The Ottawa Food Bank is calling the record-breaking visits to its food programs “a declaration of emergency,” with children and youth and newcomers accounting for more than a quarter of visits last year.
The Ottawa Hunter Report 2024, titled “The Alarm Rings On.” shows there were 556,000 visits to the Ottawa Food Bank and its associated agencies in 2023, with visits up 90 per cent from 2023. The report says 2.4 million meals were served by its food programs.
The Ottawa Food Bank says one in four households faced food insecurity in 2023, up from one in seven households in 2022.
“Severe food insecurity has nearly doubled since 2019, leaving many to skip meals entirely just to pay for rent or utilities,” the food bank says. “With a record-breaking 556,000 visits to food programs in 2023, this isn’t just a wake-up call—it’s a declaration of emergency.”
Thirty-seven per cent of users to the Ottawa Food Bank were children and youth under the age of 18, and 42 per cent of visitors are single adults.
“Newcomers to Canada who have been in the country for 10 years or less are increasingly vulnerable to food insecurity,” the Ottawa Hunger Report 2024 shows.
“In 2024, 25.9 per cent of food bank visitors in Ottawa were newcomers to Canada, up from 16.3 per cent in 2019. This includes refugees, international students, migrant workers, and recent immigrant families.”
The Ottawa Food Bank says 50,000 people visited its network in October, the highest number of visits in a month in its 40-year history.
Now, the food bank says it needs help from governments to meet the need.
“While we remain committed to serving the community, we face difficult choices,” Rachael Wilson, chief executive officer of the Ottawa Food Bank, said in a statement. “Record-breaking demand has forced us to prioritize, making trade-offs that no community should ever have to consider.”
The food bank receives 98 per cent of its funding through donations, while less than two per cent of the funding comes from governments.
“This disparity is simply untenable,” Wilson said. “We are calling on all levels of government to recognize food insecurity for what it is—a crisis—and to treat it with the urgency it demands.”