Food for Thought: Food banks need solutions, not scapegoats
Comments Off on Food for Thought: Food banks need solutions, not scapegoatsFood banks need solutions, not scapegoats
In our Food for Thought series, individuals within North York Harvest Food Bank will share their experience in matters pertaining to food insecurity and poverty. This series will share ideas, lessons learned, and challenge misconceptions as we work toward our vision of a community where all members are able to meet their food needs.
Written by Chiara Padovani; Senior Specialist, Advocacy and Community Engagement
I’ve been a food bank worker at North York Harvest for almost a decade. I have dedicated my life’s work to ensuring people in my community have enough food to eat: a basic human right that is needed in order for people to stay alive. I’m glad the crisis in food banks is getting attention, but I’d like to set the record straight.
Yes, there is a crisis in our food banks. Yes, there’s an affordability crisis in our city. But no, international students or immigrants are not to blame. Everyday, food banks encounter heartbreaking stories of people who through no fault of their own cannot manage to keep themselves and their families fed. They’re battling an impossible system that bears down on them every day with no reprieve. And every day I have to contend with the fact that I will never be able to fully solve the problems that they’re dealing with, I can only offer some food support so that they don’t go hungry.
Two months ago I met an international student, *Sharla, who came to our food bank for the first time and she was panicked. She said she had to cut
the hours she was working in half because of a new immigration policy limiting how many hours international students can work. Suddenly out of nowhere, she had to survive on half her income and didn’t know how she could afford to pay the rent. In the same breath she asked me about volunteering at the food bank because now she can’t work full time.
These are the people we’re told are taking advantage of our food banks? Or causing the affordability crisis? Give me a break. It’s scapegoating, and we don’t have to buy it. I will not sit silently while the work that I have been dedicating my life to has been weaponized to push an anti-immigrant and xenophobic narrative that does nothing to serve regular people who are struggling day to day, and only serves as a distraction from a broken economic system.
In fact, Sharla’s story sounds a lot like every other person’s story who comes through our doors whether they were born in Canada or not.
Here’s the truth: the affordability crisis we’re facing in Toronto and across the country has nothing to do with what country your neighbour, classmate or coworker was born in – and believing it does, is just a distraction from the real problem.
The number one reason people come to food banks is because they can’t afford their rent. Sharla isn’t raising your rent – your landlord is, and the provincial government isn’t just letting them get away with it, they’re making it easier by removing rent controls.
The largest group of new food bank clients are workers, which means even if you’re working full time, you still can’t afford the groceries you need. Sharla doesn’t cut your hours or pay you a wage you can’t afford to live on – your employer does, and the provincial government is incentivizing them to do so by refusing to legislate equal pay for part-time, casual, contract or temporary work.
Scapegoating immigrants, international students, migrants and refugees isn’t just a harmful distraction from the real problem, it also gets us further and further away from the solutions we actually need. Newcomers like Sharla are not the reason your rent is unaffordable, that the company you work for is extracting as much profit as they can without compensating you fairly, that grocery prices are too high, that formerly stable well-paying jobs are being replaced with temp labour. This is our fault, not theirs. We have enabled this system to thrive and to push our communities to the brink.
Because instead of implementing rent control to stabilize skyrocketing rents or implementing equal pay legislation to curb the rise of low-wage, precarious work – the kind of things that would help everyone and reduce the need for food banks in the first place – we’re being sold that the solution to our problem is just making life more difficult for Sharla?
I don’t buy it, and you shouldn’t either. Sharla deserves better than this, and so do we.
*Name changed to protect client privacy
