While the Consumer Price Index just hit 5.1% for the first time in 30 years, and income assistance programs put in place during the pandemic have been signaled to end, the calculation is simple: many Quebec households find themselves with a bare fridge that costs even more to fill at the gates of winter.
This inflation suggests its logical consequence, namely an increase in the demands that will be made on community food aid organizations. The economic wheel that turns is not always happy for the financially weakened population.
While many thought that the worst of the pandemic and its impacts was behind us, Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytical Sciences Research Laboratory at Dalhousie University, believes rather that the worst is BEFORE us, with prices that will continue. to increase until the middle of winter.
For some time now, the Regroupement Partage has observed a direct link between the increase in the price of the basket of groceries and the increase in requests for assistance. And who says additional demand means additional pressure on the support network: 20% of community workers indicated that they were experiencing professional burnout even before the pandemic! This situation has inevitably worsened considerably in recent months. In some Montreal neighborhoods, requests have exploded by up to 300%1 at the worst of the pandemic. Community food aid agencies have responded to the crisis with creativity and resilience, but with the labor shortage and staffing shortages, teams on the ground are more than ever on the brink of breath.
Added to this is the limited financial capacity of organizations whose fundraising has been either postponed or less prolific than in the past, to help more, thus making the risk of a disruption of services very present.
On the other hand, we welcome the gesture of the Legault government and its Minister of Finance, Eric Girard, to want to lighten the burden on households and low-wage earners by offering tax credits and financial relief.
This one-off measure is certainly welcome, but it is the tree that hides the forest. The forest of a failing system, hanging by a thread, and failing to help enough.
Do we want to wait, can we afford to wait for this faltering support system to fall completely?
When the front-line aid offered to Quebecers in distress crumbles, the meshes of our social net will widen dangerously.
The Regroupement Partage and its partner community organizations present in 21 Montreal neighborhoods are worried that they will not be able to:
- help parents like Danny, a father of seven, including a severely disabled teenager, who is slow to return to work due to COVID-19;
- continue to support single-parent mothers like Marie-Lucie, recently separated from her spouse, who, following her loss of employment, returned to school, while taking full-time care of her three children aged 6, 8 and 9 years old?
- maintain the service for the elderly whose retirement income is not sufficient to meet basic needs, as is the case for Claude and his spouse and so many others.
The Regroupement Partage has been working in food security for more than 20 years, more than 20 years that we understand that the financial precariousness of individuals leads to many other social issues, more than 20 years that we have seen its impacts on health, delinquency, distress, neglect, impacts that cost our society billions of dollars.
More than 20 years that various actions and programs in the fight against poverty have been deployed. Over 20 years that we continue to see distress and poverty.
We dream of becoming useless, that our action is no longer required, that poverty is a thing of the past. Unfortunately, our observation is quite different.
Hunger and food insecurity are still a daily challenge for thousands of our fellow citizens. In 2021, more than 600,000 Quebecers turned to food banks every month. 1
One in three Quebecers experiences financial difficulties in at least one of the basic needs – which means, in concrete terms, that they must choose, for example, between buying food and paying their rent.
After more than 20 years of sustained one-off actions, it is time to take a step back, to look at the forest all together, representatives of different circles, in order to fight against poverty a real social priority.