As a person living on ODSP (ie state disability income in Ontario) I feel qualified or at least entitled to hold the opinion that society's current approach to supporting people who need help is horribly broken. I wonder if you have a romanticized view of the kind of help that people get, daydreaming about how things probably work elsewhere. State support of disability is universally "unreliable, inconsistent, and underfunded." I certainly have no experience of anything else, nor have I spoken with anyone who does.

Human psychology harbours a deep, seemingly instinctive hatred of the poor and disabled, and it often manifests in the systems that are ostensibly meant to help us. No fixed address? You get half as much money to make sure you stay on the street. Live with a romantic partner? You get several hundred dollars less a month, because fuck you for trying to have anything normal people get to have. I know these examples are not universal, but this sort of paternalistic we'll-help-but-we'll-make-you-suffer-for-it-or-society-will-fall-apart philosophy is always blatantly on the surface of state services across North America.

You know how we use the police for all sorts of things that the police (ie the embodiment of the state's monopoly on "legitimate violence" against its own citizens) fundamentally should not be used for? We should not be using the state for humanitarian concerns. For all the "for the people by the people" bullshit we get indoctrinated with, that's not why states exist in the first place. Certainly not a colonialist state like the one I live in. A state does not have the capacity to be trustworthy, to have human relationships, to do good for humans. When we accomplish those things, we do it despite the state. Any love that a person has for something as capricious, inhuman, and amoral as a state will eventually be used against them.

It terrifies me to be dependent on a political entity that is currently ramping up culture war propaganda and scapegoating vulnerable people. The most powerful conservative politician in the country (pretending the PM isn't conservative because it's rhetorically helpful in this moment) recently dragged up the "welfare queen" trope: “There’s people who’ve been on Ontario Works—welfare, healthy people—for their whole lives, while these hardworking people are paying for them to sit on the couch and watch the Flintstones or the soap operas…”

Edit: You cannot live on Ontario Works. It is not even a pittance. It is half the pittance I get for being deemed unable to work, and less still if you have support in your life. Anyone who is collecting Ontario Works is miserable and if they had any other choice in the world, they would not be. Nearly everyone on OW IS disabled! OW on its own is not enough for a person to pay the rent, but if you are homeless, your payments are slashed in half yet again. It's like it's designed to offer false hope and then trap people.

The help one gets from the state will always come with conditions and indignities, and it will always be something to be given or taken away not because of a person's need or worthiness but because it suits a politician's career to give it or take it away in that moment. Everyone deserves better than this.