There have been nearly a million more visits to Toronto food banks this year compared to last year, continuing a trend of increasing demand seen since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Food banks Daily Bread and North York Harvest released their annual “Who’s Hungry” report Tuesday.

The report reveals that there were 3.5 million customer visits to member food banks between April 2023 and March 2024, which is the highest in the Daily Bread Food Bank’s 41-year history.

Visits to food banks, as measured by the report, increased by nearly a million from the previous year and are now up 273 percent since before the pandemic.

“It is inconceivable that the number of client visits to food banks is now higher than that of the entire population of the city of Toronto,” said Neil Hetherington, CEO of the Daily Bread Food Bank, in a press release accompanying the data.

The report suggests that more than one in ten city residents now rely on food banks for food, following a 36 per cent increase in unique clients over the past year.

This equates to approximately 155,000 new food bank clients since April 2023, more than four times pre-pandemic levels.

“These are our neighbors, classmates, co-workers, friends and family who thought this would never happen to me, and it’s happening to them,” Hetherington said during a news conference Tuesday morning at Daily Bread’s headquarters in Etobicoke.

Hetherington said that during the pandemic, Daily Bread predicted that demand from food banks would increase as the cost of food and rent rose and wages and welfare failed to keep up. Funds were set aside to meet the expected increase in need, but he said the money was now almost gone. In 2020, Daily Bread spent $1.5 million on food. This year, that figure reached $29 million.

Heatherington said the answer is not to worry about the report’s findings and the dire situation they represent, but rather to “organize for our neighbors.”

“Let’s not despair about the numbers. Let’s use them as inspiration to fuel policy change,” he said. “Our governments cannot continue to stand idly by while our neighbors fall deeper and deeper into poverty due to astronomical housing and food costs, years of inflation, stagnant wages and Insufficient income support. Let the government step in and introduce laws that will reduce precarious employment and provide stable, decent incomes to Canadians who need it. It’s not just numbers. These are real people in our community. …. We want to ensure that everyone has the right to food and housing.

The report reveals that Toronto food bank clients have a median monthly income of $1,265, which is well below the poverty line of $2,397 in monthly income for a single person.

Sarah Watson, director of community engagement at the North York Harvest Food Bank, said that while the ethos of food banks is “helping neighbors and caring for the community,” the unprecedented level of usage observed in Toronto is a “clear sign of systems failure.

“Our support systems and social safety net may have frayed to the point where no one falls through the cracks. The ground is collapsing,” she said.

“Newcomers, people with disabilities, people without housing, people working three jobs due to lack of worker protections, the people we will see will always be the ones we have supported in our society, the ones facing the greater number of obstacles. People are coming to us in such numbers, in record numbers, because the system has failed them, because policymakers have failed them, because we as a society have failed them.

Watson said food banks are not the solution to society’s failures.

“We’ve been doing this for decades, and it’s never been this bad, and we’re all so tired. I’m so tired. But more than that, I’m angry, because it doesn’t have to be this way,” she said.

“It’s not about building a better food bank. People need affordable housing. People need access to decent work that pays them a living wage, and they need welfare rates that don’t leave them in legislative poverty. Until we see these things, the situation will not change. We cannot keep asking the same question and expect a different answer. »

She said the people who have the power to solve this long-standing and growing problem are asking food banks to do “impossible things” to combat food insecurity.

“Do we agree with the response to this crisis that we have seen so far? Because I’ll tell you, it’s not enough, and in reality, we are beyond the crisis. So we are sounding the alarm today and we are getting used to the noise, because we will not stop doing it until we see a commitment to real change, to real solutions,” he said. -she declared.

Specifically, the report’s authors want the Canada Disability Benefit amount, eligibility criteria and regulations to be strengthened to bring people with disabilities above the poverty line and ensure that all those who need of this service can access it without recovery.

They also want at least a quarter of the 1.5 million housing units expected to be built in Ontario by 2031 to be permanently affordable or supportive, with a minimum of 50,000 units in Toronto.

Finally, at the municipal level, they are calling for a consistent definition of affordability where rent does not exceed 30 percent of the tenant’s income and for Toronto to urgently launch its Poverty Reduction Strategy Action Plan and implement updates its food charter with concrete actions. , indicators and funding to prevent food insecurity and promote resilience among Toronto’s community food programs.