Finance committee  With respect to overall housing affordability, I would share some of the views of Mr. Kavcic on that. I would say that a relatively quick way whereby we could handle that would be to work on the demand side. We could slow population growth. In the past few years, population growth has been quite strong.

Finance committee  I think that's a fair point, given the affordability challenges we see in the current environment. I will note that the latest federal budget earmarked some funds towards offering low-cost loans for prefabricated units and for student housing and the like, and some investments in the affordable housing fund, for example, so there is some movement in that respect.

Finance committee  We wrote on this. We released a report that was a fulsome take on the latest federal housing plan. The capital gains inclusion rate was rolled into that report. In it we said the impact would be highly uncertain. It's difficult to know now because we don't have a line of sight with respect to how the legislation will be fully rolled out, but there's some risk that it will be a negative factor for investment going forward, which would potentially weigh on rental supply.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. My opening statement will be brief relative to those of my fellow panellists. My name is Rishi Sondhi, and I'm an economist at TD Bank. I'm the economics group's housing-market expert, and I'm responsible for publishing research on housing and generating quarterly forecasts for home resales, average home prices in the resale market and housing starts.