Finance committee  The primary reason in our assessment is a mismatch between the demand and the supply of housing, which has been developing over a number of years. The house price escalation was made worse by this mismatch during the recent pandemic.

Finance committee  That is correct.

Finance committee  First of all, I'd like to point out that when you're talking about supply, there are currently about 16 million housing units in Canada, and 95% of them are owned by the private sector. I just want to give you a bit of the context to the landscape. Many of the levers that affect

Finance committee  Absolutely. There's quite a number of programs, so it's hard to choose which ones. Perhaps I can focus on the rental construction financing initiative. It's basically a loan program that is provided to multi-unit housing developers. If you look at the development of housing in C

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. In response to the question about where does the money come from, when you're buying a house, money always comes from two sources: from the banking system through loans, or from personal savings. Those are the two sources, so that would be the direct answer

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. In response to wage decreases, I'd like to highlight in the first instance that the pandemic was quite exceptional in that it impacted people who were in the lower part of the income distribution more than the upper. At CMHC, when we're looking at our book

Finance committee  In terms of the banking system, all our financial institutions have very sophisticated treasury operations and they source their funds from the capital market. In terms of mortgage funding, there are many sources of funds. Deposits are number one, but there are a number of other

Finance committee  As you know, Mr. Poilievre, CMHC, during the last financial crisis, had some special facilities set up—

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, with respect, I think that question should be directed to the bank.

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, as you're aware, CMHC plays a very important role in securing the stability of the finance market—

Finance committee  —through our securitization program.

Finance committee  About $400 billion.

Finance committee  If you look at our financial statements, our current guarantee balance is in the $400-billion range.

Finance committee  As I pointed out, the total value of our securitization, which is our total exposure, is about $400 billion.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. In terms of.... Mr. Poilievre is absolutely correct. It is a very unusual financial crisis, the pandemic, in terms of you would expect house prices to decline during an economic decline, and they have not. The increase is due to the very particular nature o