By Roman Zakaluzny
Robin Thomas has a beef with some of Ottawa’s food banks. Well, not so much a beef as a just a little bone to pick.
“They’re too strict!” says Thomas (not her real name), a property manager for three low-income apartment buildings in Centretown. “They are always calling me to verify that a client lives at the address they say they are. If they’re not living there, they don’t qualify for food.”
Thomas acknowledges that the food banks, which have only a limited amount of food to go around, should be strict about who they give food to.
But she also says that once people resort to visiting a food bank, they’re probably getting desperate.
And by that point, she says, it’s best not to give recipients a hard time.
“The province requires the clients to live on as little as $520 a month,” she explains. With rent in subsidized housing approaching $400, money reserved for food is usually the first expendable budget item, she says. “They starve if the food banks can’t provide.”
In March 2001, the City of Ottawa published a detailed report on poverty and hunger in the Ottawa-Carleton region. The findings seemed high then, but many front-line hunger workers say that things have gotten even worse.
The March study found that about 60,000 Ottawans received social assistance through Ontario Works.
“In the last eight months alone, (we’ve had) 50 additional requests per month. It’s definitely going up,” says Pat Hunt, co-ordinator at the Parkdale Food Centre for the last 11 years. “The high-tech burnout has had an indirect bearing on this. As well, there have been a few more people moving into the area.”
According to Hunt, the new visits are from a large cross section of Ottawa society – recent immigrants, the working poor, the recently laid-off and the homeless.
“We suspect that the amount of people in Ottawa suffering from some sort of food insecurity is significant,” says Wheatley, a public health nutritionist with the city.
Food insecurity when significant stress is felt when dealing with the attainment of food, whether it be because it is unaffordable, or culturally unacceptable.
The city is surveying residents right now to find out how many don’t have enough to eat. Meanwhile, city workers rely on numbers from 1998, which found that 10 per cent of residents — or 80,000 people — suffer food shortages periodically.
The Mission, which serves meals to homeless and terminally ill men and women, typically serves 700 meals a day. That number has gone up by 100 since a year ago, according to Mission worker Janet St. Jean.
“We expect to serve about 20,000 meals during the Thanksgiving week alone,” says St. Jean.
Even Thomas, who is employed, has visited the food bank four times this year to help feed her three kids. She sees the higher reliance on food banks as being directly related to the housing situation in Ottawa.
“With rent so high, money to pay for it has to come from food budgets,” she says. “Here we are, the capital of Canada, with 0.1 per cent vacancy. It’s a shame. It’s a crime.”