It's a bit of an arcane argument, perhaps, but I guess I would argue that it represents a substantial shift in the activities of the Housing Corporation. Maybe there were volumes of discussion, but it was never presented to a standing committee that the mandate of the Housing Corporation was going to be exercised in this way. As the standing committee normally is responsible for oversight of the activities of the department or the corporation, one would have expected that the Regular Members who are charged with that oversight would be made aware of a substantial change like this.

I think one of the areas where this raises a whole concern is about whether or not there is now going to be adequate policing to make sure that there is no interference in a market where there might be a private entity. This government is on record as saying it was getting out of staff housing to support the development of the rental market in smaller communities. It's had programs to try and make community corporations and communities take on the provision of housing for teachers and nurses and so on, but we have never actually had the Housing Corporation going in and providing rental housing as this seems to be proposed.

How do we know the program is going to be exercised in such a way as not to provide competition to the private market that we've been trying to foster for the past five or six years?