularly around the very dramatic erosion of the low-end rental stock, with a loss of over 550,000 units in the decade of 2011 to 2021, at a time when we only built about 70,000 units of new affordable housing.