Industry committee  Build smartly, upwards, inwards and outwards. Just get the right balance, and we'll have great communities.

Industry committee  When you look at just the GST/HST component, one of the big issues that we've had for a long time, since its inception, is that there is a new housing rebate, but it gets capped out. Up to $350,000, you don't have to pay and it goes down from there. Since it was introduced in the

Industry committee  I think one challenge with the building code right now is that there are a lot of good-intentioned things that are trying to be put into the building code, but every single one of them increases the price of a house. Right now, we're saying we have this housing affordability cr

Industry committee  Yes. Definitely, some municipalities are more challenging than others. There is a lot of process. Accessibility to developable land is a big challenge. Development taxes are another huge challenge. We've actually done a municipal benchmarking study assessing different cities ac

Industry committee  Yes, it applies to western Canada. A certain manufacturer, the main manufacturer in all of western Canada, accused Americans of dumping drywall into Canada five years ago at the time when we were trying to rebuild Fort McMurray and other places. It was a big issue. At that time

Industry committee  Thank you. It's a tough question because there isn't really a good answer, in my view. I mean, the softwood lumber dispute has been going on for 30 years. It's the same deal every time. The international tribunals always agree that Canada is in the right. The American lumber lob

Industry committee  It's such a tricky situation. I think those types of ideas and looking at different alternatives are important. Canada has a tremendous lumber resource, and there's more we can do. There are more structural elements that can be made with wood, and we're starting to go there. We

Industry committee  We need both, and we need more of both. Social housing, though, requires different solutions than housing affordability. Housing affordability is really about whether Canadians can afford to buy a house that they want to live in. Can they afford to rent without any kind of subsi

Industry committee  I think, with respect to the.... Thank you for your question. The building code is headed in a decent direction right now, with different provinces looking to harmonize around the national building code. There are more efforts in that direction. Honestly, I think the bigger p

Industry committee  I will say that I think we're headed in the right direction. There is a lot of talk around harmonization. It is not easy, especially when building codes are the jurisdiction of the provinces. For everybody to now be looking to really truly lever the national building code is a

Industry committee  I believe we're going to have to have all kinds of solutions. We're going to need to have workers who can move around, for sure. I think in most cases, we end up with people wanting to stay in places permanently though, and that's an important part of the process. We need harmon

Industry committee  The industry is worth about $180 billion. We're about 1.2 million jobs direct and indirect. About half of those are directly on site. About 22% of those are set to retire. In terms of what we're missing and the gap, it's across the board. It's a demographic issue as much as anyth

Industry committee  Thank you very much. On behalf of the Canadian Home Builders' Association, representing some 9,000 member companies in residential construction from coast to coast, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. Our membership includes home builders, renovators, develope

Human Resources committee  On the immigration side, I think it is critical that we really start to better target the types of people we need to do jobs in this country. We have spent a little bit too much time over the years focusing on a knowledge economy, which Canadians are actually very good at filling

Human Resources committee  Yes. We need as-of-right zoning, so that once something is zoned for a specific height, it can go through and not face all kinds of additional processes. We need height in zoning that is realistic and not as a starting negotiating point, after which the city will seek to extract