Food banks meant to be temporary
The federal government needs to step up and address poverty causes
Around the time when I was born at the Royal Alex, the first food bank in Canada opened in Edmonton as a temporary solution to hunger. Now I’m 30 years old and I’ve never known a world without food drives, soup kitchens and food cupboards.
Food banks have become a permanent fixture in our society. Nowadays, when confronted with poverty, our common response is donating cans of food or volunteering at a charity. And these services are well used: over 800,000 people line up at food banks across the country each month to help feed their families.
But food banks do not transform those things that create and sustain poverty. And most food bank volunteers and staff would agree. They will tell you that they are tired of seeing people stuck, and many wish that their jobs didn’t have to exist. Just recently a food bank co-ordinator said to me, “It’s like people can’t dig out.”
And the statistics back this up: in a country as wealthy as ours, one in seven Canadians live in poverty. Meanwhile, 10.8 per cent of Edmontonians experience low-income, according to the Low Income Measure.
But poverty isn’t an equal opportunity offender. Some groups, like new immigrants, families led by single mothers, unattached adults, youth and Aboriginal people, are more likely to be poor than others. A recent report by Citizens for Public Justice, called The Burden of Poverty: A Snapshot of Poverty Across Canada, demonstrates that poverty is alive and well right across the country.
The report calls for a federal plan to address poverty, in collaboration with provincial and territorial plans. Alberta’s own poverty elimination plan has been in development since 2012 and has not yet been enacted.
In the absence of systemic change, food bank volunteers and shelters are picking up the slack. If they closed their doors today, poverty would become a lot more visible.
Our governments have an enormous potential to use policy measures to prevent and end poverty. Many of the most effective instruments for fighting poverty (income security payments, tax benefits, pensions, and vital funding for provincial/territorial health and social service programs) are controlled by the federal government.
But the federal government doesn’t seem to be taking poverty seriously — they don’t even think that poverty is their jurisdictional responsibility. This, despite the fact that in the last five years alone, the United Nations, the Senate, and the House of Commons have all called for the creation of a national strategy to address poverty. And yet, Canada still has no such plan.
Where is the political will to ensure all can live in Canada with dignity?
Many Canadians expect more from our federal government. Friday is the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. Food bank volunteers, students and church members will be taking to the streets across the country, including in Edmonton, to call for our federal government to develop a plan to address this needless problem.
Dubbed Chew on This!, (www.ChewOnThis.ca) people will pass out lunch bags with an apple, a fridge magnet and a postcard. They’ll ask others to join the call for systemic change to address the underlying causes of hunger and poverty.
People in communities across the country want to see government action to increase investment in affordable housing and the number of good-quality jobs. They want improvements to our insufficient income-security programs for those who can’t find a job or who are simply unable to work. They want the inequities of Aboriginal communities and newcomers to be addressed.
Canada, and indeed Edmonton, pays for poverty whether we deal with the symptoms or the causes. In many cases, addressing the symptoms is actually more expensive. Investing in people and poverty prevention is wiser than constantly putting money toward alleviation.
In a landscape not too different than the 1980s, when food banks began, our neighbours are in need. But this time we need to do something better. We need sustainable, long-term solutions that respect the dignity of all, and responses that recognize that poverty is not fair. We all have the responsibility to stand up to the injustice of poverty. Most of us have been doing our part — now it’s time for our government to step up to the plate.