It seems incredible in a city where fixer-uppers go for $1 million a pop, but food banks are feeding some 27,000 Vancouver residents each week.
The fact the 15 depots, in Vancouver, Burnaby, New Westminster and the North Shore, do not list addresses online — “for reasons of security and confidentiality,” says the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society — hints at the shame associated with food bank reliance.
Really, it’s a national shame, one that has been around since food banks launched operations in this country 30 years ago.
The food distribution outlets do not receive government help, but rather are supported by the voluntary sector.
A Food Banks Canada report last week revealed nearly 900,000 people, 2.5 per cent of Canadians, were food bank users in 2011.
That’s up 26 per cent from the period before the 2008 recession.
Not surprisingly, 52 per cent list welfare as their primary income source. But who would have guessed: 24 per cent were dual-parent families with children; 12 per cent had jobs; seven per cent were homeowners.
B.C. is doing considerably better than other provinces on the food-bank front.
Numbers who use B.C.’s 91 food banks increased 15.5 per cent since before 2008 — hefty growth, but nothing like Alberta’s 74.9-per-cent jump.
And the percentage of B.C. food bank users who were children was 31.8 per cent, compared with a 38-per-cent Canadian average.
The report, titled HungerCount 2011, says food bank use is tied directly to the economy’s health and availability of decent jobs.
Perplexingly, food bank use is up even as poverty levels — measured by Statistics Canada’s Low Income Cutoff — have declined.
Some 10 per cent of Canadians are poor, down from 11.2 per cent in 2001.
But as the report states, in the last decade food banks have been helping Canadians through both good times and bad.
Doubtless, the latest food bank numbers, at least in part, are related to the private-sector propensity since the 2008 recession to maintain or boost profit by reducing employee numbers.
Also, as anyone who frequents a supermarket knows, food has grown noticeably more expensive in the past few years.
And Canadians are more indebted.
The public sector also is being constricted, with the robustness of social programs being diminished.
“As governments cut the size of the public workforce, emphasize low taxes and restrict new spending, social policy ... is at risk of neglect.”
The report warns that as the population ages and health costs increase, “it simply makes sense to prioritize the full participation of as many Canadians as possible in our economy.”
It recommends the usual left-wing recipe to address the growing reliance on food banks: federal support for affordable housing; boosting welfare benefits; more generous EI options; greater job-creation efforts for “disadvantaged workers”; and early childhood learning and child care programs.
The chance such options would be embraced by the Harper government, of course, is nil.
Conservatives argue that their quest to decrease government spending improves economic conditions for the private sector, which creates employment that enables people to support themselves.
But what’s surely most troubling is the fact that food bank use has kept on growing, through both Conservative and Liberal government approaches.
Worryingly, the report concludes: “This is a striking sign that there are serious long-term economic and social problems in Canada for which we simply do not have adequate solutions.”
Original Article
Source: vancouver sun
Author: Barbara Yaffe
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