Canada decides; obsolete USA war toys or public housing?

Had breakfast this morning at a joint called “Pur and Simple” in the western grasslands-cum-big-box-lands of Stone Road, in the south end of Guelph. Their marketing people put an umlaut over the “u” just to let you know they’re serious. They are. They deliver a seriously good breakfast at seriously good value. Our party of five filled up on everything from standard bacon ‘n eggs to exotic omelets, and got outta there for around a hundred bucks. Bruno’s take-out container was so brim-full we couldn’t close the lid. South Guelph looks crazy prosperous. The big box parking lots are hopping. You’d be hard-pressed to find a new single family detached for under a million. Two-bed condos go for 800. After breakfast, we headed out of town on the laughably misnamed “Hanlon Expressway,” an “expressway” brought to a full stop by strategically places stoplights every two or three miles. In the drive up to Woodlawn Road, we passed a tent encampment every other mile or so. This has been the coldest week of the year, with wind-chill temps at -30C. That’s seriously cold. How do you imagine the folks in those ubiquitous tent encampments are faring out? Not as well as Bruno, I’m sure. Ottawa abandoned public housing over thirty years ago. Those tent hamlets are the chickens coming home to roost. We’ve no money for housing and a myriad other social policies. Yet we are non-stop exhorted, if not outright extorted, to spend more more more on weapons. In fact, the Trump 2.0 admin is threating to bump the extortion premium to 5% of GDP, up from 2%, which we were sorta thinking we might hit in ‘32. Our leaders in Ottawa have supposedly committed to a fleet of 88 F-35 fighter jets at a cost of $100 million apiece. That’s bizarre, especially since recent history has proven fighter jets obsolete. The future of arial warfare belongs to drones and missiles. I think no such deal has been definitively inked. Rather, these are stories floated as test balloons. Do Canadians really have the stomach to buy billions upon billions of Lockheed Martin war toys, when their fellow citizens are languishing in unheated tents alongside the highway in the dead of winter? I’m hoping not. $100 million can put up a lot of housing. Given that governments have lots of land and control the approval process, there’s no reason we couldn’t be putting shovels in the ground yesterday. There’s local builders putting up decent rentals at $250 per foot (I’m looking at you, Barry!) Build generous 1000 ft units people would want to live in, and you’re at 4 units per million, or 400 per F-35. Given that the F-35 is one of the greatest embarrassments in the history of US military procurement, wouldn’t it be wise to hold back on this contract, and invest in housing instead?