With nearly 10 million people in Canada living in food-insecure households, the political silence surrounding it all is perplexing and unacceptable, Right To Food’s Jasmine Ramze Rezaee argues.
There is something unsettling about hunger in a wealthy country. Not the disturbing spectacle of famine that appears in global headlines, but the subtler, slower form of deprivation that settles into ordinary life. Saying no to a social invitation because you can’t afford it. Skipping fresh fruits. Buying groceries at the dollar store. The weight of a thousand seemingly small decisions.
In Canada – a country that prides itself on abundance and stability – nearly 10 million people live in food-insecure households. The scale of that reality forces a difficult question: How did hunger become so ordinary in the land of plenty?
Misdiagnosing the problem
Food insecurity in Canada is not about the availability of food. Our country produces and imports more than enough to feed its population. The issue is not literal scarcity, but whether people have the financial means to afford it. Fundamentally, food insecurity is a measure of inadequate incomes.
Statistics Canada reports annual food-insecurity estimates through the Canadian Income Survey. Households are categorized as marginally, moderately, or severely food insecure based on a series of questions that capture the extent to which people worry about running out of food or are forced to compromise on the quality or quantity of food. In the severe category, people report skipping meals or, in extreme cases, going days without eating altogether.
The experience is painfully familiar to many Canadians. It appears in the private calculations households make every month: whether groceries or hydro gets paid first, whether fresh produce can fit into the budget after rent or mortgage payments, and whether there is enough left for outings – that inevitably involve some type of food expense – when more pressing bills need attention.
In communities across the country, food deprivation has become embedded in the routines of daily life. Yet there is nothing normal about it.
The crisis cuts unevenly through society, exposing deeper fault lines. Nearly half of people living in single-mother-led households experience food insecurity. Rates are dramatically higher among Indigenous and Black communities, reflecting long-standing inequities in income, employment, housing access, and caregiving burdens. Recent estimates also indicate that 2.4 million children are growing up in food-insecure homes.
Food deprivation has become embedded in the routines of daily life. Yet there is nothing normal about it.
Behind each statistic lies the stress and shame of relentless trade-offs.
The consequences are many. Food insecurity is linked to higher rates of chronic illness, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, anxiety, depression, and premature mortality. Children raised in food-insecure households face elevated risks of asthma, poorer mental health outcomes, and long-term impacts that persist into adulthood. Food insecurity is not merely a social problem; it is a public health crisis with enormous economic costs.
And yet, public conversations tend to misdiagnose the problem.
Food insecurity is commonly framed as an issue of food supply – disrupted supply chains and rising food prices. But decades of research point elsewhere. Food insecurity tracks income with striking consistency. As incomes fall, food insecurity increases. When incomes improve through stronger wages or government supports, rates decline.
The pandemic provided one of the clearest demonstrations of this relationship. Emergency income supports such as the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) temporarily reduced poverty and helped buffer some households against food insecurity. The relationship was clear and measurable. For a brief moment, Canada witnessed what happens when governments materially increase people’s ability to survive.
But the gains proved fragile. As emergency supports sunsetted and living costs accelerated, food insecurity surged once again. Grocery prices alone have risen roughly 25% since the pandemic, while housing costs continue to consume ever-larger portions of household budgets. As with so many other interconnected crises, the pandemic exposed the growing divides in our society.
The normalization of precarity
Over the last two decades, rising housing costs have contributed to food insecurity. Folks in the sector refer to this phenomenon as “housing eating the food budget” because as rents and housing expenses climb, food is often the first thing families cut back on to maintain shelter. But the labour market has also changed in our country. A growing share of work now consists of temporary contracts, gig labour, unstable scheduling, and low-wage service employment with few protections or benefits. More Canadians are employed yet financially precarious. In a labour market where one in three workers faces precarity, work no longer guarantees enough food on the table.
