Food banks needs balloon over long weekend: ‘Most challenging Thanksgiving’

Food banks across Canada continue to face soaring need this Thanksgiving, with one executive warning that things could quickly get worse.
Amid inflation, increasing food and housing costs, and precarious employment situations, the country’s food banks have watched the need for their goods balloon as the organizations enter what, for many, is a critical time of year for fundraising.

Neil Hetherington, CEO of Toronto’s Daily Bread, which supports more than 200 food programs in the area, said this long weekend has been the “most challenging Thanksgiving we have ever had.”

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization saw about 65,000 client visits per month, he said. That number last month was 275,000.

“You’ve got food prices, you’ve got a precarious work environment, and most of all lack of decent, affordable housing,” he said.

“And you put all of those things together and suddenly you can understand why people are turning to food banks.”

At the Greater Vancouver Food Bank, chief operating officer Cynthia Boulter said the demand for food her food bank has seen this year is “unprecedented.”

“When I started, about five years ago, we were supporting between 6,000 and 7,000 people a month and we’re up in the 16,000 to 17,000 number at the moment,” she said.

In Quebec, demand for food assistance has been unrelenting for more than a year, according to Martin Munger, director of Les Banques alimentaires du Quebec, a network of 32 organizations that supply local food aid programs.

“With inflation on food, the demand continues to rise,” Munger said.

His organization’s latest data, from March 2022, showed its network served 671,000 people in the province on average each month, an increase of nine per cent from 2021 and 33 per cent from 2019.