Volunteers providing meals in eastern P.E.I. renew call for basic income guarantee

In the kitchen at the Lower Montague Women's Institute, volunteers with the Down East Food Collective regularly get together to prepare and cook more than 100 servings of freshly made sauces and pasta for Montague's community fridge.

They do this once a month to improve food insecurity on Prince Edward Island, and have been organizing monthly community cook days to fill the food pantry at the Montague Christian Church since April. 

The volunteers work to fill the fridge first, then start filling up the freezer, said Tina Ratcliffe, one of the collective's founding members. 

The meals are usually gone within 24 to 48 hours, she said.

"It brings great joy for me personally to be able to give back to the community," she said.

"When you see people using the fridge and taking and sustaining themselves by the meals that we have prepared, it's phenomenal." 

She said she's seen adults and children make use of meals the collective has prepared. 

According to the most recent data from Statistics Canada, 28.6 per cent of Islanders had trouble acquiring healthy food in an affordable manner in 2022. That number is up from 23.6 per cent in 2021. 

With the number of people unable to get healthy food on the rise, the Down East Food Collective's monthly meal prep initiative has no end in sight, said Irene Whitten, one of the founders of the project.

"Until the government makes policy changes that are so needed, we do what we can," she said. 

One of the policy changes advocates say would help is a basic income policy. 

"Food insecurity is an income insecurity issue," said Darlene Sorrey-Scott, a volunteer with the Down East Food Collective. 

"If you don't have an appropriate income or the sufficient income, food is one of the first things that goes — either the quality of your food goes down or you do without."

"A good, solid basic income policy needs to be looked at strongly in Canada, and doing an experiment in Prince Edward Island — in a small province — is the way to go," said Sorrey-Scott.