Homeless Crisis and Venezuela
When yesterday I took my car to a local service centre, I found myself in conversation with two other waiting customers, one a Toronto police officer raised and living in St. Catharines and the other a retired school Teacher. A garage is not a place where you would expect to hear people talking about the homeless crisis but we did.
The officer, who started the conversation, was telling of the almost hopeless homeless crisis in Toronto and the teacher chimed in with her sympathetic words expressing the need for the construction of more affordable housing. Well of course I piped in saying I had a letter in the Standard that day on this very topic. We agreed the situation was terrible.
Now I understand that we need immigrants to complement our tired ageing workforce but it crazy to bring people to this country and have them living on the street.
Then I said it may not be hopeless if our sad sack governments would do what they did in Venezuela with their Venezuelan Housing Mission project creating 5 million affordable housing units geared to income so those with nothing paid nothing. The others with incomes had mortgages with payments geared to their income. Now I did not say all that but just said google it.
Venezuela is a South American country with about half our population. It is also a country that has had to endure savage U.S. sanctions and U.S. regime change efforts. Venezuela also had their gold reserves stolen by British banksters. And, our government, Chrystia Freeland, in Nazi like fashion, led the charge to have democratically elected President Nicolas Maduro toppled in favour of self-proclaimed, not elected President Juan Guido. Guido became such a joke in Venezuela that he has now scurried off to the safety of living in Miami. Canada, I presume, still recognizes this joke of a president as President.
With all this stacked up against it, the Venezuelan government by marshaling the forces of the country, government, unions, cooperatives and the people will have managed to construct its targeted 5 million housing units by this year’s end. This was done in 12 years with a cost of just under $20 billion almost the same cost as we will be spending on 88 U.S. unneeded fighter planes.
President Maduro and the Venezuelan people are rightfully celebrating this as a wonderful success of their Bolivarian Socialist revolution. This is a government that our Trudeau government was trying to overthrow. Shake your head.
Venezuela is about the last place the Liberals want to be told to emulate but if we want to solve this homeless crisis it is Venezuela that can show us the way.
rb
