Roadmap to change
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This report card offers both a reflection point on the past year and a clear roadmap to help Canada cut food insecurity in half by 2030.
Impact Lorem Ipsum
Food insecurity remains at record highs, but early signs of progress—like easing housing pressures and new federal programs—offer hope.
About the Poverty Report Card
Poverty at a higher level
For several years, Canada has been in the midst of a poverty crisis that no single government can fix alone. Since 2023, the Poverty Report Card has been tracking and analyzing this changing picture of poverty. We’ve seen inflation drive up the cost of food, fuel, and other essentials far faster than wages have grown, forcing many households to take on unsustainable debt just to stay afloat. At the same time, soaring rents and interest rates have deepened an already severe housing crisis.
Together, these pressures have hit households like an unrelenting storm — with those who have the least hit the hardest. This impact can be seen at food banks every single day. Across the country, in nearly every community, food banks are seeing record-breaking demand.
While this year’s Poverty Report Card provides a glimmer of hope that Canada may be seeing some level of stabilizing versus prior years, albeit at historically high levels, it is still too early to determine whether the current situation represents a peak, or simply a plateau.
Fundamental to this glimmer of hope is the slight improvement that we are seeing in this year’s results of an indicator known as the Material Deprivation Index (MDI). The MDI is a measure of poverty that complements Canada’s official measure of poverty (the Market Basket Measure). Containing a selection of goods, services and activities that many Canadians consider necessary for a decent standard of living, the MDI measures outcomes arising from a lack of money, be it income or another financial resource.
In this report card, discussing poverty through the lens of the MDI is central to this narrative, as this indicator provides results that are time sensitive to current realities, consider factors other than income alone that impact a household’s standard of living, and is more reflective of trends that food banks across Canada are seeing on the front lines.
This report card offers both a reflection on the past year, and a clear roadmap forward for the Government of Canada to follow to ensure that we all work together towards a target of reducing food insecurity by 50 percent by 2030.
Read Key FindingsLand Acknowledgement
As an organization that supports a network of associations spanning from coast to coast to coast, Food Banks Canada recognizes that our work takes place on the traditional territories of Indigenous Peoples who have cared for this land that we now call Canada since time immemorial.
We acknowledge that many of us are settlers and these lands that we live, work, meet, and travel on are subject to First Nations self-government under modern treaties, unceded and un-surrendered territories, or traditional territories from which First Nations Peoples, Métis, and Inuit have been displaced.
We are committed to decolonization and to dismantling the systems of oppression that have and continue to dispossess Indigenous people of their lands and deny them their inherent rights to self-determination. This includes evaluating the role that Food Banks Canada has played in perpetuating these systems and working toward being active partners in the path toward reconciliation.
Acknowledgements
Authors:
Philippe Ozga, Chief Network and Government Relations Officer
Dana Vreeswijk, Policy and Advocacy Officer
EDI Analysis done by Empowered EDI
