Finance committee  I appreciate the enthusiasm for that, too, because I guess Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill would have been the epicentre for rapidly increasing housing prices. Good for you for advocating for your constituents, whose sons and daughters have gone to school and gotten jobs but can'

Finance committee  The direct answer on that is no. I think it's exaggerated. I think that the degree...which the media liked to cover, saying it was all foreign buyers who are driving things up, was greatly exaggerated in numbers. Since then the Province of Ontario study put it at around 3% or 4%

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Fergus. I apologize for my lack of French. To your question about home ownership rates and what would be ideal, it's higher. Higher is better. I'm just somebody who, in my current public life, and now as CEO of the Ontario Real Estate Association, belie

Finance committee  It's pretty sweet for my members. To the question about how high do you want to go, we are always on an upward trend, that's the great part of our story, and 70%, and then to 75%, seems like a reasonable goal to achieve. You're right, our home ownership rates are higher than the

Finance committee  Absolutely, and I would recommend that it happen relatively soon. Interest rates are likely to go up, as you know, in the next while. Every time mortgage rates go up by one per cent, you add two more points on top of that. That makes home ownership harder and harder to achieve. I

Finance committee  The stress test actually becomes more cruel as interest rates increase. That's another 200 points on top of that. That makes the option to get into home ownership for millennials, for new Canadians or for entrepreneurs even more difficult to achieve. We understand it had a purpos

Finance committee  Again, there's a problem. There is no Canadian housing market per se. We're a series of regions. I understand why governments went down this path. In 2017, you had rapidly accelerating housing prices in the greater Toronto-Hamilton area and in Vancouver in the Lower Mainland, so

Finance committee  Thank you. I want to commend Mr. Sorbara, as well. I know you started a housing caucus—

Finance committee  —which I think is a tremendous step. No doubt, representing the Vaughn-King area, you hear about this all the time. To answer the question, I think there are three categories here. The number one category was to try to move the pendulum back. There have been a significant numbe

Finance committee  Thank you, Chair Easter, Vice-Chair Julian, and members of the standing committee. My name is Tim Hudak, CEO for the Ontario realtors association. We represent 70,000 realtors in the province of Ontario. Importantly, for the committee's interest, they're women and men across ou