A quarter of Canadian families are facing food insecurity even when most have a breadwinner working a permanent, full-time job, new research suggests.

Researchers from the University of Toronto’s food insecurity research program analyzed Statistics Canada income data to better understand how Canadians’ jobs affect their access to food.

Their study, published last December in the journal Canadian Public Policy, found that the main earner in two-thirds of all households experiencing food insecurity held a permanent, full-time job.

Study co-author Tim Li said the findings suggest wages aren’t keeping up with the cost of living.

“This really pushes back against any narrative that this is only about precarious work and this idea that if people just had a full-time, permanent job, then they would not be food insecure,” Li said. “We’re showing that that’s not the case.”

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[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This comment is 90% of why this won't get fixed.

The public has ZERO idea of what's actually causing the problem. Blaming grocery stores for the issues because that's the only place they see the product and have to hand over cash.

Completely ignoring that the issues start 3 or 4 levels up the production chain and persist the entire length.

Go ask a commercial farmer how much it costs to raise a chicken or grow some peppers now compared to what it did 20 years ago. Their costs have gone up the same amount as yours at the store.

The things that ACTUALLY have caused this are Land value appreciation, Fuel cost increases, and fertilizer costs. The first has gone up because government policy around land is fucking stupid, and the second has gone up because oil is harder to extract than ever, and more in demand than ever globally. Fertilizer costs are almost entirely based on fuel costs because they're heavily used in extraction and processing.

If we want prices to go down again we need land value taxes and to 10x our government investment in renewable energy tech just like what China is doing now.

[–] GrindingGears@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Yes there are inflationary pressures, but come on. You don't think companies like Loblaws, and their literally record breaking profits aren't one of the main causes of this crisis? It ain't helping, that's for sure. I mean yeah 5% here and there, sure costs going up. But look at the shrinkflation too. There's a lot of tomfuckery going on here, and it's high time it's brought to an end.

[–] FireRetardant@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago

The bread price fixing was just what got caught, who knows what other fuckery they are still doing.

[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca -2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No, I really don't. The "record breaking profits" are still very small percentages.

Do the math. The numbers are publicly available. https://www.loblaw.ca/en/loblaw-reports-revenue-growth-of-4-6-in-the-third-quarter/

2025 Quarter 3, 19.4 Billion in Revenue, Adjusted net earnings (what most people would call profit) of $828 million.

That's about 4.2% Profit, even if you assume accounting fuckery and double that number it's still not a concerning amount of profit to make for a business.

People using misleading headlines and statistics against you, knowing you are too lazy to do the actual math yourself.

The real concern, as made evident in my original post, is that the cost of land for these grocery stores, and the cost of fuel to transport shit around, and the cost of the products themselves (because their makers also have land and transport costs) has massively increased their costs.

[+] Jack_Burton@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Given the system we have, this is a non-issue.

In a perfect world we wouldn't need capitalism at all, but we don't live in a perfect world. We will never have a perfect world, humans are not perfect. We're greedy little fuckers.

A 4.2% Profit is very low. Extremely low. That profit level is actually so low that it's almost losing money for investors once you account for inflation. Any lower and there wouldn't be any investors, and we'd see grocery store closures and price increases until it went back up again to attract investment.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm very much for socializing certain industries. Healthcare, Electricity, Internet/Communications, Water, Sewer, Roads, should all be run by the government in my opinion. They each have particular problems where Capitalism has massive market failures. Healthcare is too necessary and usually too urgent to be able to "shop around" for the best deal. Electricity and Internet have natural monopolies on transmission due to infrastructure building requirements.

This just doesn't apply to grocery stores. There's some fierce competition among the major players, minor players exist, and there isn't an obvious market failure like regulatory capture or a monopoly leading to ridiculous profit margins or an inability for new entrants to join the market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_supermarket_chains_in_Canada

In my mid-sized city, there all three major players present of course (Pattison, Loblaw, Empire), then we've got walmart, costco, whole foods, h-mart, and I know of at least a dozen smaller grocers and full time farm markets that aren't even chains. There's even a co-op grocery store owned by members.

I don't mean to downplay the situation, but it's quite clear when you look at the numbers that grocery stores are NOT the root of the issue with food price increases.

If you really want grocery stores to drop the prices more, do you know what would be even more useful than taking their 4.2% profit? Take the land from their landlords, and lease it to them for $1. Grocery stores typically are paying 4-8% of their total revenue in land prices.

The highest costs of grocery stores (in descending order) are Inventory, Labour, and Rent.

Now imagine if, instead of just dropping their rent prices, you actually dropped the land/housing costs for EVERYONE. That reduces how much the famer needs to spend, that reduces how much the processing plant spends, that reduces the amount the manufacturer spends, that reduces the amount the warehousers spend, and it reduces the amount the grocery stores spend.

It gets worse though when you realize that housing prices are also why labour prices are so high. If your rent/mortgage was half, you wouldn't need to be paid as much money to have the same standard of living, it wouldn't reduce your costs by half, there are non-rent costs in your budget, but say you earn the median income of $80,0000, and you're spending $3000 a month on rent for your family, if your rent dropped to $1500, you could earn $62,000 and have the same life. That's reducing labour costs by 22%.

Then take that and apply it to the entire chain as well. Reduced labour for the famer, processor, manufacturer, warehouse, grocery store.

This is the big thing people are failing to understand. Land owners are taking a huge cut of everyone's money right now. This is where the money flows to in the economy. I'm not talking about corporate land owners either, I'm talking about every single person who owns real estate from some random big corporate entity all the way down to your parents who bought a house 20 years ago and have seen it's value go up by 4x since then. That value had to come from somewhere, and it's coming straight out of everyone's pockets in the form of higher prices.

It's a hidden tax on everyone that the government controls through policy, but which the government doesn't receive the money for.

The government has the power to end that, but there's very little appetite for it because it's far too removed from public understanding for the public to even know what to ask for to fix it.

[–] Typhoon@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That profit level is actually so low that it’s almost losing money for investors once you account for inflation. Any lower and there wouldn’t be any investors

Good! Why are we allowing investors to leech a profit off of a basic necessity of life? No one should be milking extra profit out of the poor people trying to survive. A system that allows this deserves to collapse.

[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca -1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You're a fucking moron.

Should the government take over every farm, food processor, food manufacturer, and transportation company too? They're all profiting off a basic necessity of life.

Should the government take over all housing construction, development, renovation? That's also a necessity of life.

Countries have tried this before, it didn't end well.

Capitalism is working just fine for groceries right now, why throw that out when the real problem is the current land ownership and energy systems?

[–] mp3@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 month ago

You’re a fucking moron.

Please avoid personal attack when arguing.