A Growing Hunger

At the food bank where I work, we're serving triple the number of clients we were five years ago. And for the first time, many of them are people with jobs who can't keep up with the cost of living. How did we get here?

- DAVID LONG

About six months ago, a young single father came to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank. He was working full time, but his rent had gone up 20 per cent and he just couldn't make ends meet. Unable to adequately feed his children, and with no other choice, he came to us. He was distraught. Like many people, he felt the stinging stigma of accepting charity, of asking for something as basic as food.

This is not an isolated or extreme case. It's entirely typical, in fact, of the 17,000 people we currently serve each month at the GVFB. Last year, we gave out eight million pounds of food. And we're not the only organization with such staggering numbers. We're seeing similar situations at food banks all across Canada, as well as in New York, in Houston, in Mexico, in the U.K. In March of last year, there were nearly 1.5 million visits to food banks across Canada, the highest March usage on record. It was 15 per cent higher than the previous year, when we were in the teeth of the pandemic. Our colleagues at the Daily Bread Food Bank in Toronto say demand for their services is absolutely frightening-more than 270,000 visits in March, compared to 65,000 per month before the pandemic. According to a recent report from Food Banks Canada, food bank usage is up 35 per cent from 2019, and one in seven clients is employed. Our base of lower-income donors has eroded, and some of them have even become food bank users.