On the second night of my recent hospital stay I was in a double room with a curtain divider for privacy. My roommate was a man, soon to be discharged, that had come in with a shattered arm. He was leaving with the arm still in a sling, but it would be one that would be useable once the healing had completed.

The thing is the taxpayers paid for it all. He has nada. Never has either. He has, by the sound of his conversations, lived on the street, or on welfare his entire life.  On top of that, he’s an alcoholic and dependent on prescription drugs so rather than deal with withdrawals, the nursing staff had been instructed to give him four shots of whiskey a day, evenly spaced out.

He was quite vocal and knowledgeable about his medications. He inspected each little paper cup and verbally spoke the names of each of his pain killers and tranquilizers. Listening to it across the curtain wall, I could hear a tone in his voice. It’s the same tone I use when I talk about some books I really love. I name them, and my past with them, my love of what they have given me, shows up in my voice. That’s how he talked about Atavan and Tylenol 3 and whiskey.

One of his sons came in to visit him that last evening. He seemed about 19 or so based on his shoes, the loose shorts, the way he spoke. He told his dad (who doesn’t see him very much) that he was in adult education. “I’m FAS, remember?”  There was no irony in the boy’s voice on saying it, but there was delight in the idea that the hospital was paying for the whiskey, and that his dad got to ride in a private plane for free when they airlifted him from his rural north home to Vancouver and a hospital that could fix him up. The young man was also delighted that his dad was going to get a free plane ticket home and a free taxi ride to the hospital.

After the man left the next morning, he walked out leaving his TV on. (It had been on constantly, even while he slept, for the entire time I was in the other bed.)  The nurse on duty that day came in and I called out to her, asking her to please, please, shut it off. She laughed, did what I asked, and then after cleaning out his detritus, came to my side of the curtain.

We talked a little about his parting upset. The doctor had cancelled his pain medications since he had enough to get him home, where his local clinic would take over his care. The man had clearly been hoping to acquire a few more pills to give him a safety net while he travelled home. The nurse had handled it well, being very cheerful and deflecting authority, by saying she would check his orders again to make sure. She never returned and the man knew what the deflection meant. So in the end he parted peaceably enough.

The hospital where I had been admitted is a large hospital that gets quite a few cases like the man’s. One other time I had been there (in the emergency ward – I really do need to get this problem fixed), it was a night that seemed full of street people, crazy ladies, and other social casualties. None of them would have had any money, none was turned away despite their obnoxiousness and largely self-induced problems.

The nurse and I talked about that for a few minutes. Having to deal with the sense of entitlement that the man had – he wanted his whiskey now, not in five minutes – is, I sensed, a bit enraging. I can imagine. Still would she have it any other way?  No. She was quite firm about that.

I am too. I – and my taxes – pay for the man and his atavan with a whiskey chaser, but really what are the choices?  I could have let him die in the north of infection.  I could force amputation. I could pretend he didn’t exist. I could pretend it was all his fault and that because of that he deserved whatever came to him. I could do a number of other such things as a society. Yet as a Canadian, I have chosen to help him despite his drain on my reserves.

I thought about why that day. Saying that it is immoral not to help is too easy, so is saying helping is civilized behaviour. So I thought about my many years in the U.S, my family there, the poverty, the struggles I have seen and been through, the rage and violence, and it seemed to me that this was the reason to pay the man’s bills.

In Canada we have remarkably few people like the man, really. Oh we have our problems with homelessness (I live in Vancouver the homeless capital of Canada). We have drug addicts and poverty, we have families that have never worked, children raised by alcoholics, and people who are functionally illiterate despite the wide spread education programs. There will almost certainly never be a society that doesn’t have these things. Canada is far from perfect but, nevertheless, what we don’t seem to have is much violence.

We all know that the US has a terrible incarceration rate; a terrible murder rate, with deep pockets of rage in its population that erupt periodically to gun leaders down, to beat people to death who threaten what they perceive to be their fragile world order and other such horror stories. The thing is that this kind of behaviour is rarely present in most of Canadian society, and part of that is because we have as a country agreed to meet each others basic needs.  We see that as a right, not something each person, or each group or minority, has to fight for.

So actually, by paying for the man’s way, I probably saved myself a bunch of heartache as well as a lot of money. I don’t have to pay for the prison system we would need otherwise, for example. And of course there is the fact that if I get sick, even if I lost my job, someone would be there to look after me as well.

That security is calming, and despite fears that I have heard expressed in the U.S., such care by society doesn’t seem to breed laziness or a lack of motivation. In fact the security of knowing that I will not starve, I will not be turned away from my basic needs, seems to make me more motivated, less angry and more tolerant. So although listening to his TV was a pain in the ass, paying for his whiskey is something I really don’t mind doing. It seems a better solution than paying for his prison cell and the guard that goes with it and coping with all the devastation that his way to the cell would have generated.