Canada’s first food bank opened in 1981 in Alberta in response to the oil industry’s economic downturn. What started as a temporary measure has become a widespread and permanent fixture across the country.
PROOF principal investigator, Dr. Valerie Tarasuk spoke with CBC Alberta at Noon’s Kathleen Petty about how the problem of food insecurity is bigger than food bank usage and why public policies to support more adequate and stable income are needed to address it.
Listen to the full broadcast at: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-1-alberta-at-noon/clip/16187165-moving-beyond-food-hamper
In 2024, 30.9% of Albertans lived in a food-insecure household, making Alberta the province with the highest rate of food insecurity. Policy choices, like not increasing minimum wage for seven years, allowing its real value to drop considerably amid record inflation, and not ensuring that social assistance programs provide enough for basic needs, contribute directly to the state of food insecurity in the province.
Callers from across the province shared their thoughts on food insecurity.
The toll on health
A doctor from Calgary regularly sees food-insecure patients struggle with following prescriptions or accessing mental healthcare services due to cost. Research on the relationships between food insecurity, health, and healthcare tells the same story.
People in food-insecure households are more likely to have poor health, have greater difficulty managing their conditions, and require more healthcare. Provincial governments should pay attention to food insecurity and work to reduce it, given the toll on public health and healthcare budgets.
Inadequate income supports
Callers also highlighted the inadequacy of provincial programs, like Income Support and AISH, and recent changes that could see many disability welfare recipients receive even less support.
Alberta is the only province to claw back the Canada Disability Benefit from welfare, meaning recipients won’t benefit at all from the federal initiative to help people with disabilities in financial need.
Wages and salaries not keeping up
There are also concerns about the inadequacy of wages in light of high inflation, particularly rising food and shelter costs.
Two-thirds of food-insecure households rely on employment incomes, making food insecurity a problem that is concentrated in the workforce. Jobs aren’t enough to protect against food insecurity if they don’t provide stable income that cover basic needs.
Policy solutions
Reducing household food insecurity requires the commitment to ensure that incomes are adequate, secure, and responsive to changing costs of living. There are many provincial and federal policies around income support, taxation, and employment that could be changed to better support Canadians in need. Reimagining our social safety net as a basic income or a guaranteed minimum income could also go a long way toward reducing food insecurity.
