Features

Rich country, hungry city

The inability to buy healthy food in Toronto is a remarkably increasing phenomena in a country as rich as Canada, Anu Singh explores how the city's poor endure.

Toronto is getting poorer

While the national GDP has risen for the past decade, Toronto’s poorest neighbourhoods experienced a decline of 16 per cent from 1990 to 2000. Today a single-parent in Toronto brings home about $4,500 less than they did in 1990. Eviction applications rose 26 per cent between 1999 and 2006 in the city because people are unable to pay their rent. The use of food banks in Toronto has been steadily growing, and over 79,000 people use the city’s food banks each month.

The working poor

Suzette Gumbs-Thomas, a 41-year-old single mother, is one of the city’s 500,000 residents that works but still remains poor.  She immigrated to Canada over 20 years ago from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a small Caribbean island where unemployment is high.

Gumbs-Thomas’s dream of reaching middle class; owning a home, saving money for retirement and helping Danielle, her 17-year-old daughter, pay for post secondary education is far from being realized. “I’d like to see Danielle better than me; with a university education and not paying rent like me for the rest of her life,” she says.

For Gumbs-Thomas, the future seems distant when day-to-day life is a struggle, “Once you pay the rent and the bills, what’s left, barely feeds you.” 

Grace Lockwood, supervisor of Healthy Babies, Healthy Children, says Toronto’s poor families buy food in bulk to save a little cash, and fresh fruits and vegetables are not always affordable options. And though Thomas likes fresh veggies in her Caribbean dishes, she also buys a lot of canned food and cheaper parts of meats to stay within her tight budget.  It frustrates Gumbs-Thomas that after buying the necessities, at the end of the month there is not enough money to buy Nutella for her daughter or fish for the family.  “Maybe I’m the crazy one - but I do work from nine to five. If someone is working they should be able to buy what they want not just what they need,” she says. What she wants is not luxury items, but to be able to afford more healthy food for her small family.  

Like Gumbs-Thomas, thousands maintain regular jobs, but still live on the brink, and often it is cuts to the grocery bills that prevent families from falling over the edge. In the end their health pays the price.

The Unequal politics of poverty   

Toronto’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. David McKeown explores the affects of poverty on health in his report The Unequal City. His study finds that those living in the lowest income bracket in Toronto also live a shorter lifespan. Men in the bottom bracket live four-and-a-half years less than their richer counterparts; the difference for women is two years.

In light of his research Dr. McKeown advocated a $100 healthy food supplement for those on social assistance, but the working poor like Gumbs-Thomas would not be eligible. Despite the supplement being excluded from this year’s provincial budget, released on March 26, the budget is being hailed by some activists as a positive step forward since welfare and child tax benefit will both increase.  While support for welfare recipients improves, the system once again offers little help for the working poor.

Monthly income: $600 and some change  

Damien Parry is 46-years-old and has been on welfare since 2005. He lives off his $600 welfare cheque and the little extra cash he earns from scalping tickets and returning bottles.

“It’s an absolute myth that welfare is too low,” Parry says. “Poverty is an industry in this city,” he claims. Even some soup kitchens, “keep count of every meal” to get reimbursed by the city, he says.

Parry usually eats only one meal a day and looks for free food, “I don’t spend very much on food – I can find food free anywhere in the city,” he says. Marj Richings, a registered nurse, who runs the medical clinic associated with the drop-in food centre at the Church of the Redeemer says, single men like Parry, can get by with very little, but most families need greater food security and a nest. “On welfare you don’t live very well – and to have enough money to buy healthy food is totally impossible,” she says.

A single person on welfare (also known as Ontario Works) receives about $600 a month. The amount is slightly higher if the recipient suffers from a medical condition that requires a special diet. More than 75,000 people in Toronto received welfare in 2008.

Parry admits using his welfare cheque to buy alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana and crack instead of food, and like him, he says “with the exception of single-mothers and immigrants - I would say that most people on welfare use the money to sustain their habits.”

Though at times Parry sleeps 24 hours straight to recover from a weekend high off crack, Parry says he’s not addicted to the “ubiquitous” drug.  In these circumstances eating three squares meals a day is not a priority; getting the drugs are. “Satisfying an addiction is a full-time job” says Richings.

But this “dumb-crack head” as he often refers to himself is not dumb at all.

Parry often quotes works by George Orwell and Noam Chomsky, among his favourite authors is Stafford Beer a professor of cybernetics (the study of mechanical and electronic systems designed to replace humans). Parry lost his computer consulting business in the aftermath of the dot-com burst. He has a three year university education in computer science, an extensive vocabulary and is ready to talk about the politics of poverty and substance abuse with whoever is willing to listen. Parry defines poverty as a state of mind, "It's a lack of hope; it's hopelessness,” he says. Nobody knows that better than him.

Defining poverty 

Statistics Canada’s low income cut-offs (LICOs) is the closest measurement of poverty in the country. LICOs account for family size and the cost of living in a particular community. Families below the poverty line spend 20 percentage points or more of their income than the average household on basic necessities, such as; food, shelter and clothing. In Toronto a family of two bringing in less than $23,000 (before tax) and in a family of four earning less than $34,500, fall below the poverty line. Meaning one in every five Torontonian remains trapped by poverty.

Reports on Poverty

Toronto Public Health: The Unequal City

United Way:
Losing Ground

Daily Bread Food Bank:
Who's Hungry?