Ottawa, ON – After eight years of Justin Trudeau, families are forced to choose between paying rent or putting food on the table. Today, Canada’s Food Report for 2024 revealed that Canadian families will have to pay $702 more for groceries next year than in 2023.
According to the four Canadian universities who published the report, the total annual grocery expenditure for a family of four in 2024 will be $16,297, up $702 from this year due to “rising production costs” and “increased input costs.” They also wrote that “Canadians will continue to experience the strain of food inflation, compounded by increasing costs of housing, energy, and various other expenditures.”
Basic food staples will all cost more in 2024. Meat, vegetables, and bakery goods will all increase between 5% to 7%. Canadians can’t afford this. Rents are rising faster than wages for the first time in 60 years, and people are still feeling the effects of inflation and household expenses like rent and utilities. Monthly expenditures on groceries are dropping, as Canadians either reduce “the quantity or quality of food they are buying or by substituting less expensive alternatives.” In August 2023 per capita expenditure on groceries declined -3.19%. Canadians are eating less, and eating lower quality and less healthy food to try and make ends meet.
No wonder that food banks across Canada have seen usage “explode.” A few months ago, Feed Ontario reported that between April 1, 2022, and March 31, 2023, over 800,000 people in Ontario alone accessed a food bank. In total, there were 5.9 million visits to a food bank in this time period. In October, 2023, Food Banks Canada released a report saying that food banks were visited nearly two million times in March alone, an increase of 79 percent from 2019. In Toronto, there were 2.53 million food bank visits between April 2022 and March 2023, with one in ten people in Toronto having to rely on food banks, according to the Daily Bread Food Bank’s annual Who’s Hungry Report.
Canadians are being forced to use food banks because Justin Trudeau’s out-of-control inflationary spending is driving up the cost of everything. On top of this, Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax is driving up the cost of food even further.
On Tuesday, Sobey’s confirmed that “any tax flows through the entire supply chain and it affects everyone—from the farmers on through the supply chain… any time input costs are added into the food supply chain, it will inevitably impact consumer prices. Government taxes, regulations, requirements of any sort, of course, make food more expensive.” Trudeau’s taxes are directly making food more expensive. After 8 years of Justin Trudeau, he’s not worth the cost. Only common sense Conservatives will axe the tax, end inflationary deficits, and bring home lower food prices for Canadians.