TORONTO –
Skipping meals from time to time has become the norm for Tara Andrews, who says rising food prices have made it too difficult to adequately feed herself and her two teenagers.
Even with the help of food donations and her retired parents, the 49-year-old single mother says the rising cost of living is more than she can handle with her monthly income of $ 1,200. She already has a month’s rent arrears for May and expects the same for June.
“My food bill has doubled and I’m getting maybe half of what I could get. It’s a direct link that the more expensive things get, the less I can afford to buy, “said Andrews of his home in Coquitlam, British Columbia.
This is a familiar story for various agencies dedicated to tackling food insecurity, with the head of Food Banks Canada saying that many families with children are particularly insecure as school food programs end.
This is a familiar story for various agencies dedicated to tackling food insecurity, with the head of Food Banks Canada saying that many families with children are particularly insecure as school food programs end.
Kirstin Beardsley says about a third of people who rely on Canadian food banks are children – up to 400,000 each month. The agency says the use of food banks is increasing among single-parent families.
“These are children who have no chance to develop. And that has a long-term impact on the country, “Beardsley said.
“You can’t lose sight of the fact that children don’t have another childhood, they can’t do it again. This is their only chance and you need to make sure that we give everyone the opportunity they need to build the life they want. ”
This summer, Food Banks Canada hopes to increase the summer food packages it offers children to 175,000 – 25,000 more than last year and many times the first 700 packages from 2015.
In Toronto, the head of the Daily Bread Food Bank also said that requests for help had increased as inflation peaked in nearly four decades.
Neil Hetherington says his agency receives about 160,000 customer visits a month – from about 120,000 a month in January. He says the modeling the organization has done with CIBC envisions increasing that to 200,000 customer visits per month in December.
He says his colleagues across the country are telling him about such jumps, with many reporting a 20 to 30 percent jump in demand.
Although many of these visitors have been on the margins for years, Hetherington says he sees new faces who have never turned to food charities, linking the jump to merging rising food prices, gas prices, housing costs and continuing job insecurity in some sectors.
“We see people who work, but their salaries are not up to date, so they can drive to work or feed their children. They are increasingly worried about what they see and the (possibility of) putting food on the table, ”says Hetherington.
Back in British Columbia, Andrews says things would have been much worse for her without the subsidy for her two-bedroom apartment, which reduces rent to $ 540 a month.
But she says existing financial problems deepened during the pandemic and only worsened in 2022, as inflation also raised the price of gas and utilities.
It is also burdened with $ 150,000 in school loans, but can only cover interest.
“I’m happier than some because I live in a house, so it’s subsidized, but you still have all the bills that go with it to keep the house working. Then there’s food on top, “she said.
“I do enough to cover my bills and really not afford food. That really comes down to that. ”
Among the organizations Andrews relies on is the North Vancouver-based Backpack Buddies, which delivers weekend meals to children who need help eating between school as Friday afternoon ends and resumes Monday morning.
The program has expanded to the summer months during the pandemic and will grow even more this summer, says co-CEO Emily-Ann King.
“We hoped that the launch of COVID in March 2020 and the next six months would be the highest demand for services like ours, but today we see more demand than we have ever had,” King said.
She says they have recently added another 500 recipients in communities, including the lower Similkameen, Salt Spring Island and the village of Lytton, devastated by last year’s wildfire. They expect to help about 2,100 children a week this summer.
Demand is rising as annual inflation has risen faster than since 1983, with Statistics Canada announcing on Wednesday that the consumer price index rose 7.7 percent in May from a year ago.
This has a lot of power for more interest rate hikes to control inflation. The Bank of Canada has already raised its key target three times this year.
Canadian statistics report that food prices rose nearly 10 percent in May from a year earlier, corresponding to a jump in April. The price of fresh vegetables has risen by 10%, while the largest increase in history includes edible fats and oils by 30%.
As prices continue to rise, food policy expert Valery Tarasuk of the University of Toronto says things will only get worse for the 5.8 million Canadians who are thought to be insecure, including about 1.4 million children. .
Although this fund may increase this year, it is most concerned about already suffering Canadians, who will sink even further unless income support programs increase in tandem with rising costs.
“Things will get much worse before they get better. And I think with each of these reports, I hope that our political leaders are under increasing pressure to rethink what they are doing at the bottom, “Tarasuk said.
“We don’t need small one-time checks. They will not be enough to make this disappear. We need policies that are really lasting, and that means things like indexation. “
The Bank of Canada says it is ready to “act harder” to curb inflation, leading some economists to suspect that interest rates could rise by three-quarters of a percentage point next month, in line with the Federal Reserve of the United States last week.
For Canadians who are already over-extended, Hetherington says an increase of one or two percent in monthly mortgage or loan repayments could be significant.
“Every day I see kids excited to be in the food bank, shopping for the food they need,” Hetherington said.
“They are excited to shop with their parents at a food bank and that breaks your heart. It is absolutely wrong that this is happening in our country. “
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on June 23, 2022.
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