Nearly 23% of the Canadian population reported food insecurity in 2022

Nearly nine million Canadians lived in food insecure households in 2022, with 22.9 per cent of the population reporting some form of food insecurity, according to a Statistics Canada report released Friday.

The data agency wrote in its annual Canadian Income Survey that 8.7 million people lived in households that reported some kind of food insecurity.

That was an increase of almost 1.8 million people from the previous year, when the rate was 18.4 per cent. It marked the second consecutive year of increases since the pandemic began.

Statistics Canada measures food insecurity across three categories:

The number of people living in moderately and severely food insecure households increased in 2022, with the moderately impacted proportion rising to 10.9 per cent and the severely impacted proportion rising to six per cent.

"There's no doubt that this challenge we're facing right now isn't hitting all Canadians equally," said Jim Stanford, an economist and the director of the Centre for Future Work in Vancouver.

Single-parent families and "unattached" people under 65 were at an especially high rate of food insecurity, according to the report.

"It's people who can least afford it who have the least protection against higher prices and higher housing costs and so on, and these numbers absolutely confirm it."

"We've seen enormous increases in food prices, we've seen enormous increases in profits in the food industry, the food retail sector. So that is hitting hard, and that to me, is a real worry," said Stanford.

"If we're a rich country like Canada, and we can't assure that everyone has enough food on the table, then clearly we need to do things better."

Valerie Tarasuk, who is the lead investigator of the University of Toronto's household food insecurity research program PROOF, told CBC News it was "sickening" to see how much the numbers had gone up, though she was expecting that.

"I'm disappointed. We've known that this has been a period of unprecedented food price inflation, among other things," said Tarasuk, adding that severe food insecurity is linked to negative health outcomes.

"So we knew that people on the bottom end of the economic spectrum were having a hard time. From that perspective, it's not surprising that the numbers have risen, but still, it's heartbreaking to think of that many Canadians living in such difficult circumstances."

The survey, which is an annual report on the income of Canadian individuals and households, showed that the number of Canadians living below the poverty line had increased to 9.9 per cent in 2022 from 7.4 per cent in 2021.