Certainly. That data comes from research that FoodShare conducted in collaboration with PROOF, a research initiative at the University of Toronto that's focused on policy interventions for food insecurity.
This research challenged the mainstream understanding of the causes of food insecurity in this country. Previously, when groups looked at aggregate data on food insecurity in Canada it revealed that things like household composition, immigration status and access to an income floor for seniors all had impacts on food insecurity. This research looked at a specific community, the Black community, to better understand what was happening to Black Canadians when it came to access to food.
We found that Black Canadians were three and a half times more likely to be food insecure. We found that 36% of Black children grew up in food insecure households compared with 12% of white children, and also that the percentage of Black homeowners who are food insecure is just about equal to the percentage of white renters in Canada who are food insecure.
Ultimately what we found is that whether or not a Black household was new to Canada or here for generations or headed by one parent or two, the prevalence of food insecurity remained high. In essence, we found that the typical factors that helped protect against food insecurity that we had commonly understood for a long time, like ownership of a home or access to a pension, did not protect Black families in the same way that they do white families.