Deachman: Ottawa food banks are desperate but governments aren’t listening

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Darlene Myles volunteers at the Heron Emergency Food Centre (HEFC) in Alta Vista, where she has also, intermittently for the past 20 years, been a client. So she well understands the world of food banks from both sides of the counter.

She knows what it means to have to stretch a bag of pasta for several meals for her daughter and her. She knows people who, despite their dire need, are too embarrassed to ask for help. And she knows that the situation is getting worse, with the growing demand on food banks rapidly outpacing donations.

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“Things are already tough,” she says, “but people are going to find it really, really tough. It’s going to get so much more difficult.”

Louisa Simms, executive coordinator at HEFC, similarly laments the situation. “Every month, we say, ‘That’s a new record.’ ”

The records they’re setting point to a worsening problem: the number of people coming to the food centre just keeps growing.

HEFC served 889 households last month, an increase of almost 21 per cent over the previous November, and nearly 60 per cent higher than the 556 it served in November 2022.

The number of people who accessed HEFC also soared to a record high — 2,777 fed in November this year, 50 per cent more than in November 2022. Among seniors, the increase — 70 per cent — was even higher.

This is not the sort of record Simms or Myles want, or deserve. After all, their clients are people. Hungry people. And Heron is just one of the Ottawa Food Bank’s 71 member organizations operating nearly 100 food programs in this city. The increase in food insecurity that weighs so heavily on Heron’s resources is playing out not just in Alta Vista, but across the entire city: According to OFB’s 2024 Hunger Report, one in four Ottawa households is food-insecure. There’s been an almost doubling of food bank visits since 2019.

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“You ask who’s coming to the food bank? It’s everyone,” says Erin O’Manique, executive director of the Gloucester Emergency Food Cupboard. “It’s people coming in in their PSW outfits. It’s people working.”

You ask who’s coming to the food bank? It’s everyone.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the uneven equation are dwindling resources. Ottawa Food Bank CEO Rachael Wilson announced in October that starting in January 2025, the organization will reduce food deliveries to food banks and cupboards by 20 to 50 per cent. In the case of Heron, which currently gets about 80 per cent of its food from OFB, and Gloucester, there will be a 30 per cent decrease.

The announcement, says O’Manique, feels like a tipping point in the fight against hunger in Ottawa. “We’ve started to talk about using the word ‘crisis.’

“We will have to cut back on what we give out,” she adds, “just to make everything go a little farther. I did budget more for food for next year, and I told my board we’re going to have to fundraise more, and we’ll see what happens.”

Simms says HEFC will have to make up the shortfall by buying more groceries itself, using funds the centre has raised on its own. Heron already spends about $90,000 a year for foodstuffs beyond what OFB provides. Starting next month, it will simply have to buy more. Simms forecasts it will be able to do that for about six months.

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“What happens after that, I don’t know. I don’t know where else to look.”

One good place to look would be at all three levels of government, which currently contribute minimally to the operations of food banks.

News that the city found an extra $200,000 in its 2025 budget for 34 local food security organizations, including OFB, will help, but not much. It works out to an average of less than $6,000 per organization.

“It’s nice that they gave us some, but they’re going to have to continue to find more somewhere,” says Simms. “It can’t be just a one-time drop.”

Wilson agrees. In October, she asked the city to provide $5.6 million to cover the current gap. In 2024, the city’s contribution to OFB was about $440,000, or just 1.4 per cent of the food bank’s budget. Overall, funding from all levels of government accounts for only two per cent of OFB’s budget, with the remaining 98 per cent coming through community donations.

Numerous factors contribute to food insecurity, such as unaffordable housing and low wages, but the burden of ensuring people have enough to eat shouldn’t be borne almost exclusively by private citizens and benevolent organizations. The right to adequate food is universal, recognized internationally and enshrined in the United Nations’ 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), to which Canada is a signatory.

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So whose job is it to ensure that people get enough food?

A query to Jenna Sudds, Liberal MP for Kanata-Carleton and minister of Families, Children and Social Development, sent me off to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada with no comment from the federal minister responsible for the Ottawa area. An emailed response from Cameron Newbigging of Agriculture Canada’s media services said the federal government is working “continuously” to improve access to nutritious foods and strengthen food security, including $62.9 million announced in the 2024 budget to deliver the School Food Infrastructure Fund (SFIF) and the renewed Local Food Infrastructure Fund (LFIF) over three years.

Additionally, the feds are also investing $1 billion over five years to create a National School Food Program to “enhance and expand” access to school food programs across Canada, he said.

Meanwhile, Diya Soni, press secretary to Michael Parsa, Ontario’s minister of Children, Community and Social Services, sent an email saying the province was making life more affordable for all Ontarians, citing, among other initiatives, the recently announced $200 rebate and the extension of the gas tax cut.

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The only food-specific measures noted in the email were an additional $6.15 million in the Student Nutrition Program and the First Nations Student Nutrition Program, for total provincial funding of over $38 million in 2024.

These are welcome investments, of course, but none mentioned any suggestion of bolstering food banks. Kudos to the city for scraping up some extra dollars for them, but the woeful imbalance between public and private investment must change.

Priorities need to shift. If the city can pay $50 million to widen two kilometres of Bank Street in Findlay Creek, or invest in however much the Lansdowne development will eventually cost, can it not throw something more than crumbs to food banks?

And instead of luring voters with a $200 rebate, could the province not put that money directly toward solving the food insecurity crisis, lessening the hardships many of its constituents face?

And the feds? Mired as the government is in political chaos at home and threats from Donald Trump abroad, it still has an obligation to its own hungry citizens.

Do better — for Darlene Myles, everyone like her, and everyone she helps.

bdeachman@postmedia.com

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