BY MICHAEL THOMAS

It is no secret that homelessness is strangling this city. In last week’s front-page article titled “Almost Homeless” we highlighted this plight, and this time I am back to shed more light on this very dark road that Toronto is traveling down.

Recent city data shows the number of tents in ravines, parks, and under bridges is more than double last spring’s count. City outreach workers have counted 82 tents or other makeshift shelters set up citywide (March 15^th, 2023), which has gone up to 202 on the same date this year and counting.

Things have gotten so bad that veteran Toronto outreach worker Diana Chan McNally said, “It’s just an overall explosion in homelessness.”

Here are some of the locations in Justin Trudeau’s Canada: Clarence Square Park, Milliken Park in Scarborough, the parklands along the west-end Humber River, and Rowntree Mills Park by the banks of the Humber River north of Finch.

The skyrocketing cost of rent coupled with a lack of housing, especially in the last four years, has played a vital role in all this.

Greg Cook, a long-time outreach worker, revealed that 1,056 people entered shelters in February versus the 864 who moved out. An average of 158 people each day that month called to find a bed but were turned away. The city count can be slightly off because some homeless encampments are hidden.

Chan McNally noted that this affects longtime Torontonians who have lost their homes and also recent refugees as well, “There’s also this ongoing process of more and more people falling into homelessness,” she said. As we continue on the homeless ride even the TTC Toronto Transit Commission is being made to feel the bite of shared hopelessness in Trudeau’s Canada. Imagine buses now being used as overnight shelters in Toronto Canada, a place that refers to the Caribbean as third-world countries.

Toronto’s Mayor Olivia Chow said, “We have never had so many people living in shelters, over 10,000 people so for us every day is a challenge.”

Lorraine Lam from Shelter Housing Justice Network said, “I may know somebody who rides the subway to stay warm throughout the day and as long as they can at night, or going to the mall, libraries, some folks are sitting at the hospital emergency rooms just waiting for an option.”

This hardly sounds like a developed first-world country to me!!!

Rafi Aaron of Interfaith Coalition to Fight Homelessness said, “We need to have continuously open 24-hour warming centers throughout the entire winter, serving hot meals with low barriers that people will come in and use them.”

“We need to support people in encampments. Turning away this many people, evicting people only forces them into ravines,” Aaron said.

Mark Aston, Executive Director of Covenant House said, “Last year we saw 60%  in the number of visits to our drop-in center, and a 30% increase overall in youths showing up at our doors needing emergency support, and this year we are seeing this trend continue.”

In the meantime, Faith Lomas, a 19-year-old woman who has been homeless since she was 17, confesses to a news source that she rides the TTC continuously just trying to get away from the deep freeze of “old man winter” in Toronto.

The icing on this cake of homelessness is hunger, something homeless folks know all too well. In 2023, nearly two million Canadians accessed food banks and one million more Canadians are expected to use a food bank for the first time this year, and as they say, the story continues.

In the meantime, Justin Trudeau’s regime recently announced it has committed 80 million dollars of the taxpayer’s money, sending Canadian soldiers to Jamaica to train a multinational force to meddle in Haiti’s business, under the disguise of peacekeeping. All this, while many Canadians are “Homeless and Hungry”.

Can someone please tell me that this is not by design?

BY STEVEN KASZAB

12.5 -17% of Americans live below the poverty line. This statistic from the New York Times has remained persistent for decades, fluctuating like the N.Y. Stock Exchange. Many of us ask ourselves why the most powerful nations have such a poverty divide, rich, well-off people and the poor, side by side. One group trying to survive, the other enjoying their financial bonanza: travelling, buying homes, cottages and other prestigious items.

America decided wrongly to become the policeman of the world after the second world war. Doing so placed future citizens, their children and generations of Americans into a financial-political situation that America cannot get itself out of, although it has tried. The decision made the military and weapons industry a massive influential group, absorbing a large part of America’s GNP. Billionaires were made, and employment within this sector grew substantially.

Americans are living in poverty because of two decisions made long ago:

1. America became the world’s policeman; there became a need for and development of the best weapons, which drew trillions of dollars from the nation’s budget, going to a select few and away from the needy in America. America flexed its muscles, manipulated and influenced many of the world’s politically centered organizations like the United Nations and NATO for its own benefit and motives.

Power often corrupts, and being the most powerful nation on the planet is prestigious, emotionally satisfying and financially overpowering.  An element of America’s political and social past haunted the nation, and the second amendment became America’s cause celeb influencing how America saw itself domestically and internationally.

