Nearly all free food service users at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay are international students

This is one of two stories in the series Making Their Mark, which explores the experiences of international students living in Thunder Bay, Ont. The series highlights the challenges they face but also how they're building community and making a positive mark on the city. You can read the other story in the series here.

A rising number of students are relying on free food programs at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., and the overwhelming majority of them are from abroad.

The Lakehead University Student Union (LUSU) runs a Food Resource Centre on campus that provides an emergency grocery pickup program and free meals to students in need, as many struggle with food insecurity — meaning they lack access to sufficient, adequate food to meet their basic needs.

Among those who have been using the emergency grocery pickup program are Pooja Patel and her twin sister, both first-year nursing students who arrived in Canada from India.

"I work at McDonald's, too, so sometimes I'm super busy so I cannot prepare my meals as well," Patel said. "When I come here for grocery pickup, [they] have so many items that are usually helpful there and easy to prepare when I'm running out of time."

About 90 per cent of the grocery program's clients are international students, a trend Faraz Khorsandi says has become increasingly concerning as Canada prepares to welcome more than 900,000 students from other countries this year.

"International [students] are paying way [higher] tuition fees compared to domestic students, and they come from different countries that have different exchange rates and all of that, so it's even more expensive for them," said Khorsandi, Lakehead's international student assistant.

International undergraduate tuition in Ontario has skyrocketed by 96 per cent over the past decade. In comparison, domestic undergraduate tuition has risen by roughly 13 per cent in the same period, according to Statistics Canada data.

In 2021, about 75 per cent of international students were food insecure, according to a national survey by Meal Exchange. The combination of increased tuition, the rising cost of living and the housing crisis has left many international students scraping by in a country where they felt they would gain economic prosperity.

"It's all nationwide. We can see it all over Canada, not only Thunder Bay," said Khorsandi, who moved to the northwestern Ontario city from Iran last year.

The numbers are adding up in the form of longer lines at Lakehead's Food Resource Centre.

"Last September, our emergency grocery pickup program saw about 160 unique individuals," said the centre's director of food security, Sierra Garofalo. "This September, it has increased to 217 and we've seen an increase in students who are coming to our other free meal programs as well.

"I think it's important to address the problem as what it really is, which is poverty. Food insecurity is a symptom of poverty, and so we do have to start looking at it as that."

The Food Resource Centre has also started to collect data on homelessness among its clients. Last month, from those who accessed the emergency grocery pickup program: