Ottawa, ON — Today, the City of Toronto declared a “food insecurity emergency” after the NDP-Liberal Government’s carbon tax and inflationary spending drove up the cost of everything.
This follows a report from the Daily Bread Food Bank, which revealed that more than one in ten Torontonians are forced to rely on food banks with almost one in four food bank clients being children under 18 years old. Last year, Toronto recorded 3.49 million visits to food banks between April 1, 2023, and March 31, 2024, which is an increase of 1 million over the year prior and a dramatic 273 percent increase since before the pandemic.
Toronto is not the first city to declare that food insecurity is an emergency. Earlier this month, the Kingston City Council declared that food insecurity had become an emergency. Mississauga also declared an emergency in November 2024.
The soaring price of food is not just limited to our largest cities. Across Ontario, food banks handled 7.7 million visits from over one million residents in 2023 to 2024. And in Canada as a whole, there were 2,059,636 visits to a food bank in March 2024 alone – the highest number in Canadian history.
After nine years of the NDP-Liberal carbon tax, millions of Canadians are going hungry. This year, families will have to spend $800 more on food than they did last year, pushing more people to food banks as they can’t afford their groceries.
The last thing Canadians need is even more expensive grocery bills. Yet on April 1, the NDP-Liberal Government will again hike the carbon tax, as part of their plan to quadruple the carbon tax to 61 cents per litre by 2030. Only Common Sense Conservatives can be trusted to axe the tax to bring home lower prices for Canadians.