December 2, 2024
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Ottawa, ON – After nine years of the NDP-Liberal government, millions of Canadians are going hungry. Today, Feed Ontario released their annual hunger report, revealing that more than one million Ontarians had to turn to a food bank in 2023-24.
In Ontario alone, food banks had to handle 7.7 million visits from over one million residents. This means there are more Ontarians accessing food banks than “the entire population of Nova Scotia.”
Food bank use has risen in Ontario for eight consecutive years. In the last two years alone, the number of Ontarians accessing food banks has increased by 73 percent, “nearly triple the jump seen in the two years after the 2008 recession.” In 2019-20, 537,000 were relying on food banks. That means there has been an 86 percent increase in the last four years.
On top of this, as Trudeau’s cost-of-living crisis worsens, nearly 1 in 4 food bank users were employed. Many food bank clients pointed to unaffordable housing as their primary problem, after Trudeau and the NDP doubled the cost of rent. This is made clear in the 80 percent increase in the number of renters accessing food banks since 2019-20.
Canadians deserve relief. Yet in the new year, the NDP-Liberal government will hike the carbon tax again, as part of their plan to quadruple the carbon tax to 61 cents per litre by 2030. This will make everything more expensive for everyone at the worst possible time. Trudeau just doesn’t understand that if you tax the farmer who grows the food, and the trucker who ships the food, you end up taxing the family who buys the food.
Enough is enough. Only Common Sense Conservatives will bring home lower prices for Canadians by axing the tax and fixing the budget.
