Leading Ontario grocery store chains should take the lead in combating food insecurity by making food affordable for all families. Grocery stores can counter people’s inability to afford staple foods as inflation soars by marking down items.

These stores are capitalizing on higher prices and lower purchasing power to charge more for groceries, and are neglecting shoppers’ basic need to access affordable food. Greed shouldn’t prevent companies we regularly trust and rely on to provide nutritious foods we need. After all they seem to flourish while the rest of us suffer.  

Loblaws, Canada’s largest food retailer, is taking advantage of general inflation. Earning 40 percent so far in 2022 Loblaws can hardly claim that they can’t cut us some slack; there will still be enough to give their shareholders a windfall Christmas gift.

Imagine that in one of the well-healed G8 countries, 13 per cent of Ontario households face food insecurity, putting roughly 1.7 million people at risk of malnutrition, according to provincial public health dietitians. Even more alarming, experts report one in six Ontario children lives in a food-insecure household.

An extensive list of places where residents in need can access free meals in Toronto, for example, compiled by the Canadian Mental Health Association, reminds us we have a stockpile of everyday options for alleviating hunger. But soup kitchens, food banks and religious congregations provide only short-term solutions to what can easily morph into a long-term problem. For many, food insecurity has already happened.

Statistics Canada reported the price of food rose by nearly 10 per cent between April 2021 and April 2022, adding 43 per cent of those surveyed reported higher food costs to be the result of rising costs of living that affected them most. 

Single parents are particularly vulnerable to these rising food costs; the 2021 Canadian Income Survey found 38 per cent of female single-parent households and 21 per cent of male single-parent households experience food insecurity.

Multimillion and multibillion-dollar food providers have no excuse to continue charging the prices they do for staple foods that have often become unattainable to lower-income Ontarians as a result. We need to see more markdowns today.

Alternative solutions to food insecurity do exist. Newfoundland and Labrador saw a major decline in food insecurity between 2007 and 2012 following a poverty reduction strategy that lowered and eliminated provincial income taxes for lower-income households, raised minimum wage by $4 over four years and increased social assistance rates to compensate for inflation.

However, grocery stores here in Ontario can take the most immediate action by reducing the prices that shoppers wrestle with every day. The difference made by a two- or three-dollar markdown per item, while consequential to these companies’ profit, could dictate whether a lower-income parent—can feed their family.

Canada’s 2022 food price report predicts an increase in food costs of between five and seven per cent. Dairy, bakery items and vegetables will see the highest price rises, inflicting a major hit on how accessible staple foods are for Canadians. With prices set to surge, it’s time for Ontario’s big-name grocery stores to step up, recognize food insecurity as a problem for hundreds of thousands of Ontarians and make the first move by lowering basic food costs.