Growing use of food banks a clear signal that basic income is needed in Canada
Thanksgiving in 2020 — like just about everything else this year — will be a little different, a little subdued, and a little forlorn.
Maybe your bubble will be smaller than the usual group that gathers for dinner.
Maybe a son or daughter won’t make it home from university.
Maybe a cherished grandparent or elderly aunt will be missing for the first time.
For many Ontario residents trying to navigate this dismal year, their first concern is not who is at the table. Their worry is, what will we put on the table? More and more, they are turning to food banks to fill their fridges and cupboards, and more and more food banks are facing growing pressures to keep up.
The pressure is coming from the supply side and the demand side. Donations are declining because autumn food drives are going by the wayside at schools and at businesses, where people are working from home. At the same time, demand is growing as families who were managing to make ends meet in the summer are turning to food banks. Credit cards are maxed out, and they have to choose between paying the hydro bill, for instance, or buying groceries.
Consider, as an example, the experience of the Burlington Food Bank. Robin Bailey, executive director, saw the same thing happening during the 2008 financial crisis. Now he’s seeing people who had stopped coming to the food bank returning as the pandemic drags on, and he expects it will only get worse.
“We know we’re in for the long haul,” Bailey said, adding many other food banks across Ontario are reporting the same thing.
“The struggle doesn’t really hit the food banks until really later on … CERB is holding people up. The problem with that is that stuff is going to hit us again in March and April when taxes (on CERB) are due.” Bernie Parent, the operations manager in Burlington, co-ordinates the delivery of 1,500 pounds of food each weekday. “People manage for the first few months,” Parent said. Then they have to make the difficult — and often traumatic decision — to resort to a food bank.
He has seen the tangible impact of the drop in donations.
Larger food banks take in enough in cash donations that they can buy what they need, at least for now. But smaller operations, particularly those serving Indigenous or racialized clients, don’t have that financial wherewithal.
That Bailey and Parent are experiencing déjà vu should come as no surprise. Canada has long struggled with food insecurity. The first food bank opened in Edmonton in 1980 as a way of offsetting the impact of the National Energy Program launched by the first Trudeau government.
Forty years later, with another Trudeau in the Prime Minister’s Office, a Food Banks Canada study pegged the number of food banks at 700 across Canada, and another 3,000 food support programs. The number of people who will need to rely on these programs will only grow as Canada emerges from the economic impact of the pandemic.
That growth should invigorate the push for a basic guaranteed income for Canadians. Right now, only one sector of the population receives any form of guaranteed income. It is seniors, who are eligible for Old Age Security and Guaranteed Income Supplement, both of which are means tested.
It is telling that in the last Hunger Count by Food Banks Canada, the number of seniors facing food insecurity was under seven per cent. And the number of people over 65 in Canada? Statistics Canada puts it at nearly 16 per cent.
No one who has to rely on these two programs is living in luxury. But the fact that seniors are faring modestly better in food insecurity than the rest of Canada’s population shows that a guaranteed income is working.
And expanding it to support all Canadians who need it would be something many people would be thankful for.