Food security is a huge issue for many of the people I work with, and now there's such a demand on the food banks in Toronto. It's overwhelming to hear people's stories. Many people, for example, know that they're allowed to go to the food bank only so many times a month, so they learn where else they can go to get accessible food for their families. Often things like formula for infants are not available in the food banks, so people will resort to other alternatives to feed their children. What we also see is that the parents are not getting adequate nutrition in order to feed their children. These are some of the stories that I certainly hear.
But the other thing I'm hearing a lot about is people who've gone off their medication because they can no longer afford to buy their medication and they don't fall into a category where they can access drug benefits. And believe me, we use every which way to get people medication. We use the Trillium program, the Ontario disability support program, compassionate drugs, and donations from pharmaceutical companies to help people access medication, but what we really need is a publicly funded, publicly controlled national pharmacare program that people can access and that is less about the profit for the pharmaceutical companies and more about people accessing drugs.
We had a situation recently with a client who had mental health issues but she had been stable for a long time and was working. Then she was laid off from her job, and that meant she couldn't afford the medication that she used for her mental health illness and she ended up being hospitalized because of that.