How a province can help put food on tables

There are some things a province can do to make a significant impact on food insecurity and other things it shouldn't worry too much about, according to a new study published in the journal Preventive Medicine.

The study looked at Statistics Canada data from 2005 to 2018 on food insecurity, and related that to economic factors and changes in provincial policies across the country, focusing on four factors in particular.

• Minimum wage.
• Welfare income.
• Income tax rates for low-income households.
• Food and energy prices.

Valerie Tarasuk, a professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto, was one of the authors of the study. She told Island Morning host Laura Chapin the provincial policies that made the biggest impact were ones that changed the amount of money low-income households had.

For example, a $1 increase in minimum wage was associated with a five per cent lower risk of food insecurity.

"It's substantial. For me, that's probably one of the most important findings in this paper," said Tarasuk.

"It looks like from our analysis that it's a very important lever for the provinces in terms of protecting low income households from food insecurity."

Increasing welfare amounts by $1,000 a year had a similar impact on lowering risk, the study found.

Conversely, a one percentage point increase in the income tax rate for low-income households was connected to a nine per cent increase in food insecurity.

Prince Edward Island recently raised the basic income tax amount exception and raised the bar for the lowest income tax bracket. Tarasuk expects those changes will make a difference.

"The basic allowance obviously means those people on welfare will have more money to spend on basic needs. And that's exactly what we need to see happen in order to get the rates of food insecurity down," she said.

What Tarasuk and her co-authors did not find is a relationship between food insecurity and changes in the price of food and energy.

"Often those small changes make big headlines. At the end of the day, they don't really amount to a hill of beans in terms of people's food insecurity rates," she said.

"What's more important is how much money they've got in their purse when they go through the door of that grocery store, rather than what the price of individual products is on the shelves."

Over the course of a year and all the things low-income households have to spend on — housing, heating, clothing, transportation, as well as food — the extra costs associated with rising prices are not nearly as significant as the impact of increasing incomes even modestly, she said.

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