Ottawa, ON – After eight years of Justin Trudeau, food banks across Canada are being overwhelmed by Canadians who can no longer afford basic necessities. According to Feed Ontario’s annual Hunger Report, Ontario has seen “food bank use explode” as Canadians struggle to keep their heads above water amid skyrocketing inflation and interest rates.

Between April 1, 2022, and March 31, 2023, over 800,000 people in Ontario alone accessed a food bank. In total, there were 5.9 million visits to a food bank in this time period. Feed Ontario reported that “if the 800,822 people who visited Ontario’s food banks between April 1, 2022, and March 31, 2023, became their own municipality, it would be the third largest city in the province ahead of Mississauga.”

The number of people accessing a food bank in Ontario increased by 38 percent from the previous year, making this the single largest single-year increase ever recorded by Ontario’s food bank network. More than one in six visitors say they are employed, which is an 82 percent increase over 2016-17 and a 37 percent increase over the previous year. 

Across Canada, more people are visiting food banks than ever before. Last month, Food Banks Canada released a report saying that food banks were visited nearly two million times in March alone, an increase of 79 percent from 2019. In Toronto alone, there were 2.53 million food bank visits between April 2022 and March 2023, with one in ten people in Toronto having to rely on food banks, according to the Daily Bread Food Bank’s annual Who’s Hungry Report.

On top of this, Statistics Canada published a study into food insecurity that showed that the number of families who were food insecure increased by more than 12 percent from 2021 to 2022.

Life has become so expensive in Justin Trudeau’s Canada that Canadians have to choose between eating, heating and housing themselves. Only common sense Conservatives will turn that hurt into hope by axing Trudeau’s carbon tax and bringing home lower prices for all Canadians.