Front Burner - Inside a busy food bank: 'It’s the person across the cubicle'

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

The Daily Bread Food Bank in Toronto had their worst month on record in March: more people used their services than at any other time in their 40-year history. This, at a time when Canada’s unemployment rate is at a near-record low. The situation is similarly dire at food banks across the country. So today on Front Burner, producer Imogen Birchard heads out to a food bank in Etobicoke, to find out who’s using the service now and what’s driving them there. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Imogen Burchard, a producer here on FrontBurner. So I was talking to a friend recently, and she told me about this experience she'd just had walking down a major artery in downtown Toronto. She saw this long, long line up on the street and got curious.

Is there some pop-up shop here or some super in-demand ticket all these people are hoping to get their hands on? But as she got closer, she realized no, this was the line for the local food bank. And the long line wasn't unique to that day or to that particular location. Just last week, Neil Hetherington, the CEO of the Daily Bread Food Bank in Toronto, told me a similar story about a different spot. I was driving down Avenue Road and I saw a food bank lineup. And I was disheartened and I was like, wow, that's kind of long. And then I got stopped at the light right parallel to it. And I realized it was a lineup like at customs where it

actually weaves. It wasn't that one lineup. It was threefold. People had to weave back and forth. And I was disheartened prior and I was angry after that. At a time that Canada has near record low levels of unemployment, the Daily Bread Food Bank has hit their own record high. In March, more people showed up at their doors in need than in any other month in the organization's four-decade history. Classically, people will say, that's great, you're serving a lot of people. I see the homeless on the streets of Toronto. That's great that you're providing support to them. And I would say, no, no, no, it's actually the individual on the subway beside you and on the bus beside you who's making use of the food bank. And now it's the person across the cubicle from you. The situation is similarly dire across the country. So I headed out to one of the Daily

Bread's large network of food banks across the GTA to find out who's using the service now, what's driving them there, and why the guy in charge of the place isn't just disheartened, he's angry. It's a sunny Tuesday morning when I arrive at their location in the West Toronto borough of Etobicoke. The space is big. It's a former World War II munitions factory. And clean. There's a waiting area with chairs neatly arranged

and a corner for children to play in with toys like the ones you see in doctor's offices. Volunteers greet people as they arrive. There's free coffee. The stream of clients coming in is steady. Constant, but not chaotic. They're there by appointment. And they're not all who you might expect. All I need is just milk and simple fruit, some rice.

That's what I'm looking for. It's this woman's first time at the food bank. I asked if it was hard for her to make the decision to come. Yeah, because it's my first time. I don't even know how to make appointment. I don't know if they're going to ask question, why you come here? Because I do have full-time job. I think food charity is for people, they are maybe disability or they have family, they need to take care of their child, so they don't have time to get a job. But I do have full-time job, so I don't, everything I need to come to here, but turns out we do. Over the last 18 months, the number of people at the food bank

whose main source of income comes from employment has more than doubled, 35%. That means over a third of people coming in have jobs, even full-time jobs. I work full-time as a marketer. Before the pandemic, I worked seven days a week. Like I work full-time as a graphic designer from Monday to Friday. And on weekend, I work as a cashier. But during the pandemic, the shopping malls closed,

so I lost one of the job. And my full-time job doesn't earn too much, but I'm not... This woman, she owns her home, a small condo. And that's at least partly why she's here. Mortgage. That's the mortgage and the internet and the phone bill. And that's something you have to pay for every month. Yeah, because I usually have like around $400 for food each month. But now the mortgage covers like $300 more, so I don't have money for food. Like all the inflation and the food is so expensive right now and everything. I've heard economists say before, on this show even, when talking about rising interest rates,

that people will sacrifice every other expense before they miss a mortgage payment. Here's living proof. I spoke to other people with mortgages. This guy was a welder until he got into a workplace accident. Right now I'm actually on long-term disability. I don't know if you know too much about that, but they pretty much give you, it's like $1,400 a month. You know, good thing I have my partner who kind of picks up the slack right now but you know we have mortgage and things like that and i obviously can't do it on the amount of money that they're giving me so which is which is why i come here you know our mortgage payment alone is uh three three grand a month maintenance fees