America is still carrying the big stick Teddy Roosevelt once spoke about, but the cost of the stick has increased many hundreds of times, and Americans have to pay the piper with regards to its public expenditures. Debt ceiling aside, America has fallen into the debt trap and many rich and powerful individuals and organizations are bilking the public in the name of national security.

2. America has spent itself into multi trillion-dollar debt while supporting other nations around the globe, some allies and some not. Israel has received billions of dollars each year from America allowing it to build an artificially prosperous nation and a robust military. Egypt, Taiwan and many other nations receive billions of dollars for political and economic returns.

The interests of national security have out weighted the social and financial needs of Americans, all the while the rich get richer, the middle class is on a downward spiral, and the poor go nowhere, stuck in their class state of socio-economic poverty. Isn’t it about time that America cares for Americans and not strangers who should be caring for themselves? America is not a piggy bank after all, where those in peril (and there always are people/nations in peril), can come by and ask for assistance. A stable economic-political world is a sound goal, but at what cost to America?

BY SIMONE J. SMITH

Sometimes information is shared with me, and it makes me sit back and go, “Hmmmm!”

I received an email that stated in the subject line, “This email is only for CANADA.”  Okay! I was interested. I kept reading. “We have been asked to share the following information by a fellow Canadian in case you aren’t aware and want to take ACTION. Please feel free to share this with other Canadians.”

Apparently, the federal government has quietly begun the creation of Personal Information Banks (PIB) to collect and store data on Canadians.

According to the Government of Canada, Personal Information Banks (PIBs) are descriptions of personal information under the control of a government institution that is organized and retrievable by an individual’s name, or by a number, symbol or other element that identifies that individual. The personal information described in a PIB has been used, is being used, or is available for an administrative purpose. The PIB describes how personal information is: collected, used, disclosed, retained and/or disposed of in the administration of a government institution’s program, or activity.

There are three types of PIBs: central, institution-specific and standard. The following descriptions are standard PIBs. They describe information about members of the public as well as current and former federal employees contained in records: created, collected and maintained by most government institutions in support of common internal services. These include personal information relating to human resources management, travel, corporate communications and other administrative services. Standard PIBs are created by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat.

Now, the claim is that governments need information about their citizens in order to deliver programs and set public policies in vital areas, such as: health, transportation, public safety and national security. At the same time, individuals need to know that their personal information is being collected, used and disclosed. This is where the Privacy Act comes in. The Privacy Act sets out the privacy rights of individuals in their interactions with the federal government. It obliges government institutions to respect the privacy of individuals by controlling the: collection, use, disclosure, retention and disposal of recorded personal information.

In passing the Privacy Act and appointing a Privacy Commissioner, Parliament asserted the right to privacy. It concluded that, while the federal government needs to collect and use personal information, it must do so in a way that does not unduly interfere with people’s privacy.

The Act obliges the government to collect only the personal information it needs to carry out its functions, to keep it: accurate, complete and up-to-date, and to destroy whatever is no longer needed. If the government needs to share your personal information with other departments or organizations, it can do so only under certain conditions.

Over the years, individuals have reported various concerns ranging from perceived over-collection of personal information to disclosures of personal information that people felt were not authorized under the Privacy Act. This is another case where we were not consulted, nor informed about the creation, or existence of these databases and they are being collected without our permission, or knowledge. Categories of information include biometrics (DNA, blood type, eye/facial scan, fingerprints, etc.), personal biography, medical history, financial history, credit information, opinions or views of or about individuals, and much more.

It was discovered that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) had quietly added it to their Privacy Terms so that in order to submit an application for benefits, such as the One-Time Housing Top Up they started offering in December, you must click that you agree to terms including “Being described in Personal Information Bank (under development)” in order to submit your application. It is also a term in the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) application. It quite likely will be a term for submitting your income tax return, so read those Privacy Terms when filing your taxes this year!

They lay it all out in their Departmental Plan for Health Canada 2022/23. There is no mention of hiring health care workers. It’s all data, digitization, AI, vaccines and so on. This is a big deal. Under the Privacy Act, whether you are inside, or outside Canada, you can file a request for access to your personal data. The steps are as follows:

• Determine which department or agency holds the information you want to request. All federal government institutions are listed in a public directory called Info Source, along with their mandates and responsibilities.
• Find the contact information for the organization’s Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) Coordinator.
• Follow the steps for filing a request for personal information.
• Once you receive your personal information, you can ask the department to make any necessary corrections.

Nowadays, it seems like world governments are always trying to get away with something. Good thing that we have journalists as watchdogs and protectors of their communities.