The normalization of this precarity may be the most alarming development underlying the food insecurity crisis. Because now it affects people who don’t fit the “traditional” model of who is struggling. Workers, students, families with children, and people with mortgages – no one is off limits (barring the very well off). Many Canadians remain technically housed and employed yet are only one unexpected expense away from a crisis. Wealth inequality has widened dramatically in our country, with the top 20% of households holding nearly 70% of Canada’s net wealth, while the bottom 40% hold just over 3%. Most of the productivity gains of the past four decades have flowed to the top.
Hunger, in this context, is less an isolated failure than a symptom of a broader economic order increasingly unable – or unwilling – to provide stability for a sizable portion of the population. And it certainly isn’t indicative of any personal wrongdoings. The old “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” adage assumes the boots themselves are sufficient. Arguably, they are not.
The rise of food banks tells a parallel story. Originally conceived in the 1980s as a temporary emergency response during a recession and cuts to social programs, food banks have woven into the social fabric of nearly every community across the country. Their growth also mirrors the normalization of hunger. But food banks are not a viable solution to a structural problem. They don’t reduce food insecurity at the population or household level because they don’t address income disparities. While they can provide short-term relief, they can’t resolve the policy gaps driving need. Most food-insecure households never access them at all. Instead, many survive invisibly through debt, skipped meals, isolation, and constant financial triaging. Hunger in Canada rarely looks dramatic. More often, it resembles chronic adaptation.
It is clear that adaptation, over time, has become politically acceptable. Nowhere is this truer than when considering Indigenous communities, where food-insecurity rates remain several times higher than the national average. In northern and remote regions, the cost of basic groceries is staggering. Colonial policies systematically disrupted Indigenous food systems, land relationships, and traditional practices tied to hunting, fishing, harvesting, and gathering. The erosion of access to country foods, combined with the rising costs of fuel and equipment needed to harvest them, has intensified both economic and cultural dislocation.
Addressing food insecurity in Indigenous communities, particularly in northern regions, therefore requires more than income-security measures; it requires supporting Indigenous food sovereignty and self-determination. The recent fiscal update announced roughly $36 million in new dollars for food-security initiatives in the North. By comparison, a single fighter jet is projected to cost roughly $300 million. The federal government is planning to buy 88 of them.
Political silence
Given the scale of the hunger crisis, the political silence surrounding it all is perplexing. Some municipalities and public-health authorities across the country have declared emergencies, yet the federal government has never treated the issue with the same urgency. This is despite the fact that food insecurity reflects many of the same pressures governments routinely monitor: housing affordability, inflation, labour instability, and poverty.
Part of the difficulty lies in fragmented responsibility. The drivers of food insecurity – wages, housing, social assistance, disability supports, childcare, labour protections – span multiple jurisdictions and levels of government. Accountability becomes diffuse. The problem is acknowledged rhetorically while remaining politically orphaned.
Canada’s recently released National Food Security Strategy illustrates this challenge. While the strategy contains worthwhile commitments to strengthen food systems, improve local food infrastructure, and build resilience across the agri-food sector, it remains anchored within Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and largely sidelines the income policies that determine whether people can afford food in the first place. The strategy frames food insecurity primarily as a food-systems challenge when the evidence consistently shows that, for most households in Canada, it is an income problem.
Another explanation may be more troubling: economic precarity itself has become normalized. Unaffordable rents, unstable work, stagnant wages, and a lagging social safety net are increasingly treated as ordinary conditions of modern life rather than signs of systemic failure. Personal debt is at an all-time high, and mortgage defaults are expected to rise over the next two years as borrowers renew into higher interest rates. Grocery prices were projected to rise another $1,000 for a family of four this year – and that was before the war on Iran began.
Food insecurity exists within this broader normalization of instability.