car insurance like just everything adds up fourteen hundred dollars does not cover not even a quarter of that well and food is so much more expensive these days yeah no it's very expensive it's very expensive even at walmart you know you go there a hundred dollars used to go a lot longer especially in walmart or no for alls now it's like you can spend a hundred dollars and not even come out with any meat or really anything bare minimum so yeah but places like this they definitely help he's been coming to the food bank for about three months the location we're at in etobicoke it's set up to be sort of like a shopping experience you go in with a certain number of points depending on the

size of your family those points are like currency and with them you purchase the food you'd want. And as I mentioned earlier, you can come by appointment. But this guy's first visit was at a different location. It wasn't really the best experience just because like they have you line up outside and it's a little humiliating like you know because you're also lining up on a main road so everybody is just you know you're just there like on display almost right and the selection like it's just it's not as good as here like at least you feel like you're kind of in a grocery store and more like a human being right um but yeah i never thought i'd be in this situation definitely not this idea of being almost caught off guard or surprised to be at the food bank, it's something I heard over and over from people. One man I spoke to who didn't want me to record

because he was worried friends who listened to the CBC would recognize his voice told me he used to give to food hampers at Christmas. Now, he finds himself receiving. A full-time college student who's also a gig worker delivering your takeout food told me something similar. a volunteer over here. I mean, you can say that my hands and legs are tied in all different four directions. But then when my hands are and legs are free, when I'm working at my own pace, and I have a fixed work hours and fixed amount of money hitting my account, obviously I would also want to volunteer over here. A third person told me they used to be on the other side of food charity. This Ukrainian mother, who arrived in Canada just three weeks ago. In Ukraine it was very good and I had good income, everything. So I used to come with my friends who help in food bank

and I used to help them also. And I never knew that I would get in such a situation. Oh, it's horrible, sorry. Of the six people I spoke with that morning, all were new to the service. No one had been new to the service. No one had been coming to the food bank for more than a year. And that makes more sense to me when I sit down with the CEO, Neil Hetherington, for his perspective on what's going on and what he's calling for to fix it.

He tells me how many new people are arriving at their doors right now. What's happening is every month some 13,000 individuals who never used a food bank before are registering for the first time. We are not seeing the growth rate of our weekly visits diminish at all. The curve is not flattening. And so we are most concerned about how this reflects at a time where unemployment is as low as it is. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix.

I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. In March, when Canada's unemployment rate was hovering at a near record low of 5%, the Daily Bread Food Bank broke their monthly record with 270,000 client visits, up from 60 to 70,000 pre-pandemic. There's some things that we know why it's happening. And there's some that we have to

be honest and say, we don't understand it. So on what we know, we know, first, that there is not enough decent affordable housing in the city of Toronto or across the country. The second is we know that income supports are inadequate. If you are on disability, you are legislated to be in poverty, and substantially in poverty. We know that inflation has had a massive erosion of purchasing power for every Canadian, particularly your food purchases. And the fourth is the rise of precarious employment. So we know that when you are having to cobble together two or three part-time jobs, you don't have benefits. And so you end up being too rich for a social program to be able to support you getting

prescription medications or dental care, but you are too poor. And so you are making decisions like heat or prescription meds, rent or food. And so those are four things that we know. Here's what we don't know. We don't understand why for the first time in our history, we have quadrupled the number of client visits and unemployment is so low. They always went in parallel. They were always together. We were the canary in the coal mine. So as things start to change, we could warn government,

hey, things are going bad. Things are going consequentially bad. And we are raising alarm bells as loudly and as boldly as we can. And regrettably, we're not seeing policy shifts. We all promised one another that we would build back better. And we failed on that promise. So we had the acute shock of the pandemic. We doubled the number of people who are coming to food banks.

And then you have the secondary shock of inflation. We doubled again in terms of the number of people who are coming to food banks. And then you have the secondary shock of inflation, we doubled again, in terms of the number of client visits. And now you think about every warning sign of a recession. And and you say, here comes the third shockwave. And will the daily bread and will food banks across the country be able to keep up? Can you describe for me a little bit more the new people who are coming, the people you've never seen before? If you're reaching these record heights, who is making their first visit to the Daily Bud Food Bank now? The growing segment, by far the fastest growing segment, are people with full-time employment. So individuals who they went to school, they went on, 50% went on to post-secondary education, and their primary source of income is employment. And so they've done everything right. And yet they find themselves having to rely on food charity,

and not being able to make ends meet. You know, I'll tell you a story. I'm not sure you'll put this in the podcast. I'm not suggesting you do or don't. But I was walking the line and ended up having a conversation with an individual who talked about their circumstance. They have three children, and they are a producer at a major media outlet. And they were making, you know, what we consider a decent salary, you know, there used to be a decent salary, but you add in three kids, you add in $2,800 or so for a couple bedroom apartment, and suddenly your disposable income is gone. And so that rate of employed income is not rising anywhere near the pace of inflation. And so they found themselves underwater and had to do what they had to do to be able to get the food for their children.

