Canada has these problems not due to lack of social welfare spending, but due to institutional barriers to taking drug addicts off the street and into long-term care homes.

Vancouver used to have a mental institution where the patients worked a farm. When it closed, its DTES district swelled with drug addicts whose condition rapidly deteriorated from drug use.

Involuntary commitment and forced labor are not exactly amenable to liberal democracy, so it's understandable why there was such pressure to close the institutions and repeal vagrancy laws, but now the pro-leniency movement has gone too far, and all across liberal cities it's become a free-for-all that is absolutely devasting all parties involved: the ordinary citizens who become victims of rampant property crime, the vulnerable who are predated upon by drug dealers and who themselves commit vast amounts of crime to feed their habits, and the taxpayer whose hard-earned resources are thrown into a money pit with worse than neutral effects.