Thank you very much.
My name is Neil Hetherington, and I have the awesome privilege of being the CEO of the Daily Bread Food Bank, Canada's largest food bank, based in Toronto, with a mission that everybody's right to food is one day realized.
I'm here to talk about three points, to let you know what we are seeing on the ground in the food bank sector, to provide you with some recommendations for consideration and to give you an invitation for you to ensure that everybody's right to food is realized.
On the first point, what we are seeing is unprecedented. There are 5.8 million Canadians who are food insecure. In Toronto, with the food banks that Daily Bread serves, we used to see about 65,000 clients per month. With the pandemic, that number rose to 120,000, and between January 2021 and today, we are now seeing 270,000 client visits per month. That's from 65,000 to 270,000 clients per month. If there's nothing else that you take from my testimony today, I hope you take that startling, horrific number away.
The fact is that we are seeing client growth at a remarkable rate. Previous to the pandemic, we saw about 400 or so new clients per month. That number during the pandemic rose to just under 2,000 per month, and last month we saw 12,400 new clients, people who had never used a food bank before, coming to the Daily Bread Food Bank for the first time.
You've heard testimony from economists and from food producers, suppliers and retailers, each of whom have provided their opinion as to what's driving the unprecedented food inflation that we all feel, so I won't speak to those complex factors. What I will speak to is the impact of food inflation that is being felt at the community level. We continue to see large proportions of clients who have fixed incomes coming to food banks, but what's new is that we are now seeing individuals who are working full time having to make use of food banks. In fact, that number has risen to about one-third of food bank clients having full-time employment. That number doubled over the past year, so if you have a job, that doesn't guarantee that you are not going to need a food bank.
We've started to look at the correlations between food bank usage and various economic indicators. We've looked at employment, and we've looked at market rents, and the direct correlation between food bank usage and inflation is the only real correlation we have seen that can account for this unprecedented growth. Make no mistake, food inflation at 11.6% and CPI north of 6% is having a marked direct, deep impact on food insecurity in Canada.
As important as it is to examine what is producing the rapid increase in food prices, we also need to ask what led us to this situation, a situation where the lack of an extra $30 to $50 per person per month is causing individuals to have to rely on food charity. We need to start with how we got here.
While the rate of poverty in Canada has declined over the past number of years, some two million Canadians remain in deep poverty. That means that their income falls below 75% of the official poverty line. What does that mean on the ground? In Toronto it means, if you are coming to a food bank, that on average you have $8.01 left over per day after paying for your rent and utilities. That's eight dollars, and one in five food bank users in Toronto have nothing. They have used all of their income on rent and utilities, and they have to rely completely on charity, family and friends to be able to make up the difference.
There is hope, and there's hope in these recommendations that I have before you. We're pleased to see the movement of Bill C-22, with the Canada disability benefit unanimously passed in the House and with the Senate right now. That will have a dramatic effect for so many Canadians.
We're grateful for a number of income programs, such as the Canada child benefit, old age security and the guaranteed income supplement, all of these being indexed to inflation. Those are positive, but we need to recognize that there's a significant gap that remains in our social safety net. The biggest gap is among working-age, single individuals, who represent close to half of food bank clients and half of those living in deep poverty in Canada. These individuals have very few income supports available to them beyond social assistance, and, to be clear, social assistance, at least in Ontario, is about one-third the level of the poverty line in the province.
If we want to protect Canadians from the impacts of inflation, then we need to address the financial precarity that is the reality of so many households. It's time to close the gap for single, individual adults in our social safety net, just as we've done for children and for seniors.
We recommend transforming the Canada workers benefit into a Canada working age supplement that has a lower eligibility threshold and a higher maximum benefit level, and indexing it and all future income supports to inflation.
We recognize that with rampant inflation the government will be cautious on spending and stimulating the economy, but we are proposing a measure to support those in deepest poverty.
The Daily Bread Food Bank and food banks across the country are already at a breaking point. We are bracing for another rise in food bank visits. In fact, this past April, Statistics Canada indicated that one in five Canadians said that they are going to have to rely on community, on food charities, on family and on friends to be able to get by.
Charities can't meet this need. We need all levels of government to come together to act to ensure that Canadians can afford to put food on their tables.
We said we were going to build back better—