That is a reflection of several broken systems. So that is the growing face of food banks that we're seeing across the country. There are some faces that have been here for some time, and those would be the faces of individuals who are on income security, primarily those who are on disability. And I think that it is antithetical to the values we espouse as a country that anybody who has to rely on disability is required to rely on the generosity of charity rather than being able to pay for the food that they have a right to. Yeah, you used the expression legislated into poverty earlier. I mean, how do you make sense of that in a wealthy nation like Canada?

How do you make sense of that in a wealthy nation like Canada? I think that it's a hidden abomination that we have in the country. That person hasn't chosen to not have the benefit of employment. Their circumstances are such that the medical community has made a determination that they are unable to have income derived from employment. And so in those circumstances, we have to make sure that we are there. They should have the fulfillment of some basic human rights, the right to housing, the right to food. And right now, those rights are being violated. A number of clients I spoke to said that food prices were part of the reason why they were at the food bank that day.

It's impossible not to notice how much more expensive groceries have been for a while now. There's a pasta sauce that I like, and normally I buy it when it's around $2.50. And I saw it for $6.99. And I mean, it's a good pass to sauce, but it's not $6.99. Inflation has been cooling down lately, but food inflation remains stubbornly high. And food banks feel this squeeze on both sides. As you've heard, it means more people are coming in need of their services. But also, food banks buy a lot of the food they distribute. We used to spend $1.5 million per year on purchasing food. We spend now up to $1.8

million per month on food. And I'm just going to repeat that, that 1.5 per year to 1.8 per month. And, and that is just to keep pace to make sure that every person who comes to the daily bread gets the right quantity and quality of food that they should otherwise have a right to and not have to rely on on a food bank for. And we know that the big grocery companies like Loblaws, like Metro, they're making enormous profits. Are they enormous donors, record donors? Well, we will, you know, I often say that Daily Bread is a great vehicle for any of the grocery store outlets to divest of their wealth. And we will make that opportunity available to them. And we, you know, certainly partner with each of the stores when it comes to food that is, you know, coming near due. And so we'll make sure

that that doesn't end up in the waste bin. But ultimately, we're looking at why is it that there is a dramatic delta between those who have and those who don't have? And how can we make sure that everybody's basic rights are attained. So maybe you could talk to me a little bit about the changes that you're advocating for right now. There's three big ones. So it's making sure there's affordable housing. Everybody has a right to decent affordable housing in this country, and that right is being violated. We want to make sure that everybody has a decent income, and particularly those on fixed incomes, disability, seniors, those are the types of incomes that we want to make sure are adequate for folks. And the third is tackling the preposterous reality that we currently have, that if you have full-time employment, or at least the hours of full-time employment, that you're unable to afford your basics. That shouldn't be the way.

We were a whole lot better off in many ways when you went off, you got a job, whether it was manufacturing or working for an advertising firm, and you worked there for a bunch of years, you had benefit, you got a gold watch after 50 years and a pension. Things were fairly decent in that system. That's completely out the window right now. We've got to compete globally, but at the same time, we need to make sure that people are protected from systems that result in them being unable to attain the basics. The Daily Bread Food Bank does a lot of research, gathers a lot of statistics, writes policy reports, and brings this advocacy directly to governments, hoping to get them to act on this information. But it hasn't really worked, to be really frank with you. We do have great meetings with elected officials, and I can tell you before any of those

meetings what ends up happening in them. I tell them the stats. I tell them what's happening in their riding or their ward. And I tell them, here are the policy interventions we need. And then they slap me on the back and they say, you're doing a good job. They give me some platitude and gratitude, and then they shuffle me off and they don't change the systems. So I do think that we need to raise our collective voice a little bit louder. We've talked about different ways to do that. Historically, the food banks, we've just put our head down and gone on and sorted food and got it out to the community. But you know, I've tossed the idea by the board of directors of maybe we should, you know, we have 200 food banks in the city of Toronto, maybe we should shut them down

