Some people feel ashamed when using a food bank for the first time.
This is absolutely backwards. No one should ever feel shame for ensuring that they and their family have enough food to get through a day, a week, a month, or a year.
The shame should be on our political leaders at the provincial and federal levels. We shouldn’t need food banks in Canada. And yet the number of Canadians who require help getting basic nutrition keeps climbing.
This week, Food Banks Canada released a report saying that monthly visits to food banks were expected to top two million in October, for the first time ever.
Although inflation has been tamped down, the years in which it ran rampant have done a significant amount of damage. People living on low-wage jobs, disability and social assistance, and seniors on fixed incomes, have been hit the hardest.
While the price of food rose sharply from 2021 to 2023, the increasing reliance on food banks is really a story about the overall cost of living, especially for people who are just making ends meet.
How many people would have enough to buy their own groceries if their rent wasn’t squeezing them? Pinned between the need to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, for many Canadians, something has to give.
The federal and provincial governments should set a goal: by this time next year, food bank visits should be down by at least 20 per cent. In two years, 50 per cent.
In five years, we should be seeing food banks shutting their doors in many communities, because they are no longer needed.
We should all support our food banks, if we can. But we shouldn’t have to. Food and shelter remain basic rights that our governments have failed to provide to all Canadians.
Much like emergency rooms closing, the shortage of family doctors, overcrowded schools, and the scramble to build enough housing, the failure to ensure that all Canadians have enough food every week has been a slow-building crisis. Its roots go back to the middle of the past century.
Facing it head on, and calling it what it is – a crisis, a failure, a national shame – is the first step in fixing it.
– M.C.
