Why Does Canada Still Have Food Banks?

 

Posted 28 November 2012
 

Foods banks, which first appeared in Canada in the early 1980’s accompanied by the expectation that they would be temporary, have persisted and are now pervasive features of Canadian society. Food Banks Canada contends that there are nearly 900,000 Canadians who use food banks.  Why has their usage persisted and intensified?

It is a truism to state that people, working or nonworking, utilize food banks because those individuals have insufficient money to feed themselves. It is necessary, instead, to focus on the reasons why the users possess inadequate income, either from welfare, employment insurance or paid employment. Those who avail themselves of food books are overwhelmingly from the lower social classes.

Food is a fundamental human right and belongs to the category of human rights that are termed economic and social rights; this group also includes the rights to adequate levels of housing and income. Economic and social rights are legally enshrined within the 1966 United Nations Covenant on Economic and Social Rights (ICESCR), which Canada ratified in 1976. However, Canadian society has always attached a far greater importance to civil and political rights, such as the rights to freedom of speech and assembly, which are among those listed within the 1966 United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Moreover, there is insufficient awareness in Canada about the existence of economic and social rights. There remains in Canada, despite the ICESCR, a lingering but unfounded uncertainty over whether economic and social rights are justiciable rights, i.e., rights that the courts can interpret and which can be the subject of litigation. However, social and economic rights are indeed justiciable rights, and state action is implied if these rights are judged to be unrealized.  

The government’s abdication of its obligation to ensure that none of its citizens lacks food has resulted in efforts by the private sector to supply food to those who are unable to purchase enough food.  However, one of the private sector’s responses, food banks, needs to be recognized as an unsuccessful attempt to compensate for government inaction. Food banks are unable to cope with the demand for food, and the food they do provide frequently does not meet caloric or nutritional requirements. Food banks have not eradicated hunger in Canada.

The rise of food banks has been accompanied by their bureaucratization, and food banks employ salaried staff. Many other people donate food to food banks or serve with them as volunteers. There has been an increasing corporate involvement in the sponsorship of food banks. The donors and volunteers do not benefit financially from the existence of food banks but those people do derive non-monetary benefits; food banks provide them with an opportunity to show to themselves and others that they are caring and altruistic, and a chance to obtain the emotional well-being and satisfaction often associated with volunteer work. The paid staff and volunteers with food banks occasionally assert that they desire the termination of food banks, but considering the advantages they obtain from the existence of food banks, they may be ambivalent about ending the food banks. Furthermore, the staff and volunteers are usually certain of the righteousness of their actions and rarely seem to question whether food banks do more harm than good.

But how could food banks do harm? Food banks depoliticize the causes of hunger and undermine the legal fact that access to food is a human right. Food banks prompt the poor to express gratitude to those providing them with food and dilute the anger that the poor might have towards the government. The defenders of food banks claim that the immediate end of food banks would deprive the poor of an essential source of food, but neglect to add that hungry people do not passively accept their wretched circumstances. Food banks contribute to the pacification of the poor.

The food banks in Canada have transformed food security into a concern for the charities, but charity is a feeble substitute for justice. The food banks, often portrayed by their supporters as noble examples of mutual aid and solidarity, are often nevertheless, to those who use them, a degrading, humiliating and institutionalized form of begging. Consequently, many hungry Canadians refuse to resort to food banks.  

The unwillingness of Canadian municipal, provincial and federal governments to ensure that all Canadians have adequate access to food is partially due to the preoccupations of those governments with maintaining the rights and privileges of the middle class. Canada’s major political parties all focus on the middle class and have only a secondary interest in those in the lower classes. The main parties are not worried about the political repercussions of paying only minimal attention to the poor, and are not apprehensive about any threat of social unrest posed by those whose economic and social rights are violated. Consequently, none of the major parties is willing to advocate the necessary economic redistribution, which would affect their cherished middle and upper classes, that would obviate the need for food banks.

The increasing and laudable calls to close food banks face numerous systemic obstacles.