Finance committee  It does have a factor, for sure. More people come in and they want to have places to live, and home ownership in Canada is a desired effect.... Just to give you one example, in eastern Canada, we've seen a disproportionate increase, as was mentioned earlier as well, because of the higher demand and people moving out.

Finance committee  Thank you for your question. The short answer is yes. If a person has a certain amount of money to spend and prices have gone up in one category or another, it is definitely going to affect that person's purchasing power. However, the formula contains several elements. More transfers were made to households, which increased their purchasing power.

Finance committee  I'll just get Greg to give you a very quick summation of a couple of those points, because there are a couple of points where it could be helpful.

Finance committee  We're always looking for new sources of data to make the indicators even stronger. As I said, it's a bit of a team sport. We work with our colleagues at CMHC. We work with organizations like CREA. We work with the MPACs. Yes, sometimes it can be a little bit challenging to get good sources of quality data that we can count on month to month on a comparable basis, so that we can turn it into statistics.

Finance committee  Greg, do you want to talk a little bit about—

Finance committee  As I mentioned earlier, the new housing price index, which shows—

Finance committee  Yes, I believe it's 11.9% year over year—

Finance committee  We'll have to dig that out if you want the actual—

Finance committee  It's an index that we use to show the difference.

Finance committee  The homeowners' replacement cost is for the times that somebody's house gets burned down and has to be completely built from the ground up. It's the increased cost of labour, the increased cost of lumber and services—

Finance committee  That's what that component is.

Finance committee  It's because not everybody's house gets burned down and has to be rebuilt every month, so—

Finance committee  Shelter is the number one cost of—

Finance committee  They are two different concepts. One is what the householder spends in terms of the weight of that basket that I talked about and what that change is month over month. There's no question that buying houses is a significant component of our GDP, so that number is absolutely correct.

Finance committee  Clearly, where there is a shortage, you see that organizations will have to compete to ensure that they get [Technical difficulty—Editor] responses. Some of it is automation and substitution. Others are increased benefits, for example, and in some cases increased wages, to be able to respond to those shortages.