Scrapping Welfare

Imagine that you are a recently trained trauma nurse working in an emergency ward. A severely injured patient is wheeled in. You see the bleeding and want to stop it as colleagues do an assessment of the patient’s vital signs. However, you are prevented from proceeding. “Don’t you think we should find out what the patient’s nutrition standard has been over the years—and the kind of housing that person has?” one team member asks. “And what about the patient’s parents, work/life balance? How did the patient do in school?” says another. You are dumbfounded because you just want to stop the bleeding. What if there were 800 rules that defined whether you could or could not treat the bleeding first? And what if, when you asked why, the response was “Because you are spending public funds and that is the policy set by the government!” This would strike any thinking Canadian as absurd. Yet this is exactly how our governments address poverty.