In this presentation, I will provide an overview of recent inflation in the costs of food and other goods and services and briefly describe the winners and losers through this period, recognizing that all Canadians have not been equally impacted by the recent trends. Yet, the dramatic rise in the prevalence and severity of household food insecurity and increased number of people seeking charitable food assistance provide tangible evidence that a large swath of our population cannot afford the food they need. This is a serious problem given the well-documented nutrition and health implications of household food insecurity in this country. Compared to food-secure Canadians, those in food-insecure households have poorer quality diets and are more likely to have been diagnosed with or to develop numerous chronic and infectious diseases. They are less able to manage their health problems and therefore more likely to require health care. They have increased probability of premature mortality from all causes except cancers. The existing evidence indicates that household food insecurity is not reduced by food charity or other food-based interventions, explaining why this problem has festered for so long. Rather, it is reduced by policy interventions that increase the adequacy and stability of household incomes. Despite Canada's extensive investments in food insecurity monitoring and research, we still have no concerted strategy at any level of government to address this problem. The federal government has set no targets for food insecurity reduction. Among the provinces and territories, only PEI has established goals
Valerie Tarasuk is a Professor Emerita in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto. Her research has extended to Canadian food policy and population-level dietary assessment, but her primary scholarly contributions have been in the area of household food insecurity. She has led several tri-council research grants to elucidate the scope, nature, and health implications of this problem in Canada, assess the effectiveness of community responses, and determine how public policies and programs impact food insecurity prevalence and severity. In 2011, she led the establishment of PROOF, an interdisciplinary research program launched with funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to identify effective policy approaches to reduce household food insecurity in Canada. Her contributions have been recognized with the Earle Willard McHenry Award for Distinguished Service in Nutrition (2017), Fellow Distinctions from the Canadian Nutrition Society (2021) and American Society of Nutrition (2024), honorary doctorates from Queen’s University (2018) and the University of Guelph (2023), and her appointment to the Order of Canada (2025).