The Current - A grocery rebate can help, but by how much?

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

Food prices have climbed for years and for families on fixed incomes, every increase means another trade-off. As the federal government rolls out a new grocery rebate, we hear from a single mother of four on the Ontario Disability Support Program about what it could change for her family, and from food economist Michael von Massow on what the rebate can and can't do to ease food insecurity.

Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of the debaters, the show where Canada's top comedians answer Canada's top questions like, is Winnipeg the best place to raise a family? We're expecting to raise a little heck with this one, so don't miss it wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Walking through grocery store aisles nowadays can be a tough experience for many Canadians. According to the Bank of Canada, food prices have shot up by 22% in just over three years. To offer some relief last month, the federal government announced an increase to the GST rebate for low and modest income Canadians. Those who qualify will see their GST credit up 25% for the next five years with a higher one-time payment this year.

Betty Lou Souter is the CEO of Community Care in St. Catharines, Ontario. that organization helps those who need food, clothing, and shelter. The challenge has always been we need to get the politicians listening. This gives us a little bit of hope that it is on the radar. I just think this is going to give people the opportunity to have the ability to stretch their food dollars a little further and to live with dignity and purpose. Is it enough? It's never enough. But it is a start.

Well, Christina Kennedy is a single mom of four children. She's on a fixed income and lives here in Toronto. So Christina joins me in our Toronto studio. Good morning. Thanks for coming in. Good morning. Can you tell me a bit about your family and what these past few years have been like for you and you guys? I mean, it's been pretty difficult. There was a succession of events where my husband passed away.

I became ill and I've been a single disabled mother caring for children. That's tough. I mean, you're raising four kids while on the Ontario Disability Sport Program. How have you been able to get by? I mean, it's not easy. I try to stretch money out as best I can. I buy things in bulk. I cook meals, you know, at the beginning of the week for several days in a row just to stretch it out.

You know, I report for CBC News largely on business and economics. So I've been reporting on this a lot and watching sort of, you know, the CPI reports come in and all the sort of, you know, high-level ethereal side of this. What has it been like for you watching as food has trended way above? the sort of headline rate of inflation, month after month, year after year, watching those prices just continue to go up. I mean, I think it's a lot more than just me. One in four Canadians are having a hard time affording food right now. But for myself, it's definitely been more and more difficult as the years go on.

Like, I feel it going through the grocery aisles. What's it like for you when you show up at the grocery store and try to figure out, how am I going to make everything last this week, this month, whatever it may be? It's pretty frustrating, especially when there's no. continuity with the prices. It seems like there's no rhyme or reason when they go up. Do you mind if I ask just how much of your income goes towards groceries every month? So half of my income goes directly to rent. Then a quarter goes to bills. And what's left, I basically try to stretch that out and have it go to groceries. I wonder, what has it been like,

you think, for your kids watching you? You know, I think we all have those core memory experiences of like sitting in the grocery cart with my mom going through the grocery store. What do you think this impact has been on them? I mean, we try to shield our kids the best we can, right? But it is difficult because sometimes there's things that I just can't get them that they may want. Right. So let's get into the heart of this. The government has announced this GST rebate.

It existed. What they've done is boosted and increase it. Getting it through the House Commons last week, how much of a difference do you think this can make for you and for your family? I think it's great. I think any little bit helps, but I think there definitely needs to be more initiative to give more funding to food banks and make some more programs to help families long term, just because the inflation is just not sustainable on people's incomes. Right. If you could wave a magic wand, what would you like to see them do? I would really like to see food programs for families, maybe, and not just people on disability, people, any low-income person, whether you're not, you. you're working for jobs or you're on welfare, it shouldn't matter if you're struggling.

There should be grocery card programs to help families alleviate the stress of buying groceries. I mean, and at the end of the day, giving you a bit of extra money doesn't bring down the cost of groceries. It just helps you cover those increased costs. Do you get the sense that something more needs to be done to address the supply problem? Like at the end of the day, the problem is that groceries cost more, not that you don't have enough to sort of cover the bill, right? Absolutely. I think that a lot more needs to be done to address it, but I don't really know the answer, to be honest with you. It's a pretty complicated situation. You've assumed you got pretty good at trying to figure out how to scrimp and save, and I'm assuming cut coupons. Do you have advice for people out there that are sort of struggling to make ends meet? Definitely, you can go to your local food bank. You can try to buy things in bulk. I definitely do go to stores when they're,

sales. I go to several different grocery stores and I keep my eye on, you know, the different sales and promotions all the time. Do you, do you, I mean, there's a stigma to this. Absolutely. Is there a community that you've been able to find to talk to people to get advice like that about how to scrimp, how to save, how to, where to find deals, where to find support when you need it, or is, is it hard to have those conversations? It is very hard to have those conversations. I think there is a lot of stigma. And So it's an uncomfortable conversation that a lot of people really don't want to have. There's a lot of judgment from, you know, even family members at times.

