There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza - Alcyonenews

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Posted August 25, 2023

There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza ...

A week or so ago Sean Fraser, Trudeau’s Minister of Housing, Tenting and Umbrellaring, flew West on a mission to cause housing to be built. He brought along a diabolic plan: He will bribe those lazy builders with $500M to get them to raise their cranes and build eight large buildings containing 1,100 (a drop-in-the-bucket) rental units in Vancouver and environs. These will shelter some people who “can ill-afford shelter at current prices”. The remaining sufferers will have to wait out in the rain until the Conservative Party gets a new boss-to-beat.

The reality is there is a housing crisis nation-wide. It started about the turn of the Millennium. After being PM for a mere three years, Justin Trudeau noticed the housing “anomaly”, apologized, and reminded the nation that he was himself evicted from his 12,000sf parental home at 24 Sussex Drive and was squeezed into the 10,000sf Rideau Cottage. Driven by this personal “misfortune”, on March 27, 2018, Trudeau adroitly conducted his government to proclaim Housing a “Human Right”.

They delineated the attributes of the new Right as being: “Inclusiveness; Helping those in the greatest need; Accountability; and Participation”. Hard to tell what these mean but I imagine they are meant to mean something. Then Trudeau queued the newly-mined Right for entry into his paternal Constitution Charter of Freedoms and Rights, to figure alongside the Right to live in a “Just Society” and the Right to vote in an election every fifth year.

To breathe life into the new Right, Trudeau launched “a National Housing Watchdog” bureaucracy, with the usual retinue of Committees, Consultants and Tribunals, I presume. The financial endowment was a whopping $40B which makes it a money monster.

Part of that money was, in their words, to facilitate “renters being accepted by rental housing owners”. This sounds stupid and it is.

The proclamation did not retard the suffering of the un-sheltered. On the contrary, the ranks of people in need of shelter kept on growing. There are a host of causes for that growth, a material one being the suppression of public awareness and discussion of the matter by the PR beast.

Sean Fraser faked ignorance of the Human-Right-to-Shelter. It could be that re-election consultants directed him to keep silent on the stuff. But he clarified that the pleas of the homeless (recently re-branded “un-housed”) are not covered by his $500M plan.

This is bad, but the Minister went on for the worse. He did not apprise us of the cause of the transition from the bungalow-with-a-backyard to a tent-in-the-park, hopefully with a porta-potty nearby. A security guard, a UBC professor, a department-store butcher and I, a P.Eng, owned our homes on Kitsilano’s West 2nd Avenue. Food-banks were not invented and “tent-cities” were un-imagined. In my student years in Paris, the world and I listened to Line Renaud singing “Mia cabane au Canada (My cabin in Canada). That was a dream for many, a reality for us proud Canadians.

These the two Trudeaus and their ilk drained from us. The Minister went fish-mute about the causes of the national disaster and the culpability of the politicians. All as if the mess happened on the watch of aliens. He faked ignorance about the “Great Slide”, he uttered no word about its cause(s), he turned a blind eye to the way they dragged us from the comfort and pride of yesteryear to the hardship of gilt-oozing meek of today.

The whole political clan should account for what they have done to the nation. All of them must cease and desist pushing our society forever lower on the down-slope, soaking our psyche in guilt for the alleged sins of our ancestors while “evicting” our kids from the bungalows. There is a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, and until this is acknowledged and plugged, the bucket will not hold water.

The “reporters” did not confront Fraser about the hole in the bucket, which cause(s) the housing crisis. He did not offer that essential information. They did not ask him how that which he was pretending “Fixin’ got broke”. Would the reporters have responded likewise with silence, to a physician who wrote a prescription “for whichever drug, for whomever patient, for relief from whatever disease”? Or to an engineer who called bids for “digging a hole big enough to accommodate snugly a tall building”?

To fill in for the errant reporters I am asking Sean Fraser and his choir-master Justin Trudeau: Tell us who and how caused the decline of Canada. Then come and show us why we should trust you to undo the mess you have made...