We know what works
And yet the solutions – while perhaps politically controversial – are not especially mysterious. The best available evidence we have is remarkably consistent. When incomes rise, food insecurity falls. When social protections strengthen, hardship declines. Targeted income-security programs, such as the Canada Child Benefit, have already demonstrated measurable effects on reducing poverty and food insecurity among families. The evidence is even more compelling for seniors. Together, Old Age Security (OAS) and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) provide a comprehensive and generous income floor, contributing to dramatically lower rates of poverty and food insecurity among older Canadians. Today, children are approximately three times more likely to experience household food insecurity than seniors – a striking reminder of what well-designed income-security programs can achieve.
The solutions – while perhaps politically controversial – are not especially mysterious.
Expanding disability supports and targeted measures like the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit and the Canada Workers Benefit, modernizing Employment Insurance, strengthening wages, and investing in a range of affordable housing measures would all materially reduce economic vulnerability and, therefore, hunger.
Public systems matter, too, because they shape how much pressure households can absorb privately. Childcare, pharmacare, healthcare, school food programs, and subsidized housing all influence whether families can afford necessities at month’s end. The fulfillment of the $10-a-day childcare agreement, for instance, functions not only as social policy but as economic relief. Pharmacare operates similarly. When households are not forced to choose between prescriptions and groceries, financial pressure eases elsewhere.
Yet the recent fiscal update raises concerns about the future of the government’s pharmacare commitments. And, while the government has begun to reckon with the consequences of its long retreat from housing – culminating in the recognition of housing as a human right through the National Housing Strategy Act and more recent initiatives to expand the supply of affordable housing – these efforts will take years to bear fruit. They also cannot substitute for adequate incomes today, particularly for households already struggling to afford food and housing.
Perhaps this is the moment to consider ideas once dismissed as too radical: stronger public regulation of essential food pricing, publicly owned grocery retail models, or a national food voucher program modelled on systems that have already been tried in the North. The scale of the food-insecurity crisis demands the same spirit of innovation the government so often champions elsewhere.
What’s the plan?
In the long run, charity is a bad substitute for public policy. Addressing hunger requires confronting deeper questions about our society: how we distribute the collective wealth we create, whose voices are centred in decision-making, and what kind of country we aspire to build. It may even require the sort of national reckoning typically reserved for crises we decide are intolerable, such as a public inquiry – a whole-of-government response equal to the scale of the emergency. At the very least, we need a dedicated home in government.
Prime Minister Mark Carney seems to be preoccupied with these questions as well. And yet, our political imagination is increasingly consumed by economic growth targets, trade wars, investment attraction, and defence spending. The social consequences of inequality and deprivation are treated as secondary concerns. The result is a country asking people to be patient with suffering that has already become intolerable.
The crisis of food insecurity, in the last analysis, is a crisis of political imagination.
What is the plan for folks struggling today, who cannot wait for the capitalist boom promised tomorrow?
At a time of global volatility – when hegemonies are being reshaped and geopolitical instability is driving up the cost of living even further – the real question is: What, exactly, is the government’s plan to confront the food insecurity crisis?
What’s the plan? This is a question worth asking our elected officials, again and again.
Ultimately, food is what sustains life. It binds families, communities, and generations. It is essential for good health – and in many cultures, it is medicine and sacred. Food underpins social stability itself and, as I have argued elsewhere, the stability of our democracy. When nearly a quarter of Canadians can’t reliably afford it, we are no longer talking about a marginal issue. We are confronting a profound social failure.
Throughout history, the price of bread and the inability to meet basic needs have shaped political upheaval and public unrest. When millions of people – including children – in a country as wealthy as Canada are priced out of food, the implications extend far beyond the grocery aisle.
The crisis of food insecurity, in the last analysis, is a crisis of political imagination. Canada already possesses the wealth, evidence, and policy tools necessary to reduce hunger dramatically. We are an immensely talented, smart country. What remains uncertain is whether we possess the collective will to treat widespread deprivation as unacceptable – and to recognize food insecurity as the political failure it is.
