A recent spring food drive in Barrie, Ont. fell $100,000 short on their financial goal. It's part of a growing trend across Canada.
Food banks in Canada are being pushed to the brink with high demand and donations not keeping pace. Experts say it’s unsustainable.“The word that I hear often with food bank s across Canada is ‘unsustainable,’” says Kirstin Beardsley, Food Bank s Canada CEO.
A 2023 report from Canada Helps found that 57.3 per cent of charities cannot meet current levels of demand and that 31.5 per cent of charities raised less money than the year before. To give people a sense of just how bad it’s gotten, Beardsley compared the impacts of the 2008 recession with the pandemic. During and after the recession, she said food banks on average saw a 30 per cent increase in demand for services. Since thepandemic and rising inflation, Beardsley says 2023 data shows a roughly 80 per cent increase in demand for services. It’s likely to be higher once the 2024 numbers are collected, she added.
“It’s a pretty high level of food and financial donations we need to be able to meet that need. To be realistic, we have had to cut back a little on some of the quantities of items just to stay in our budget.”leading to more people needing their services, Palmer says single people are making up one of the biggest groups they see because they have to pay all their expenses on their own.
Palmer says this allows them to quickly deliver perishable products with a short shelf life to those in need.When asked if the federal and provincial governments should support food banks more, Palmer said it would help more if they looked at how to prevent people from needing to go in the first place.Palmer says one area that could help curb demand is providing more financial support for people on government assistance programs.
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