Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here with you today and to contribute to this study. It may seem a little bit unusual that we are here, but hopefully that will become clearer as we go along.

My name is Alana Lavoie. I am the national director of housing policy and government relations for Habitat for Humanity Canada. We are Canada's only national affordable home ownership organization.

Our organization is composed of 45 local habitats that serve communities from coast to coast. We are part of an international organization operating in 70 countries.

Working with donors, governments and communities that give their money, time and materials, we build homes and sell them at fair market value to eligible low- or middle-income families.

Families that buy Habitat for Humanity homes do not pay a down payment, and their mortgage never exceeds roughly 30% of their income.

To be eligible for a Habitat home, families must need improved housing, be able to carry the costs of owning a home and paying a geared-to-income mortgage, and be willing to commit 500 volunteer hours to Habitat for Humanity. Many of our future Habitat homeowners have in fact traditionally helped to build their own homes. Habitat provided financial literacy courses and homeowner education and seminars. It really is a true partnership and a very unique pathway to home ownership at a time when it is very difficult to achieve that.

In 2023, almost half the families who partnered with Habitat were led by single mothers. One in five families had one member living with a physical or mental disability, one in 10 families had at least one member who identified as indigenous, and one in 10 families were newcomers to Canada.

Families have a chance to build equity. Parents can go back to school to retrain and get better jobs. Their kids have a safe and secure place to study and grow. The mental health and physical health of the family improves, and we see them invest more in their communities.

However, doing what we do is not easy. It is a complex assembly of inputs, the same as those for any homebuilder. Many of the challenges that were raised by my colleague Mr. Lee in the broader homebuilding sector are the same ones that we face; however, we face them with some budget realities that come together a little more gradually than we may see in other sectors and that require a lot of creativity to get to the point where we can provide a family with a home.

With that said, our leaders are incredibly creative, innovative and solutions-oriented. For us, that has meant digging into how emerging homebuilding technologies can reduce the cost to build, which allows us to put more families in homes and helps smooth out the challenges of the homebuilding process in an extremely high-cost and variable homebuilding environment.

This is why, across our federation at Habitat for Humanity, we're embracing newer approaches, from 3-D printing in Windsor and Peterborough to modular construction in P.E.I. and New Brunswick, and even starting to explore the potential of mass timber.

We're building to higher standards that create more sustainable homes with reduced cost for our families over the long term, including net-zero and passive houses. We stay on top of evolving and innovative building materials through partnerships with building materials suppliers. We're very fortunate to have a build gift in-kind program in which we work directly with companies that are willing to work with us to try some new windows or new plumbing fixtures or technologies.

However, embracing these new ways of building doesn't come without challenges, and we are certainly looking to governments to help us have a more systematic approach to providing opportunities for Habitat and other non-profits to build housing and be on the cutting edge of using some of these technologies.

The capital investments that are required for modular builds and 3-D prints, and the things we haven't yet discovered, tend to require capital flows that are different from traditional stick builds. Many governments and financial institutions are offering funding and financing options for homebuilding that are structured around traditional construction milestones that can create challenges, particularly for non-profits and charities that are trying to enter into using these technologies.

We can have a somewhat less flexible financing situation in some cases than other kinds of builders. The disbursements of funding and loan payments follow very specific milestones, such as that when your building permits are secured and when your drywall is completed, your occupancy permits are secured. It's helpful if you have drywall, but you might not in a 3-D print. Who knows? In most cases, the disbursements can generally line up with when we need to pay and when we have the money going out.

However, with a lot of these emerging technologies, most of our experience to date has been with modular housing, both in Canada and around the world. There's a more significant outlay of cash required up front, and federal—