Three Years After Recession, Food Banks Still Popular

Some 700,000 people visit a food bank in Canada at least once a month.

Of all the various measures and statistics we use to gauge how poor or wealthy our society is – unemployment, GDP/GNP, average income – few get to the meat of the matter quite so well as how many Canadians are using food banks. And new data on food bank use shows that 26 per cent more people are using the food dispenseries than they were in 2008 before the recession. About 700,000 Canadians – around two per cent of the population – went to food banks each month in 2011, which is down about 2 per cent from last year (yay!) but still, as we said, far higher than it was just three years ago (boo). The food bank stat matches up pretty well with the unemployment rate, which at 7.1 per cent, is higher than it was pre-recession but has gradually edged downward over the past year. Delving deeper into the food bank data, 38 per cent of people who used them were children, and four per cent were post-secondary students. Two-thirds of all users were renters, six per cent were homeless, and one in 10 was either First Nations, Metis, or Inuit.