Household Food Insecurity in Canada Status Reports

Past status reports are archived for reference, research, and recordkeeping purposes. These reports draw on data collected by Statistics Canada on previous years of the CIS (Canadian Income Survey) and the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS). Since questions on food insecurity are optional in some survey cycles of CCHS, some provinces and territories opted out of participation. As a result, there are no national estimates from 2013-2016.

Due to changes to the survey design of CCHS in 2015, Statistics Canada cautions users against comparing subsequent survey results with those prior to 2015.

Users should also not compare survey results from the Canadian Income Survey (Household Food Insecurity in Canada, 2021 onward) with previous reports due to important differences between the two surveys. See our commentary, Moment of reckoning for household food insecurity monitoring in Canada, in Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention in Canada for more information.

PROOF seeks to improve the accessibility of food insecurity data by regularly reporting it in an easy-to-understand, comprehensive manner. These reports also contain summary data based on geography, racial identity, main source of income, and other household characteristics that are often unavailable through other public information sources. This has positioned PROOF as the unique provider of food insecurity statistics for certain vulnerable populations and from years in which some jurisdictions opted to not measure food insecurity.

These reports include marginal food insecurity in their analyses and derive estimates of the total number of individuals living in food-insecure households, allowing for prevalence measures that provide a more comprehensive picture of the state of food insecurity in Canada.

Prior to these reports, the main point of reference was food bank usage statistics, which we now know seriously understate the scale of the problem. Our reports have popularized the use of food insecurity statistics to describe this serious problem.

For more information on the measurement of food insecurity in Canada, please see the reports themselves, and our measurement and interpretation guide “Household Food Insecurity in Canada: A Guide to Measurement and Interpretation”.

These reports are original works and the statistics may differ from how others report food insecurity data from Statistics Canada. As such, the statistics appearing in PROOF reports should also be attributed to the authors and PROOF.

The PROOF status reports are protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License that allows you to share, copy, distribute, and transmit the work for non-commercial purposes, provided you attribute it appropriately to the original source. Please see Licensing & Attribution for more information.