Economic boom not putting food banks on the shelf

Norma Greenaway, CanWest News Service
Published: Thursday, November 08, 2007

OTTAWA – Canada is on a roll. The jobless rate is near record lows, oil prices are soaring, the loonie is flying high, and the federal government is awash in surplus cash. The good economic news has not, however, erased the country’s hunger problem.

A new national study, titled HungerCount 2007, says 720,231 people, a number just shy of the population of New Brunswick, were forced to turn to one of the country’s 673 food banks in March to feed themselves or their families.

The tally was down slightly from last year. But it was up almost nine per cent from a decade ago, and no province or territory can boast that food banks have outlived their usefulness, says the Canadian Association of Food Banks, which has conducted the annual survey since 1989. The survey, released_Thursday, covers only one month

Although there have been fluctuations from year to year, the number of users has remained “unacceptably high” at more than 700,000 for each of the past 11 years, the survey found. Moreover, people with jobs comprise the second-largest group of food bank users, after those on social assistance.

“This is a sad reality when we live in such a prosperous country,” Katharine Schmidt, the association’s executive director, told a news conference on Parliament Hill.

Schmidt said the $60 billion in tax cuts announced last week by the federal government, including a one-point cut in the GST and a dip in the tax rate on the lowest-income earners, must be followed up with, among other things, more generous federal tax benefits for working people and parents, and an expansion of the Employment Insurance program to cover more people and to give them better benefits.

Even in booming Alberta, food banks reported a steady stream of clients again this year, many of whom reported having jobs. Camrose and District Food Bank reported, for example, that 90 per cent of its clients received most of their income from employment.

Food banks helped 38,837 Albertans in March, or 1.1 per cent of the provincial population, the report said. Of the clientele, 43 per cent were children, 27 per cent reported earning wages and 35 per cent said they were on social assistance.

In the nation’s capital, the Ottawa food bank said the number of schools seeking meals for hungry children has grown dramatically to 17. The food bank has also started providing 12,000 meals to children during the summer months.

Nationally, the survey said children accounted for almost four of 10 people using food banks. Single-parent families account for 28 per cent of the clientele, two-parent families 22 per cent, single people 37 per cent, and couples without children 12 per cent.

People on social assistance were the primary users of food banks at 51 per cent. Employed people accounted for 13.5 per cent, people on disability supports accounted for 12.5 per cent, pensioners accounted for six per cent, and people on Employment Insurance benefits accounted for five per cent.

For the first time, the association surveyed the housing situations of people using food banks and found that 86 per cent were renters and eight per cent were homeowners.

Peter Tilley, executive director of the Ottawa Food Bank, said the annual studies illustrate a sad reality that food banks, once thought of as emergency assistance for people needing some short-term help, have become a crucial part of the country’s social safety net for hundreds of thousands of people.

“It’s a shame we made a business out of poverty,” he said with a grim smile, referring to the network of food banks across the country, most of which, he stressed, rely almost exclusively on volunteer labour.