Who is ‘food insecure’ in Canada? New data shows ‘very high’ need
- Media Manager
- Nov 14, 2023
- 1 min read
Global News
Written By: Sean Previl
Published: November 14th, 2023
Photo Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain
Single mothers, Black and Indigenous families have been among the Canadians impacted the hardest by food insecurity, according to a new study by Statistics Canada, which looked at families who were “food insecure.”
The data, released Tuesday in the “Food insecurity among Canadian families” study, used data from the 2021 Canada Income Survey and 2019 Survey of Financial Security and questioned more than 70,000 Canadians from Jan. 16, 2022 to July 5, 2022 to get information on household experiences during the 12 months before the survey — directly in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the study, the number of Canadian families who were food insecure increased from 16 per cent in 2021 to 18 per cent in 2022, amounting to about seven million Canadians.
Valerie Tarasuk, lead investigator of PROOF, a research program working to look at policy directions to reduce food insecurity, told Global News that the numbers are “very, very high” and concerning.
