Food banks signal a worsening hunger crisis in Canada: There's an easy fix
More Canadians are using Food banks than ever as grocery CEOs hoard record profits. France has a pragmatic solution. Time for Mark Carney to join Jagmeet Singh and address the crisis.
Food banks didn’t exist in Canada when boomers were growing up. We often forget that but it’s important to remember. They only appeared in the 1980s. Desperate working parents could no longer afford to feed their kids readily so charities sprang up to address their needs. In healthy social democracies, they don’t exist because they aren’t needed – because there are better solutions than humiliating struggling working class families.
Food banks were never meant as a long-term solution, but as an emergency, band-aid fix to a systemic problem ultimately created by an ideology – namely the intentional neoliberal shredding of the social safety net under the Mulroney-Chrétien-Martin-Harper governments. You probably know their tired mantras from a long succession of politicians, in one variation or another: “Government is the problem, not the solution. The private sector does everything better than the public sector. Let’s replace public servants with private consultants (who happen to be my friends – total coincidence! Trust me!). The super wealthy are our leaders and builders and must be allowed to dodge taxes. Yes, we have record deficits but it was in the cause of shrinking the government.” (That last one – Harper’s favourite – never really made any sense to anyone but the most hardcore Fraser Institute acolyte).
It’s common to associate neoliberalism with the 1980s, but the reality is that we’re still neck-deep in the neoliberal era, and the emerging techno-solutionist broligarchic age is just the latest incarnation.
Food banks are infamously the proverbial canary in the coal mine of neoliberalism signalling a worsening affordability crisis for working Canadians. The fact is, food in Canada is way too expensive for the average (median) salary. The cost of food has increased by over 20 per cent since the pandemic, and food bank usage is at a 35-year high. The grocery sector have blamed “supply chain” issues, which does not account for their record profits – they raked in $6 billion in 2023.
What can be done
Pierre Poilievre, malignant, dishonest grifter that he is, obviously offers nothing.
Soon to be PM, Mark Carney has sort-of addressed affordability by once-again focusing on timid economic nudges, namely middle class tax cuts. His recent LPC francophone debate response to a question on grocery prices was shockingly out-of-touch and showed a serious lack of preparedness by his campaign team. Memo to Mark: Kids going hungry just isn’t funny.
But neither Poilievre nor Carney has meaningfully addressed a solution that is proven to effectively drive down the prices of groceries for average workers while still allowing grocery CEOs to earn healthy profits.
The solution comes from France and is simple and pragmatic: a price cap on essential grocery staples. This allows plenty of room for profits on fancier goods while restricting price-gouging on healthy essentials. From an economic perspective, it provides balance by recognising that food is human right while allowing the market to innovate and cater to those with fatter wallets and more expensive tastes. It’s a win-win. And we know it works because it is currently working in France – a country that knows and loves good food – prices fell while profits remained healthy.
Poilievre and Carney haven’t merely ignored this practical solution, just in June of last year their parties, the Liberal-Conservatives, teamed up (as they almost always do in Parliament), to vote against bringing that proven solution to Canada. Needless to say, the NDP and its leader Jagmeet Singh wasn’t pleased by this callous vote.
Let’s be clear about what happened today, when given the chance, Liberals and Conservatives chose again to side with ultra-wealthy grocery giants instead of helping Canadian families who have been struggling for years to put food on the table.
The Liberal government has the absolute gall to tell Canadians they’re doing the best they can to help with the soaring cost of food. They’re unbelievably out of touch; Canadians deserve so much better.
– Jagmeet Singh, 5 June 2024
“One of the reasons why families have a hard time to afford their groceries is because we haven’t had productivity. That’s the issue. It's that their wages aren't keeping pace with prices. That's because they're not being given the right tools to work with. We're not working as smart as we should. So that's the challenge that we're talking about.
– Mark Carney, 25 February 2025
Does Mark Carney understand how to improve productivity?
Until now, Mark Carney and his campaign team have clearly made a real politik decision to appeal to the more conservative wealth-hoarding wing of the Liberal Party in the run up to the leadership vote, and his rivals have meekly allowed this to go mostly unchallenged as they focus on their own career prospects over the struggles of working Canadians.
Will there be time or even the need to shift left (as the Liberals usually pretend to do during elections) if, as widely expected, Carney decides on a Spring election? Maybe not. Then it will be up to the NDP to fight through legacy media’s distortions and somehow spread awareness of a proven solution to the food crisis – one that will help millions of Canadians access nutritious food so they can focus on the things Carney claims to care about: productivity and innovation.
Let’s keep it simple:
No productivity or innovation happens on an empty stomach.
Even a finance bro wunderkind should be able to understand that.
You need to have an accurate diagnosis for why grocery prices are still high and still going up, because inflation is down to 1.8 per cent, so it’s not inflation driving the price of food anymore. It’s greed — it’s clearly greed. And the scandals [have ranged] from colluding to price-fix tater tots to the Loblaws [underweight meat] scandal.
It is price fixing, it is price gouging. And the solution to that is price caps, which is something that was tried in France. The NDP supports price caps on the French model: the government did a study in collaboration with producers and distributors of food, and came up with a fair price of 5,000 different food items, and they just legislated it.
– Avi Lewis, NDP candidate for Vancouver Centre, 4 February 2025
Instead of taking meaningful, urgent action to lower prices for Canadians, the Liberals and Conservatives continue to give public money to grocery CEOs.
– Jagmeet Singh, 5 June 2024