A recent survey commissioned by Food Banks Canada found that a growing number of Canadians are reporting they are facing hunger and food insecurity due to rising inflation and housing costs. In April, inflation hit its highest in three decades, hitting nearly seven percent.
A poll by Mainstreet Research shows that one in five, about 7 million Canadians, currently report being hungry, and 23 percent report that they are eating less “than they think they should” because they don’t have enough money for food. . The percentage of those who earn less than $50,000 a year and eat less is nearly double the average.
Food banks across Canada typically see a decline in demand during the summer months, but there has been no sign of slowing this year. “Food banks in most parts of Canada are facing an influx of Canadians visiting food banks for the first time — a number that has increased by 25 percent in some regions, something we haven’t seen since the first few months of the pandemic. said Kirsten Beardsley, CEO of Food Banks Canada.
“The biggest sign that inflation is seriously affecting hunger and food insecurity in Canada is that the reasons people say they go to food banks are changing,” Beardley said. “In the past, people turned to food banks when they lost their jobs or because of lower wages, but over the past six months, Canadians have been telling us they are running out of money for food due to rising housing, gas, energy costs and food”.
Statistics Canada reports that consumers paid 9.7% more for groceries in April compared to last year, the biggest year-over-year increase since September 1981. the price of fruit jumped 10 percent.
Speaking to CBC News, Breanna Cordeiro of Oakville, Ontario, said rising gas prices combined with stagnant wages have forced her family to look for ways to save money. “When you look at budgeting, is it like where can we make some cuts?” she said. “And, unfortunately, sometimes it has to be food.” Opting for meatless meals and stocking up mostly on what’s on sale goes this far, but even then, the mother-of-two says it can be tricky. “The flyer comes out every Wednesday or Thursday and says, ‘Is this on sale? Is this the selling price? This is something you paid full price for even six months ago,” she said.
Stop Community Food Center, Toronto’s food bank, can’t handle the growing number of people coming hungry to its doors and has been forced to cut back on the amount of food it gives to each person. The three food bank locations currently serve about 400 meals a day, up 40 percent from 2019. During the pandemic, families were allowed to collect food twice a month, but they were forced to change this policy. Maria Rio, director of development and communications, told The Breach: “Due to food costs and an increase in new customers, this has become more and more difficult to maintain, so we have now returned to access once a month per family.”
The grocery business in Canada is monopolized by five large corporations: Loblaws, Costco, Sobeys, Metro and Walmart, which control more than 60 percent of food sales in the retail market. Every major chain has squeezed its customers and its employees. Economist at the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) David McDonald reports that grocery stores “recorded $7.3 billion in pre-tax profits in 2021.” That’s “more than double what it was in the year before the pandemic,” McDonald said.
The skyrocketing profits of big business on the one hand, and the stagnant wages of workers on the other, as the cost of food and other necessities rises, are not just the product of economic forces but the intended outcome of the policies pursued by the political parties of the establishment. and unions for decades.
The unions forced one round of concessions after another on the workers, systematically sabotaging their struggle against real wage cuts, gutting benefits such as cost-of-living adjustments, and destroying jobs. All political parties, from the New Democrats on the Left to the Tories on the Right, ran a low-tax, deregulated regime that proved to be a bonanza for the super-rich and big corporations.
These long-standing developments have accelerated dramatically due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The federal Liberal government, backed by labor unions and the NDP, has handed over $650 billion overnight to the financial markets and big banks to protect their vast wealth while forcing workers to stay at work in dangerous conditions as the deadly virus spreads.
With inflation rising in recent months, workers have struggled to escape the straitjacket imposed on them by unions and have been actively fighting for higher wages and better working conditions. This fight involves 40,000 Ontario construction workers, more than 20,000 New Brunswick public sector workers and Canadian Pacific railroad workers.
Aware of the growing anger among the workers, the new democrats absurdly sought to portray themselves as friends of the workers in a series of demagogic statements.
On June 8, New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh posted a video on TikTok and Instagram in which he speaks in the House of Commons about the struggles growing numbers of workers face to feed themselves. “One in four Canadians in this country go hungry because they cannot afford food. At the same time, corporations are making record profits. They break record after record. Our plan is to tax the excess profits,” Singh said.
No one can take such cynical posturing seriously. Singh’s NDP has supported a minority liberal government since 2019 with the full backing of the union bureaucracy. He supported the Trudeau government’s bailout of the super-rich at the start of the pandemic and a back-to-work campaign that aimed to force workers to pay for hundreds of billions of dollars lent to banks and large corporations. At the same time, all NDP MPs supported Liberal budgets, which included additional billions of dollars to fund Canada’s armed forces.
In March of this year, the NDP signed a “trust and supply” agreement that will keep Justin Trudeau’s liberal minority government in power until June 2025. The NDP and its union supporters openly welcomed the agreement as necessary to ensure “political stability”. allowing Canada to continue to play an important role in the war of the imperialist powers against Russia.
As the WSWS explained at the time, “The specific task of the NDP and their allies in the unions will be to suppress the struggles of the workers, while at the same time providing the liberals with a ‘leftist’ cover while the government pursues imperialist aggression and turns towards the resumption of austerity and ‘growth of the economy’ — a euphemism for the whole range of policies aimed at supporting business, from deregulation to privatization”.
The inflation rate has been spiraling for more than a year as the economic costs of failing to end the pandemic and massive handouts to wealthy corporations are imposed on the working class by the policies of the ruling elite. For more than two years, the NDP has been working with unions and liberals to crush strikes and reject legitimate wage demands, while promoting Canada’s imperialist ambitions around the world.
Yves Giroud, parliamentary budget spokesman, recently released a report stating that the federal government would need to spend an additional $75.3 billion on defense over the next five years in order for Canada to meet NATO’s target of spending two percent of GDP on defense. Based on government data, Giroud predicts that Canada’s total military spending will increase from $36.3 billion in fiscal year 2022-23 to about $51 billion in 2026-27.
Despite Singh’s chatter about corporate taxation, his party is the fifth wheel in a government committed to ensuring that the funds needed to fund Canada’s massive rearmament program come from gutting what’s left of the social safety net and increasing the exploitation of the working class. .
