Opinion: Our failed immigration policy has hit food banks hard
Foreign students are a big part of food banks' new users. Ottawa needs to make sure people coming here to study bring enough money for food
Published Dec 17, 2024 • Last updated 20 hours ago • 3 minute read
The Daily Bread and North York Harvest food banks recently released their annual Who’s Hungry report. It’s based on a central database used by food banks across Toronto, along with nearly 1400 survey responses collected at 67 sites across the GTA. The data show that in the past year Toronto’s food banks received a record-breaking 3.49 million client-visits this year, nearly a million more than last year.
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What is most surprising about this year’s report, however, is how much new food bank use was attributed to a single group: newcomers. Four in five new food bank clients (about 125,000 people) had only arrived in Canada in the last five years. In addition, the report found that 31 per cent of survey respondents were students — more than half of them international students who visited a food bank for the first time last year.
Many factors cause food insecurity: housing costs, grocery prices, the state of labour markets and the level of social assistance. But changes the federal government made to the country’s immigration system — and largely walked back late this year — are also part of the problem. “We made some mistakes,” the prime minister conceded in a recent video.
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For starters, over the last three years the country experienced a wave of population growth driven almost entirely by immigration. It began in 2021, when Canada welcomed more than 400,000 permanent residents, up 16 per cent from 2019 and an all-time high, breaking the record set in 1913.
Last year we welcomed 471,808 permanent residents. And over the last two years the number of temporary residents — temporary foreign workers and international students — grew even more quickly, by 1.2 million.
Immigration, especially economic immigration, is vitally important for countries like ours whose population is aging. And temporary foreign workers can fill critical gaps in the labour force. Moreover, at a time when many universities find themselves with multi-million dollar deficits, international students pay more in tuition than citizens and permanent residents, thus helping subsidize their education.
But the federal government is the border’s gatekeeper. It needs to ensure that each newcomer has the funds needed to secure food. When more than 100,000 newcomers start using food banks in Toronto alone, something at the federal level is broken.
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In fact, many things about the current immigration system are broken. For one thing: the government’s issuing of study permits to students at “diploma-mill” colleges, which for many people are a means of skirting the country’s formal immigration rules. Then there is the backlog of 260,142 refugee claims as of October 2024. Anyone already in Canada can submit a claim — even one likely to be rejected — and remain in the country for years until it is adjudicated. That number was just 9,999 when the Liberals took power.
“We didn’t get the balance quite right,” the prime minister admitted last month in announcing the government would slash immigration targets to flatten population growth. To its credit, Ottawa has taken steps to ease food insecurity among newcomers. For instance, it doubled the amount of money international students must prove they have before they’re issued a study permit. But why, Canadians are left to wonder, did it take tens of thousands of food-insecure students for our government to wake up to the need for this change? Justin Ling, who had a rare interview with Justin Trudeau earlier this year, concluded “the government doesn’t seem to wise up to an emergency until things get really dire.”
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“Dire” is a good description of what’s currently going on in the country’s food banks.
Jonah Prousky is a freelance writer and management consultant.
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