With
the ongoing consultation on a pan-Canadian School Food Policy, PROOF has sent an open letter to Minister Gould and Minister Bibeau about concerns
that the federal government’s perpetuation of the false claim that a national school food policy will reduce food insecurity will silence important discussions about how the federal and provincial/territorial/indigenous governments can reduce food insecurity
among families with children.
We
welcome all to add their names to this open letter by filling the form at: https://proof.utoronto.ca/resource/open-letter-on-school-food-policy-consultation/ and/or
to reference this letter in your own consultation submission. Join us in calling for clarity, accountability, and leadership on addressing household food insecurity and advancing a pan-Canadian school food policy.
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Open
Letter: Stop headlining the pan-Canadian school food policy as a way to reduce food insecurity among children
December 9, 2022
Dear Minister Gould and Minister Bibeau,
We are writing to express our deep disappointment with the Government of Canada’s indiscriminate linking of claims about food insecurity reduction
with the pan-Canadian school food policy consultation.
Since the inclusion of a pan-Canadian school food policy in the
2022 budget, the federal government has repeatedly linked this policy to the problem of household food insecurity in Canada. The National
Advisory Council on Poverty reinforced this message in their 2022 report on the progress of poverty reduction, recommending a school food policy as a way to “address
food insecurity among children”. Most recently, materials for the public consultation, from the press releases to
the discussion
paper and consultation
questions, have framed this policy as a way to “reduce food insecurity and hunger”, despite providing no evidence to support the assertion.
Indeed, there is no evidence to support this claim.
Advocates for a pan-Canadian school food policy have long recognized that universal, high-quality, and nutritious school food that fits community
priorities is important in its own right, but that such programming cannot substitute for dedicated action on income adequacy. Your government’s conflation of school food policy with food insecurity reduction detracts from school food advocates’ years of hard
work to build the case for a school food policy that addresses the diverse educational and nutritional needs of children.
Household food insecurity is a profound policy problem in Canada that by
our research,
whose data are used in your documents, affected 15.6% of two-parent families and 38.1% of female lone-parent families in 2021. Over 1.4
million children were living in food-insecure families last year, and this number can only have risen with the recent food price inflation.
This problem of inadequate access to food due to financial constraints
denotes
a broader experience of financial hardship and material deprivation, with
serious
implications for health. School meals cannot resolve food insecurity for the same reason other food provision initiatives cannot;
they do not deal with the impoverished financial circumstances captured by these statistics. Providing meals in school is no replacement for ensuring that families have enough money to make ends meet.
As Canada’s leading research group on food insecurity, whose data are used in your documents, we are very familiar with the research on school
food programs and food insecurity. In fact, we have authored some of the key Canadian studies on the topic. From our careful reading of the published, peer-reviewed literature on the relationship between food insecurity and participation in school food programs
in high-income countries, your contention that a national school food policy will reduce food insecurity is completely unjustifiable. There is, however, plenty
of evidence
to show that the way to reduce food insecurity among families with children is to improve the incomes of those who are most vulnerable,
namely low-income families.
The development of a pan-Canadian school food policy in respectful partnership between the Government of Canada, provincial/territorial governments,
and Indigenous partners has long been called for as a national responsibility. The Government of Canada’s leadership is critical in moving towards a future in which the current complex and resource-limited patchwork of school food programs meets children’s
needs equitably, from coast to coast to coast. We are concerned that the federal government’s perpetuation of the false claim that a national school food policy will reduce food insecurity will silence important discussions about how the federal and provincial/territorial/indigenous
governments can reduce food insecurity among families with children.
We call for the development of a pan-Canadian school food policy to move forward without unsubstantiated claims that it will address the very serious
problem of food insecurity among families with children in Canada. We also recommend that the federal government implement
strategic improvements to the
Canada
Child Benefit, to reduce the extraordinary vulnerability of low-income and single-parent families to food
insecurity. Finally, we urge the federal government to begin seriously engaging in policy discussions around household food insecurity
that focus on addressing the root cause — inadequate incomes.
The consequences for the health of Canadians and our healthcare system
are too great to ignore.
Sincerely,
Valerie Tarasuk, PhD, DSc
hc
Principal and founding investigator of PROOF
Professor, University of Toronto
Lynn McIntyre, C.M., MD, MHSc, FRCPC, FCAHS
Founding investigator of PROOF
Professor Emerita, University of Calgary
Catherine L. Mah, MD, FRCPC, PhD
Founding investigator of PROOF
Canada Research Chair in Promoting Healthy Populations, Associate Professor, Dalhousie University
Herb Emery, PhD
Founding investigator of PROOF
Vaughan Chair in Regional Economics, Professor, University of New Brunswick
Daniel Dutton, PhD
PROOF investigator
Assistant Professor, Dalhousie University