and just distribute food at one location until government policy changes. And that location being City Hall or Queen's Park. And so if you need food, and we serve about 12,000 per day, the 12,000 people would be inconvenienced and they'd have to come to Queen's Park to pick up their food. And we would do that every single day, every single day until policy change happens. That's not like us. That's, you know, we're not that kind of an organization. But at some point, we have to say enough is enough. You know, when you started to tell me that idea about closing down all the locations and just opening one in Queens Park, I kind of wondered if you're about to say closing them all and showing

what would happen if we weren't here. And I wonder if you're about to say closing them all and showing what would happen if we weren't here. And I wonder if you feel taken advantage of almost as if like that you're always relied on to fill the gaps that legislation isn't filling. We've, well, we certainly had conversations, you know, different staff, you go for a beer, you think, wow, what about if we closed all the food banks down? And, and we just, yeah, we show them. And if we do that, we have to be very, we are putting people in the most precarious moments of their life in an even more difficult circumstance. And it could be viewed as using individuals as pawns. And that is not who we are. And so we will never do that. That goes against the values that we have. And one of the values

we have is a right to food. And we can't deny that right to food. And we can, I think, however, raise voices more loudly. Given the work he does, I wanted to know how Neil thinks that the insecurity that he knows people are feeling is impacting our society. Well, I think you can see that impact in a sense of heightened anxiety and stress. You can see that people on the street are a little bit short with one another, a little bit more so than before the pandemic. And I think, I don't have data to support this, but I think that some of that has to do with a lack of disposable income, a heightened sense of stress. From that, am I going to be able to make sure that the kids have the food that they need for packing their

lunch tomorrow type of stress. And when you have that, it manifests itself in other ways. You can see challenges when it comes to concerns around safety on the subway, as an example. How does this all boil down into a heightened sense of stress and concern and anxiety? That's not my field of study at all. But that's what I see on the street. And I'm hopeful that we'll take notice of that and make change. You know, you've talked a few times about what's coming. And I wonder if you could just expand on that a little bit before I let you go. We were in a difficult circumstance before the pandemic. 60,000 client visits per month was problematic for this city. And then we said we're going to build back better.

We didn't build back better. We had another doubling. So we went from 60 to 120 and now 270,000 client visits from primarily food inflation. That's the direct correlation that we've got there. primarily in food inflation. That's the direct correlation that we've got there. The greatest concern that I want to impart is unemployment is low. And if we get to a situation where combating inflation through higher interest rates results in a slowing down of the economy, and increased unemployment rates, we will be in a state that food banks have never been in before. Well, we're there now, but we will be, it's a crisis on a crisis on a crisis.

And we're just getting to that third one. Do you feel like what you're saying, which I know you try and say to a lot of people, do you feel like it's making an impact? I think that what we say to people, you know, in those moments where you're going for a, You know, in those moments where you're going for a, when I go for a walk with my dog, Charlie, I often think about the fact that I am shocking individuals about what the reality is. But if, but being completely honest, I'm very nervous that it is not having an impact, because if it did have an impact impact we would be able to deal with the shocks that we have so that's a little bit disheartening and so it causes you to reflect upon the strategies that you're deploying in terms of changing policy. I'm a very optimistic guy, and I've got hope, and I do want to make things better.

I am not radical in any stretch of the imagination. It's been frustrating. I feel like we have done everything we can to, heads down, feed the need, tell government about what's going on. And I feel like we aren't being listened to through substantive policy change. So what do you do at that point? Do you just say, all right, well, it is what it is. Or do you say, no, we've got to do something more. And so we're still on a path of being able to walk

alongside different elected officials, all three levels, all different parties. We'll continue to work with them. But I do want to make sure our voices, not only our voice, but the voice of clients who are having to make use of food banks is heard and acted on. Tonight, the Daily Bread Food Bank is hosting a Toronto mayoral debate. The conversation will focus on the candidates' plans to address the affordability crisis. That's all for today. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. I'm Imogen Burchard. Alex Panetta will be back hosting tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.