Hunger is an increasing problem in Alberta. New data from the Breakfast Club of Canada shows that a record forty per cent of Albertan children live in households where they don’t have steady access to nutritious food. That’s the highest percentage of any province in Canada, and an increase of thirty per cent since last year.
The report pins the problem on rising living costs, an increase in food bank usage, and tariff-related food price increases.
The province needs to address this problem. Currently parents unable to provide their children with three meals a day are getting no or little support from outside sources. As a result, children are going hungry.
The National School Food Program
Alberta Food Matters (AFM) has been advocating for several years to change how schools deal with students’ nutrition needs, by both increasing the amount of food making it into schools and by increasing its health content.
While AFM Chair Wanda Laurin acknowledged that more needed to be done, the organization welcomed with open arms the arrival of Canada’s National School Food Program earlier this year. The program invests $1 billion over five years to expand existing food programs and ensure children are being fed.
Alberta will receive $42 million of this funding over the next three years. This will supplement the $20 million the Alberta government currently allocates annually to schools across the province. Through this funding, the Breakfast Club program serves 37,000 children in 290 schools.
The money in Alberta’s existing school food program was to be used only on food, meaning that schools relied on volunteers to serve the meal, noted Laurin in an interview with TheRockies.Life. “No school food program should be run on volunteers. It’s impossible,” she said, explaining that volunteers are by nature unreliable.
“I’ve seen it happen where they’re with you for a couple years and then they drop off, their kid moves on to another school or they leave, and the whole program just falls apart,” she said.
Money from the federal program can be used for staffing and infrastructure as well as food.
$1 Billion not enough, Poilievre says
Not all federal parties supported the National School Food Program. Prior to its adoption, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives voted against it as they claimed it did not do enough to address the affordability issues at the root of the matter.
While the vote was met with wide criticism, Laurin sees an opportunity in their lack of support.
“Of course, it’s not enough. A billion dollars is not sufficient. Because right now the spending per kid across the country is dismal,” she said.
“This is actually a good way for him to talk about it because it means that we’ve got a foot in the door with the conservatives even though they won’t put it in their platform.”
Their rejection of the program gives advocates a way to ask what changes would be enough to address the issue.
Rethink farming, feed more
Further developing school food programs that focus on local, healthy food could benefit farmers and build community resilience as well as feed children.
“A national school food program, if we say you must source locally as much as possible, is a game changer for a lot of rural economics because it’s not cities that are going to supply that. It is out in the rurals that small producers are going to grow the crops and send them into the city,” Laurin said.
She said such a policy could be an “economic shot in the arm for rural communities.” It would allow farmers to make a living producing at a smaller scale, and could reduce the need for mega-farms that have been sweeping the province. “If we change how the market works, then we change how we can produce as well,” Laurin said. “It brings people back to community. It pumps up the local economy, it employs people, and it gives people a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives.”