And it can be very difficult to kind of broach that conversation with people. If you sort of ran into somebody at the grocery store who's like, hey, Christina, how do I get through this? What can I do? What is your advice? And is it just sort of pushed through those stigmas and ask for help, find help, find whatever you can? because at the end of the day, it's about getting food on the table? I think at the end of the day, you shouldn't turn down help. If you need help, ask for it.

None of us can do it alone. We all need help sometimes. And that's something personally I definitely went through. I didn't want to ask for help initially. But sometimes you have to ask for help. You can't do it alone. One of the things that's been raised, to me at least, about this program, is that it's a five-year program that, you know,

nobody really seems to know what's going to happen at the end of it. What worries you most about sort of where we're headed and what it's going to mean for low and moderate income Canadians? I definitely think that that's an issue because I don't really think the issue of inflation will be solved in five years. So I think there has to be way bigger plans put in place for both groceries and rent as well, because those are two things that coincide and a lot of people are struggling with right now. Just to wrap this up, what do you think it is that politicians fundamentally don't understand about this issue? The human aspect to it. It's not just numbers.

I think that it would be very helpful if they sat down with people struggling with these situations and got firsthand knowledge rather than just looking at data. There's a lot of things that are lost in data. And especially efficiencies in the system that would really help move things along. more effectively that you won't get otherwise. Well, listen, I really appreciate you having this conversation with us and helping us break through that stigma a little bit too. So thanks for this. Thank you.

Christina Kennedy is a single mom of four children. She lives in Toronto. It's been said that being neighbors with America is like sleeping with an elephant. One gets affected by every twitch and grunt. Well, these days, there's a lot more than twitches and grunts in dealing with the U.S. I'm Paul Hunter.

And I'm Katie Simpson. We're reporters here in Washington, and every Wednesday will bring you a smart conversation to help you make sense of how American politics are affecting Canada. Our new podcast is called Two Blocks from the White House. Find and follow now wherever you get your podcasts, including YouTube. To help us better understand why food inflation is so high in Canada, and if the government's new GST rebate can make a difference for families like Christina Kennedy's, I'm joined now by Vichelman Van Mavis.

He's a food economics professor at the University of Guelph. Mike, good morning. Nice to hear from you again. Good morning, Peter. Let's just sort of quickly do the legwork here. Who qualifies for this new rebate and how much more money does it really mean for people? Well, anyone who qualified for the GST rebate before, so it's income based based off of historical tax filings, will qualify for this. additional money. And depending on the composition of your household, it can be from 700 to

1,400 immediately and then another 700 a year for the next five years. So we have this report from the Bank of Canada last week that really dug deep onto where we've seen food inflation, what it's sort of meant for the economy and for households, 22% over three years. How do you, like, how does these numbers that we're talking about through the GST rebate, how do those match up with how much we've seen groceries actually increase over these last three years? Well, the designers of the program say they have decided the amount based on how much prices have gone up in the last five years. So in theory, this should retain the grocery purchasing power of the people who are eligible. Now, as your previous guest said,

rent has gone up, transportation has gone up. So this will not completely offset all of the inflation that they've faced, but this will offset the increase in grocery prices that they've seen over the last several years. We spoke with Alexei White. He's the director of the Systems Change at Maytree, a poverty reduction organization that focuses on, you know, income security and affordability. And he says the program's a good first step, but it doesn't go far enough. Let's take a listen to his concerns here.

The amount decreases after the first year. Our calculation is that single people who make up over 80% of those who receive the GSC benefit will only receive about $12 per month in additional support after that first year. And that is, I think most people would agree, just not enough money to make a significant dent in food insecurity, in poverty, and all of the other challenges that people are experiencing as a result of affordability and Canada. So, Mike, what do you make of what Alexei White has to say? Should the government have gone further here? Well, I mean, I'm never going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

So will this help? Undoubtedly, we heard your previous guests say yes. Could there have been more? Undoubtedly as well, right? Governments deal with how much money they have, how they have to prioritize. We know we're cutting in other places. So could we have raised the eligibility? There's always, there's always someone at the margin who could have used more.

