In January 2020, the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) published the horrifying results of a survey of Canada’s nationwide hunger crisis. While official data shows that four million people in Canada “struggle to get enough to eat,” these numbers alone do not explain the wide-ranging effects that lack of access to food has on mental and physical well-being, a lacuna which the paper sought to fill.

The study argued that, for millions of Canadians, “food insecurity” leads to “material deprivation and psychological distress,” which results in chronic inflammation, malnutrition, and the inability to manage chronic conditions. The paper found that “infectious diseases, unintentional injuries and suicide were twice as likely to kill those who faced severe problems finding enough food [than] those who do not.”

“It’s like we found third-world causes in a first-world country,” said lead author Fei Men. “The results are pretty striking… In the developed world such as Canada, food insecurity can still cause deaths.”

The CMAJ paper is not the first time researchers have studied the reality of the hunger crisis that Canadian politicians are so keen to avoid discussing. In 2012, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Olivier De Schutter led an 11-day investigation into hunger and food inequality in Canada. At the end of his trip, he appropriately criticized Canada’s hunger crisis as “unacceptable” and urged the government to act. He stated:

What I’ve seen in Canada is a system that presents barriers for the poor to access nutritious diets and that tolerates increased inequalities between rich and poor, and aboriginal [and] non-aboriginal peoples… This is a country that is rich but that fails to adapt the levels of social assistance benefits and its minimum wage to the rising costs of basic necessities, including food and housing.

He pointed out that Canada’s racist colonial realities deprive Indigenous peoples of access to nutritious food. “A long history of political and economic marginalization,” his report said, “has left many indigenous peoples with considerably lower levels of access to adequate food relative to the general population.” De Schutter estimated that, in 2012, one to two million people in Canada could not afford healthy diets—a state of affairs which, as the CMAJ report lays out, leads to increased mortality rates for affected persons.

Officials in the Harper government reacted with petulance. Then Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said that “his [De Schutter’s] time would be better spent elsewhere,” stating “There are, what, 193 members of the UN?” Meanwhile Jason Kenney, current premier of Alberta and then minister for citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism, called the investigation a waste of money and “a discredit to the United Nations.” He accused De Schutter of simply “giv[ing] lectures to wealthy and developed countries like Canada,” rather than illuminating the stark condition of hunger and food inequality that persist under supposedly prosperous Global North states.

Roughly ten years after De Schutter’s report, the same issues still exist, and in many areas they have gotten worse.

Policy research conducted by the Canadian Research Data Centre Network (CRDCN) in January 2022 provides useful information for understanding Canada’s widespread and largely unacknowledged hunger crisis. The Network’s research links the exacerbation of hunger to a diverse range of economic causes including lack of affordable housing, and calls on Canadian governments to implement a number of humane policies to remedy these intensifying inequalities.

The CRDCN found that lack of access to food is linked to higher healthcare use and costs among Canadian adults. “As the severity of food insecurity increases, so does the odds of acute care admission,” writes researcher Tim Li. “Of those who were admitted to acute care, more severely food insecure adults stayed longer in hospital and were more likely to be readmitted.” Therefore, hunger not only increases the likelihood of negative health effects and illness, it also results in increased strain on Canada’s ostensibly universal but shamefully threadbare healthcare system, thereby impacting the ability of hospitals throughout the country to provide quality care to patients suffering from other conditions as well.

In its study about the relationship between homeownership and hunger, the Network found that renters are far more likely to suffer from decreased access to food than owners. The CRDCN resolved that “policies that help Canadians own their homes and manage the financial burden of mortgage debt may help mitigate food insecurity.” According to Li, there is a need for “policies to address the high risk of food insecurity among renters.” He called for the federal government and provincial governments to “explore targeted income-based interventions for low-income renters to reduce their risk of food insecurity,” one of which may include tethering rent to income. However, federal and provincial governments in Canada have implemented few measures to supply Canadians with stable low-cost housing, even in the face of increased housing expenses (in 2022, the average rent in Canada rose 4.4 percent from 2021, while the national average home price broke an all-time record in January of this year).

As the CRCDN indicates, the alleviation of high rent burdens would decrease hunger in Canada, which would in turn decrease the adverse mental and physical affects caused by hunger which led to “raised mortality from all causes of death except cancer.” But as housing prices rise and Canadian governments show little interest in guaranteeing housing or at least making it more affordable, it is unlikely that the number of Canadian residents who are dying from hunger will diminish in the near future.

The CRDCN also found that the Child Care Benefit (or CCB, introduced by the Trudeau government in 2016) has not reduced overall hunger rates in Canada. While the 2022 Policy Snapshot states that the probability of missing meals or going days without food fell from 12.3 percent to 8.2 percent among low-income families, “there were no significant changes in the overall prevalence of food insecurity” following the introduction of the CCB. Furthermore, although acute hunger in low-income families has decreased slightly since 2016, Valerie Tarasuk and Emika M. Brown’s research shows that the probability of “severe food insecurity” has actually increased among households without children. Ultimately, the CRDCN concluded that the potential of the CCB to relieve hunger and its myriad negative effects on Canadians has been “unrealized.”

Finally, the CRCDN’s policy findings include chilling statistics on the prevalence of hunger in northern Canada. In 2011, the Harper government introduced a program called Nutrition North Canada. The stated objective of the initiative is to “help make perishable, nutritious food more accessible and more affordable than it otherwise would be to residents of eligible isolated northern communities.” However, the Canadian Community Health Survey (2007 to 2016) reveals that hunger in the ten largest communities in Nunavut increased by 13 percent following the full implementation of the program in 2014, rising from 33 percent of households to 46 percent.

Canada’s food crisis is the result of a settler-colonial capitalism system which deprives a disproportionate number of Indigenous people of access to healthy diets, while simultaneously enforcing brutal class-based rule that impacts all races and sectors of the economy, thereby draining Canadians of their earned incomes and condemning many to early deaths caused by hunger. While Jason Kenney condemned the UN’s research into food inequality in Canada as a “discredit” to the organization, the persistence of the hunger crisis is in fact a discredit to this country’s ruling class and a demonstration of our moral failure and subservience to capital.

Owen Schalk is a writer based in Winnipeg. His areas of interest include post-colonialism and the human impact of the global neoliberal economy. Visit his website at www.owenschalk.com.