Good morning.
Thank you very much for the invitation to speak to the committee today. I'm glad I didn't come to talk about housing because I couldn't top that.
I'm here on behalf of Food Banks Canada, which is a national organization that unfortunately has member food banks serving residents in every riding represented in this room today.
We were very pleased by the minister's announcement that the poverty reduction strategy will be released in the fall of this year, as we recommended in our “HungerCount 2016” report. We recommended a quick rollout of the strategy because food bank use has been hovering at record levels for an unprecedented amount of time. More than 830,000 people have accessed a food bank each month since 2010. Our neighbours who are struggling with food insecurity cannot wait years for the federal government to act on this file. They need help now, today.
Many people think that food bank use is ever increasing but this is not true. Food bank use decreased for four consecutive years between 2004 and 2008. In late 2008 food bank use quickly began to expand as the recession set in, and it is now 26% higher than it was before the global economic downturn.
The need for food banks exists across the spectrum. More than one-third of individuals helped are children; more than 40% of households helped are families with children. While more than half the households accessing food banks are on social assistance or disability-related income supports, one in six tells us that employment is their primary source of income.
One of the most striking trends in the food bank network is the growth of single, unattached individuals walking through our doors and asking for help. Single people have grown from 30% of households helped by food banks in 2001 to 45% in 2016.
Without taking away from any other group at high risk of poverty and food insecurity, in my remaining time I'd like to focus on this population of so-called unattached individuals.
Depending on which measure you look at, between 9% and 13% of Canadians can be defined as having low incomes. Using the market basket measure, the figure is just over one in 10. If we look at single, working-age, unattached people the figure jumps to 33%. One in every three single adults in Canada lives in poverty. This group of single people living in poverty represents a population of 1.3 million people and this group lives in deep poverty with average incomes that are 50% below the poverty line. This means they're living on an average of about $10,000 per year. That bears repeating. There's a population of 1.3 million people in Canada who are living on an average of $10,000 per year. That doesn't even get you to the basic personal amount on your tax return.
This is a population that from a government program perspective has few places to which they can turn. A large number are receiving social assistance. If they're working—and many people cycle between welfare and work—they can access some assistance through the working income tax benefit, but the amounts are small. There's very little cash support and very little in-kind support, such as labour market training for this population, particularly outside the larger cities.
The advisory council on economic growth estimates that we could add $38 billion to Canada's GDP by increasing the labour market participation of low-income, low-skilled Canadians like the group I'm talking about. To accomplish this will require major changes to the relationship between governments and working-age singles living in poverty. It has implications for income supports, job training programs, indigenous policy, and chronic mental and physical health strategies.
Again, we don't want to take anything away from other populations at high risk of poverty in Canada. We strongly urge the federal government to make the large population of single, unattached people living in poverty a central focus of its poverty reduction strategy.
Thank you.