working poor turn to food banks

Food fight

The fastest-rising group of food-bank users are neither homeless, on welfare or on EI. They have jobs, but they just can't make ends meet

National Post

: Charles Mitchell

To look at her, you'd never think of Rose Agular as a food-bank user. The 45-year-old single mother is not homeless. Neither is she on welfare or EI. She's employed full-time as a cashier at a coffee shop. In a typical week she works at least 42 hours and sometimes as many as 50. However, she earns only $7.85 an hour, which she says is not enough to buy groceries after paying rent and babysitting expenses for her eight-year-old daughter, Kim. So for the first time a few weeks ago, she turned to a food bank for help.

"When it comes to the food for me I can survive, but with my daughter there's nothing at all. I don't have enough money," says Agular, who spoke on condition her real name not be used. "It's a supplement for my daughter because sometimes I can't buy food for her."

Before Agular turned to food banks she would always drop a can or two into the collection bin at her grocery store or her child's public school. Now she's on the receiving end of others' charity, a predicament she finds hard to stomach.

"I feel guilty for myself for going there, because some people don't have a job or the government gives them money, but it's not enough for them to live on," Agular says.

Agular is in fact among the fastest-growing segment of food-bank users: people who have jobs. According to the Canadian Association of Food Banks, some 778,000 people across Canada use food banks every month -- and almost 13% are working. A report this year by Toronto's Daily Bread Food Bank shows the problem is far worse in Canada's richest city: 19% of its clients have jobs - a 138% increase since 1995.

Critics point to rising rental housing costs across Ontario, an average of 18.9% since 1998, according to figures compiled by the Daily Bread Food Bank. That same year, the province passed the Tenant Protection Act, which partly dismantled rent controls, allowing landlords to boost rents to whatever the market would bear. Add to that the minimum-wage freeze, which has been set at $6.85 since 1995. The result is that many low-income workers have been left without enough money to meet basic expenses.

"In Canada, unlike many, many other parts of the world, if you don't have housing you don't survive, because it's too cold," says Bob Spencer, former executive director of the Ontario Association of Food Banks. "So housing jumps to the top of the priority lists for most people. We find working parents will go hungry the last few days of the month so that they can feed their kids and pay their rent."

Spencer believes there's a direct link between government policy on wages and shelter and the rising number of employed people seeking help from food banks.

"This is a group operating at the minimum wage," he says. "So if you raise their housing costs and don't change anything else, then by definition the amount left for food goes down. The housing survival pressure pushes the food survival pressure."

Adds David Hulchanski, director of the Centre for Urban and Community Studies at the University of Toronto: "You have what researchers call 'shelter poverty,' which means that the amount of rent you pay is such a large percentage of the cash you have that you can't afford other necessities. The reality is minimum wages have not gone up and costs through modest inflation have increased through the years. So that's just another factor: that there are so many people on minimum wage, or minimum-wage jobs aren't enough to pay for costs, so they have to look elsewhere to try to get by."

Once you factor in rising inflation and the high cost of living in Toronto, basic necessities like transportation can be difficult to afford for some people.

"You have to get around," Hulchanski says, "and for a middleclass person a two-dollar TTC ride is cheap, it's a good deal. But if you're on minimum wage what percentage of your hourly wage is two-dollars?"

Rose Agular earns slightly more than minimum wage but still can't afford transportation. Fortunately, she earns about $8 in tips every night, money that goes toward TTC fares. Half of her salary is slotted for the $691 rent on her subsidized two-bedroom apartment. The rest pays for a babysitter. It would be easier, she says, if she could place her daughter in daycare, but Agular works the graveyard shift. Before clocking into work at 10 p.m., she drops Kim off at the babysitter for the night and picks her up to take her to school in the morning.

"You can find a cheaper babysitter, but you don't know them and you can't trust your daughter with them. I found someone who takes care of her, and I can trust her."

Finding a babysitter is not a problem for Mario Soto. His wife stays home with their two sons, aged six and one, while the 31-year-old PhD candidate heads off to his teaching assistant job at the University of Toronto.

Soto (not his real name) makes more than $32 an hour, but he usually works fewer than 10 hours a week. That's still more than a minimum-wage worker grosses in a week, and he supplements his income with occasional consulting work during the school year, a job at which he works full-time in the summer. Nonetheless, because of rent and skyrocketing tuition he, too, has resorted to food banks to help support his family.

"A friend told me about the food bank," Soto says, adding the friend told him "the people are friendly and you can get some stuff to survive on your budget."

He says he feels no stigma taking the handouts because as an international student he finds Canadians in general more accepting of people who rely on social and community programs.

"People here don't care that much about what you do. And you're free to do whatever you want to do," he says.

Soto says he's confident he'll be able to support his family once he graduates in a year or two.

Working more might not help Agular, who's worried about what's going to happen come January, when her geared-to-income rent is likely to increase because she worked more hours this year than she did in 2002. Still, she hopes she will not have to use the food bank for much longer.

"If I can find a day job then I can save a lot of money," she says. "I don't need to go to the food bank any more because I know there's a lot of people more than me that need it."

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