So much money being thrown around

By Peter Bailey — The New Life poet

This year, Montrealers will be celebrating 375 years of history. Canada will be celebrating 150 years of history. And hundreds of millions of our tax dollars will be spent on nothing constructive. It will be squandered by falling into corrupt hands.
What do Native people and Black Canadians have to celebrate, especially Black Nova Scotians who arrived in Nova Scotia 234 years ago?
Historically speaking they were cheated, robed, lied to, enslaved, suffered racism and poverty, starved to death, exterminated…
The Native people suffered worst then that and are still suffering.
As late as the 1930s during the great depression, a number of Black people in the area now known as Little Burgundy were left to starve to death. Many other Black people died of diseases due to a lack of food.
The city of Montreal is spending 40 million dollars to put thousands of lights on a bridge. For what? Most people in Montreal will never ever see them. It should be a crime for politicians to blatantly waste money for corrupt purposes. What else could explain spending 40 million dollars to put lights on a bridge?
Here we have homeless people, unemployed people, a shortage of affordable housing, hundreds of thousands of people are living on welfare payments totaling six hundred dollars a month. Thousands of others are using food banks to survive.
Meanwhile, the cost of living keeps going up, but salaries, welfare and pensions remain the same.
[As for those on welfare their payments go up one hundred dollars every twenty years. You have public housing in disrepair and being over run by bed bugs, roaches, rats and mice.]
So I ask: “What is there to celebrate?”
If you’re filthy rich that does not have to pay taxes because you’re hiding your money in an offshore bank account, and the government allows you to do it, then you have something to celebrate.
If you’re a filthy rich corporation like Bombardier and the government throws a billion dollars at you every other year, then you have something to celebrate. If you’re a heartless, mean spirited  politician, you have something to celebrate.
We’re always being told the government is in debt. Thereafter the government cuts funding to welfare recipients, hospitals, schools, etc. Moreover, we see the same government squandering more and more tax dollars.
The pattern hasn’t changed for four decades or longer.
The government deals in corruption, incompetence and waste. Afterwards they make the most vulnerable people pay for it.
I ask once again, what is there to celebrate?
As far as I’m concerned there is absolutely nothing worth celebrating in this country… this city.
Furthermore, the lights on the bridge are only good for catching bird excrement.