Good afternoon.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to present before you today.
It's an auspicious time to be here, given that today is the second day of Hunger Awareness Week. I'd like to take a moment to thank the members here today who will be fasting tomorrow to bring awareness to the issue of hunger in our country. Thank you very much.
In my presentation I'd like to give you some information on Food Banks Canada and on the current state of food bank use in the country. Then I'll review our proposal to the committee.
Food Banks Canada is the national organization representing and supporting food banks across the country. Our dual mission is to help food banks meet the short-term need for food assistance and also to find policy solutions to reduce the need for food banks in Canada.
There are more than 800 food banks working in partnership with over 2,900 food programs in every province and territory. These organizations in any given month provide groceries to nearly 900,000 people. They also serve more than three million meals per month. In 2011, food bank use was 26% higher than it was before the recession.
Food banks have been helping more than 700,000 people per month for the better part of the past decade. Of those helped, 38% are children and youth, and 50% of households receiving food are families with children. While half of households receiving food are on social assistance, one in five receives the majority of its income from employment, and 7% of those helped are seniors.
Though Canadians have been incredibly generous in their support of food banks since the economic downturn, the network has struggled to meet the need for their services. In March of last year, 35% of food banks actually ran out of food, and more than half gave less to each household than they had in the past in order to stretch their resources.
As I said, individual Canadians, service clubs and other groups, small businesses, and large corporations are generous supporters of food banks. However, as generous as these donors are, it's not enough to meet the need. We're very happy to see this committee focusing on incentives to charitable giving. We're positively disposed to several of the policy changes being considered by the committee, particularly the stretch tax credit put forward by Imagine Canada.
What I'd like to focus on in the rest of my time is our written brief, which outlines a plan for a charitable food tax credit that we believe will result in a significant influx of food to food banks. Specifically, the brief recommends changes to the Income Tax Act that will create an incentive for food manufacturers to donate from their inventory. The charitable food tax credit, very simply, would result in a reduction of the amount of federal tax owed by companies that donate food to food banks.
We're a member-driven organization, and this is a proposal that originated from our member food banks. You can see from our brief that several of our current manufacturing donors support the proposal. We've worked with the polling firm Angus Reid to gauge support for the idea and have found that 83% of Canadians support tax incentives for manufacturers that donate food to food banks.
Finally, we've seen similar policies succeed in increasing donations of food at the federal and state levels in the United States. This leads us to believe that our proposal, whose cost to the federal government we estimate as a maximum of $15 million per year, will lead to a substantial rise in the amount of food available through food banks to the Canadians who so desperately need it.
Thank you.