Grant: Project Grant

Household food insecurity, the inadequate or insecure access to food because of financial constraints, is a serious public health problem in Canada. It has now reached a record high, affecting almost 1 in 5 Canadians. Food banks typically see only a small fraction of those who are food-insecure, but they are now overwhelmed with demands for assistance. Food insecurity has been recognized as a matter of concern in several federal, provincial, and territorial policy documents, but Canada still has no strategy to deal with this problem. As the number of Canadians experiencing food insecurity rises, the need for policy actions to address the underlying causes of this problem has never been more apparent. Because households' food security is tightly linked to their financial circumstances, the logical policy to address food insecurity is the federal government's Poverty Reduction Strategy. This strategy has been effective in reducing poverty through the introduction of the Canada Child Benefit and pandemic-related supports like the Canada Emergency Response Benefit. But food insecurity has still escalated. We think this is because a household's chance of being food insecure is driven not only by their income, but also by their assets and debt (which are not counted in calculations of poverty). We also know that households are more likely to be food insecure if they have recently endured job loss, sudden increases in expenses, or other changes that have increased their financial precarity. Working in partnership with Employment and Social Development Canada, Statistics Canada, and Community Food Centres Canada, we propose to analyze several years of income data for participants in the Canadian Income Survey to better understand how households' current and recent past economic circumstances predict their risk of being food insecure. We will use our results to identify policies in the Poverty Reduction Strategy that can reduce food insecurity in Canada.