I know some people are on financial assistance because they legitimately went through some hard shit and have very good reasons why they couldn't work.... However I worked at an LCBO (the only place you can buy liquor in ontario) for a few years and you could instantly tell when the welfare cheques were sent out....
Once a month there would be the same people who come in the store with their young children who are barely clothed and dirty, look malnourished and they would spend hundreds of dollars on liquor... The shitty thing is by law we have to serve them unless they are drunk at the time of buying alcohol, I quit because of the bullshit I had to put up with...
Get drunks coming in the store swearing and smashing things because they don't get served... Get people who give you death threats because certain days we are told to scan everyone's ID no matter what and the cash register wouldn't unlock unless we scanned an ID. Stupid policy but not our fault... Anyway.
I also spent a year working up north and I mean FAR as fuck up north, no roads - can only get to town by snowmobile or aircraft.. I worked on a... project for the natives in the town to rebuild their water treatment facility... My first week there someone burned my shed down because it was locked and they wanted to see what was inside, I learned quickly never to lock anything... Kids would come to my door and ask to use the washroom and steal my toilet paper and tooth paste... It was supposed to be a dry town but the entire town pretty much shut down for 2 days after the welfare cheques came in (or whatever they call the cheques natives get) a 26oz bottle of Vodka would sell for over $100... I am not exaggerating this AT ALL EVERYONE would get drunk and not show up to work for 2-3 days after every payday (once a month)...
There were some really nice, cool people in that town but they were being taken advantage of BIG time by their chiefs and I felt really bad... If you think a kid has no chance on the streets of new york in the ghetto that is a fucking castle compared to what the kids in those towns had available to them... I took a family with me to Toronto and they didn't even say a word for the first day, they didn't even know such a place existed.
It turns out after we built the water treatment plant, we trained people on how to maintain it and handed things over then no one in charge decided to work there anymore and let it run while taking all the money the government paid them to run it for the citizens on its own until the town got poisoned... It was all over the news awhile ago.