My reaction to the youtube video was a little shocking because Canada is a country with resource wealth and has some of the best social services. I was also surprised to know that millions of Canadians have to use food banks. I disagree with Canada making the social services privatization and allowing private corporations to take over from government in the funding and deliverance of many social services. There are many social services that are too important to be left to the private sector. I think privatization will affect my practice as a social worker because privatization reduces the number of public employees.

Darice Collier

After watching, "Poor US: An Animated History-Why Poverty?" I learned many things that were a great insight about poverty. Everything always has a history and the first step to fix anything is to know the history of it. One of the historians stated that, "If we want to make poverty history, then first we need to understand the history of poverty". I thought this was an interesting statement and this is something that we all need to know to improve poverty from existing. Poverty has indeed been around with humans for a very long time. During the Stone Age, poverty with no food or medicine resulted with people dying before they could find out much about it. During the early civilization, everyone was pretty much poor. Poverty was considered a lack of reliable access to basic needs. Health expectancy was 35years, which is half our life expectancy now.

There was an animated play in the video, two people represented the rich and one person represented the poor and they held a conversation about poverty. The rich made a statement about how they wanted to get rid of poverty, which, is something that poverty told them is something that would not work because it would be a disaster to humanity. The rich told poverty it would work because there would be slaves to get the work done. One of the statements that occurred in the conversation that I thought was something to ponder about was, "If everyone was rich no one would want to work hard". Basically many things just will not get done due to there not being any poor people to work for the rich. There will not be anyone to do the hard work. There will not be clothes, shoes, food, gathering harvest, and etcetera if wealth was distributed. There need to be a certain amount of rich and poor people for everything to work out smoothly. Poverty is what makes the rich be rich.

Darice Collier