Could we have done it more? sorry, could we have put more into the program? Yes, again. But we've done this. And I think, I think this is an important first step. I often lean on you in my reporting on business and economics to help Canadians understand what on earth is going on with food inflation. Can you just walk us through why we're seeing this, this continued increase in food prices right now? So, so I think, I think what's important to remember is that the high line number, the top line number that we get 5% in the last month, it relates to an average of all of the prices in a basket of things that Canadians demand.

And if we talk about it just as a single price increase, we seem to be saying that everything is going up that much and it's not true. So we have a few things that are driving the current increase in food prices. And the big one is beef. Beef is up because supply is down. We are at the lowest beef herd in Canada for almost 40 years in an environment where the population is grown. And so beef cows are the factory of the beef business,

and we're just not producing enough beef. That's going to start coming back, but that's driving those prices. We know that coffee is another one. and coffee and cocoa from chocolate are kind of the canaries in the coal mine of climate change and are very, very susceptible to small changes in temperature. So they're getting some heat stress where they are. Yield is going down, quality is going down. And so we've seen coffee prices.

Again, economics 101, supply goes down, prices go up. We saw also with coffee last year some impacts of U.S. tariffs and our counter tariffs, but that should have gone away. And so we can go down the list of individual things and say, this is why prices have gone up. We have some short coffee and beef are longer term. Last November, we saw a short term, really big price hike in lettuce. In November, 90% of our lettuce comes from Southern California. In fact, 90% of the lettuce from across North America comes from Southern California.

they've had some virus, disease problems, and some quality and yield issues. And again, supply goes down, quantity, so price goes up. And that's gotten better because production moves around. But we have all of these, you know, we had the, we had extreme weather a couple of years ago in the, in Europe that caused olive oil prices to go up. We had the war in Ukraine. We have an exchange rate that goes up and down. So there is this multifactorial reason. that prices are going up.

I think people get frustrated, though, because they hear, you know, Yahoo's like me go on the radio and say, oh, well, CPI, inflation has come down to 2.4%. And they say, not for me. You know, you talk to Christina who's spending half her money on rent and trying to scrimp and save to cover her grocery bills. It is true, though, that overall the headline rate of inflation fell to, what, 2.4%. But the opposite has been happening with food. It's been accelerating through that time.

And we have, on the one hand, conservatives saying, you know, this is all. all about the industrial carbon tax. You have the NDP pointing at, you know, the concentration in the grocers that own all the grocery stores. Do you have a sense of what's truly happening here? Well, I think what's truly happening is what I was just saying. I think there's no evidence that grocers are significantly contributing to food price inflation, notwithstanding what people are saying.

There's no evidence that the industrial carbon tax, we used to be hearing about the consumer carbon tax, it's gone. We didn't see an impact on prices. Now it's the industrial carbon tax. The truth is it's all of these factors and we're trying to find a way to make it easy. Food is much more susceptible to other factors like climate change because it's a biological process. You know, if we have extreme weather, it doesn't necessarily affect the production of computers or cell phones, but it can very easily affect the production of food, of lettuce, of coffee, of beef. And so we've got this complex situation with multi-factors happening. And I think that, frankly, politicians and pundits are doing us a disservice if they're pointing

at one thing, because unfortunately, it isn't easy and it isn't just one thing. I was talking to Christina there about the GST-Rabate. doesn't help with the cost of groceries. It just helps her cover that extra bill. Is there something more long-term that needs to get done here? Well, I think if you look at where this is targeted and what the root causes of food insecurity are in this country, food insecurity isn't about food availability. There are sort of pockets where there aren't as many grocery stores or not as much options, but generally this is about income. And there are two ways that you can deal with affordability. One is on the price side, which is much more difficult to control, and the other is on the

income side. So this is a temporary program. But the people who are struggling the most are the people at the bottom end of the income scale. We haven't seen support payments for people on disability go up. We have not seen minimum wages go up. So while others, particularly in the public sector, have seen that gap closed a little bit by income policy, the people at the bottom have not. All right. We're going to have to leave it there, Mike, but thanks for this. Appreciate your insight. Thanks for having me.

Have a great day. Michael Vaughan, Massau is a food economics professor at the University of Guelph. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca. slash podcasts.