When I heard Donald Trump saying he might use a military option to oust a socialist government in an economically ravaged, oil-dependent economy, I thought he was talking about Alberta. Turns out he's presenting his own version of the Monroe Doctrine of U.S. domination of the Western Hemisphere and he's talking about Venezuela, whose economy is in a staggering slump because of the fall of oil prices, just like Alberta which has a convoy in Ottawa demanding government intervention.

Ironically just a few miles away from Venezuela is Haiti, the homeland of a former Canadian Governor General, where there are anti-corruption riots and critical shortages of food and medical supplies. No mention of U.S. military intervention to calm things down there. Oh, I forgot, they have no oil.

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However, it's been recently reported that billions of dollars of foreign aid, including $400 million from Canada, went to Haiti after the earthquake and disappeared. Why not meddle there and find out what the heck happened to our money? After all, the Americans claim that they know where the military and political leaders of Venezuela have their money stashed.

I was extremely disappointed in Justin Trudeau's quick reaction to support Trump's tactics in Venezuela. If we really wanted to help the people there, why not just buy their oil instead of Saudi Arabia's where they just murdered a journalist, are involved in a massive humanitarian crisis in Yemen, have a terrible human rights record and are not a democracy?

Oh yeah, because a Canadian company has big arms deal with those guys.

Recently we found out that a major Canadian company, SNC-Lavalin, was involved in a bribery scandal with the infamous dictator Mohamar Kaddafi. How does our self-righteous PM deal with that? He throws a prominent and popular Indigenous female cabinet minister under the bus.

This is not democracy, it's hypocrisy. As the late great comedian George Carlin often said, "It's all B.S. and it's bad for ya."

Roy Olsen

Prince George