I'd like to thank you for inviting Food Banks Canada here to speak today. I want to commend you for taking the time to hear the views of so many stakeholders. I know you have a long day ahead of you.
I also want to commend you for your visit to Vestiaire St. Joseph Food Bank in Shediac. I believe Mr. Allison and Mr. Martin had the chance to attend. I know that Pat Sirois appreciated your interest. I hope you were able to get some insight into the work she's doing. As someone who lives in Toronto, I know that it's always good to be reminded that poverty and hunger is a problem in rural Canada as well. I forget it too easily.
To introduce my own organization, Food Banks Canada is the national association representing food banks across the country. Our 450 affiliate-member food banks serve 85% of those assisted by food banks. They distribute approximately 130 million pounds of food every year to those in need.
I'm sure some of you have read the headlines about the 20% jump in food bank use this year. The figure comes from the Food Banks Canada HungerCount survey. Although we don't have information from all food banks yet, this puts us on track to see the highest level of food bank use ever in Canada. It's 20% higher than the 700,000 separate individuals served by food banks every month in 2008. I also want to note that the number of people on welfare has jumped dramatically in the past six months.
With that as my introduction, I'd like to talk this morning about what this means for Canadian individuals and families and in a very limited way about what it means for the work you're doing in your current study.
What does it mean to be on welfare? What does it mean to need assistance from a food bank? Very concretely, it means that you've exhausted your other means of supporting yourself and your family. For welfare in particular, just to be eligible you need to have personal assets under a particular level—a very low level, actually.
Just last week, in The Globe and Mail, the Premier of British Columbia said:
Income assistance is clearly the last social safety net into which any worker wants to fall.... [T]hose who are forced to go on welfare risk entering a cycle of dependency....
What this means is that getting people back to self-sufficiency isn't going to happen overnight. Even in the best economic years of the last decade, food bank use didn't drop below 700,000 people per month.
With this in mind, as I was preparing for this morning, I was thinking about other government reports—on poverty reduction, for example, the recent Senate report on rural poverty—and I was thinking about how easily and quickly these kinds of reports are forgotten, to be frank.
So I'd like to quickly say that Food Banks Canada shares the policy preoccupations of many of those who have testified before this committee, including those this morning. We consistently call for a long-term commitment by governments at all levels to investments in affordable—and including, as Patricia said, supportive—housing; quality, accessible, affordable child care; adequate income support policies, among others. We've also called for the inclusion of these and other investments under the rubric of a federal poverty reduction strategy. We think these things are all essential, because the work we do is about people not having enough food, and not having enough food is about not having enough money, so essentially it comes down to people having enough money.
What I'd like to end with and what I want to stress stems from my thinking about, on the one hand, how long it will take for many families to get back on their feet, which will be measured in years for many, and on the other hand, the lifespan of a committee report or even of a given committee membership. I know that membership on this committee has changed since the last election, even though the study has been going on for a couple of sessions.
What I'd like to point to specifically is a simple idea, but I thought it would get ideas rolling: the option of creating a multisectoral body, composed of representatives from various federal government departments, but most crucially from people outside the government who have been and will continue to be essentially concerned with the reduction of hunger and poverty. Though I'm not an expert on this by any means, there are existing examples of this type of structure; for example, the Technical Advisory Committee on Tax Measures for People with Disabilities, which lasted from 2003 to 2005. Another example is the Food Security Reference Group within the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch of Health Canada.
The purpose of the body would be to advise on some or all of the committee's recommendations; to act as a locus for cooperation with provincial and municipal governments, the business community, and the non-profit sector; and to enable knowledge development and knowledge translation with respect to poverty reduction. Its existence will help ensure that what we feel is the extremely important work that this committee is doing will continue for as long as possible after the current study has ended.
Thank you.