
Why Are Canada’s Food Banks Collapsing?
The Ottawa Food Bank is starving for supplies and scrambling to meet skyrocketing demand. It’s the same story for community food programs all across the country.
As Canadians grapple with astronomical grocery prices, troublingly high numbers of people are flocking to food banks to feed their families. Last March alone, two million Canadians visited food banks—a staggering 90 per cent increase from 2019—and the most recent figures estimate that 12,000 new users access them every month. Food banks aren’t just frequented by unhoused and precariously employed folks anymore, either: now, one in five users has a steady job.
Faced with the deluge of need, community food programs across the country have begun closing their doors due to empty shelves—some temporarily, like the Salvation Army Food Bank in Brant County, Ontario, and others permanently, like Kingston’s Loving Spoonful. Things are similarly dire at the Ottawa Food Bank: CEO Rachael Wilson says that the rising cost of food has left the charity strapped for supplies, forcing them to turn people away and even close their doors for a few days each month. Here, Wilson describes the conditions inside her bank’s 51,000-square-foot warehouse and what needs to change to prevent millions of Canadians from going hungry.
How did you get into this line of work?
Growing up in downtown Ottawa, I saw the stark contrast between affluence and need. I started volunteering in my teens—first at the McNabb Community Centre, where I saw six-year-old kids coming in hungry, and then at the Ottawa Food Bank, where I sorted food. (The operation was about a fifth of the size it is now.) I started my career fundraising for the Toronto theatre scene before transitioning to the Ottawa Food Bank as its director of communications and fundraising nine years ago. I became CEO in February of 2021. Today, food insecurity is an even larger problem. We’ve all heard someone say, “I spent $100 and I got one bag of groceries.” The divide between haves and the have-nots is only getting bigger and bigger.
To millions of Canadians none of this exposé surprises in the least. The unfortunate thing is that for too many more millions and in more ways than one Canada had to be gutted like a fish before they realized this wannabe emperor had no clothes, and he never did.
Rick Hillier: Justin Trudeau abandons Canada in its hour of need
Justin Trudeau will go down in history simply for being our prime minister for a decade. He will be remembered always for the narcissism and egotism that will have seen his nation, and the 41 million Canadians who inhabit it, abandoned for personal ambition. This is not, as Churchill once intoned, his finest hour.
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