A customer shops for produce at a FreshCo grocery store in Brampton, Ont. on June 5.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Nick Saul is the CEO of Right To Food. Jasmine Ramze Rezaee is Right To Food’s director of policy and community action.
Every summer, Canadians gather around backyard barbecues or join neighbourhood potlucks on the street. These moments are meant to be about connection. But for millions of people, they also come with stress and anxiety: Can we afford to bring something? Can we afford to host? Should we even go?
Those same financial pressures dominate kitchen table conversations year-round. With grocery prices remaining stubbornly high and the cost of living continuing to outpace many household budgets, more and more Canadians from all walks of life are feeling the squeeze.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has acknowledged these concerns and promised to make life more affordable. It remains one of the defining domestic challenges facing his government.
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That is why the federal government’s recently released National Food Security Strategy is so disappointing. It rightly recognizes that Canada’s food system faces real challenges. Climate change, supply chain disruptions, food processing capacity, corporate concentration, and domestic food production all deserve the serious attention it gives them.
But the strategy will do little to help the millions of Canadians struggling to afford groceries today because it largely overlooks the single biggest driver of household food insecurity: inadequate incomes.
Food insecurity in Canada isn’t primarily a food systems problem. It’s an affordability problem.
That’s why a group of leading nonprofit organizations working on food security and poverty reduction has issued a joint statement calling on the federal government to strengthen the National Food Security Strategy before it moves into implementation. Together, we are urging Ottawa to convene a formal roundtable with the nonprofit sector.
The reason is simple. For decades, evidence has consistently shown that household food insecurity is driven by inadequate incomes – not by a shortage of food. Canada produces plenty of food. Yet nearly a quarter of people in this country – almost 10 million, including one in three children – experience food insecurity because they can’t afford the basics.
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Food insecurity means skipping meals, buying cheaper and less nutritious food, worrying about running out of food before payday, and relying on food charities simply to get through the month. It is one of the clearest indicators that our affordability crisis has gone too far.
But how we diagnose the problem matters because different problems require different solutions. If the problem is food production, we invest in farmers, food processors and resilient supply chains. If the problem is affordability, we must also ensure that people have enough income to buy the food that already exists.
The National Food Security Strategy makes important commitments to strengthen Canada’s food systems. But it contains no measurable targets for reducing household food insecurity. It introduces no significant new income security measures. And while it acknowledges Indigenous food sovereignty, it does not provide new investments to support Indigenous-led food systems and traditional harvesting. These are significant omissions.
No amount of investment in food processing or agricultural innovation will help a parent standing in the grocery aisle who simply doesn’t have enough money in their bank account.
We’ve seen what happens when governments increase incomes. During the pandemic, emergency income supports reduced food insecurity and poverty among many households. Programs like the Canada Child Benefit and the Guaranteed Income Supplement have similarly demonstrated that when incomes improve, food insecurity and poverty declines. The opposite is also true. When living costs rise faster than incomes – whether from work or government supports – more people struggle to afford food.
The National Food Security Strategy can still become a stronger roadmap. As it moves into implementation, the federal government has an opportunity to work with the nonprofit sector to ensure the strategy reflects what decades of evidence have shown: when incomes rise, food insecurity falls.
In a country as prosperous as Canada, no one should have to choose between paying the rent and buying groceries. The evidence is clear, and the solutions are within reach. What stands in our way is not a lack of resources, but political choices and priorities. The question is whether the federal government is prepared to act on what we already know.