OTTAWA—Despite Canada’s riches, many Canadians are suffering from poverty, inequality and an inability to afford daily food needs, says a scathing United Nations report released Wednesday.
“What I’ve seen in Canada is a system that presents barriers for the poor to access nutritious diets and that tolerates increased inequalities between rich and poor, and aboriginal non-aboriginal peoples,” said Olivier De Schutter, the UN right-to-food envoy.
“Canada has long been seen as a land of plenty. Yet today one in 10 families with a child under 6 is unable to meet their daily food needs. These rates of food insecurity are unacceptable, and it is time for Canada to adopt a national right-to-food strategy,” said De Schutter.
His report was based on an 11-day mission to Canada, his first investigation of what he called “a rich, developed country.”
“This is a country that is rich but that fails to adapt the levels of social assistance benefits and its minimum wage to the rising costs of basic necessities, including food and housing,” De Schutter said.
Last year, he said, close to 900,000 Canadians were turning to food banks each month.
His report also described the situation in many of Canada’s aboriginal communities as desperate.
“A long history of political and economic marginalization,” it said, “has left many indigenous peoples with considerably lower levels of access to adequate food relative to the general population.”
De Schutter urged Canadian governments to work together to develop a national food strategy.
He also lamented growing obesity in Canada, saying more than one in four Canadian adults are obese, a rate that costs at least $5 billion a year in health care costs and lost productivity.
The report immediately prompted a flurry of reaction on Parliament Hill. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney called it a waste of UN money to investigate developed countries like Canada.
“It would be our hope that the contributions we make to the United Nations are used to help starving people in developing countries, not to give lectures to wealthy and developed countries like Canada,” he told reporters. “I think this is a discredit to the United Nations.”
Kenney dismissed De Schutter’s mission as a political exercise, saying the UN’s own figures rank Canada as one of the best developed countries in the world.
Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, who met with De Schutter after he released his report, strongly objected to his remarks on food issues facing aboriginals.
Aglukkaq told reporters she pointed out to De Schutter, whom she described as “a bit patronizing,” that there are no farms in Canada’s Arctic.
“He’s ill-informed in that he doesn’t understand that Inuit continue to live off the land today,” explained the Nunavut MP, who is also minister for the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency. “I go home and we have seal meat, we have polar bear meat, we have fish. This is our way of life.”
In the Arctic, she said, “the food security issue is not about access to (food). It’s about fighting environmentalists trying to put a stop to our way of life,” a reference to non-Canadian activists who oppose the hunting of polar bears and seals and want to limit fishing.
The Official Opposition urged the Conservatives to act quickly to put together a national food strategy and to do more to address food affordability issues in First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities.
“Like it or not, the situation is bleak for millions of Canadians. Food security is a right. Hunger and malnutrition are unacceptable anywhere, but especially in a country as wealthy as Canada,” said NDP aboriginal affairs critic Jean Crowder.
“It’s the least fortunate who must choose between paying their rent and putting food on the table. That’s not a choice Canadians should have to make.”