A new study commissioned by Community Food Centres Canada is highlighting a “crisis” for single, working-age Canadians, with one in five living in poverty.
Nick Soul, the CEO of Community Food Centres Canada, told CTV News Channel on Friday that these adults are “arriving in droves” at community food centres across the country with “all of them united… around a lack of income to meet basic needs.”
The survey is pushing back against established notions that employment is a pathway out of poverty and the numbers are stark.
“Thirty-eight per cent of food insecure households are single working age adults. They make up 90 per cent of the people in the shelter system,” Saul says. “Of the 1.8 million people who are in deep poverty, half of them are single working-age adults.”
It’s a problem that’s gotten worse over the last decade and Soul warns that increasingly precarious employment is a driving factor in people being unable “to get ahead” despite working fulltime hours as well as government income supports that “just haven’t kept pace with the realities” of living in Canada in 2023.
Click the video at the top of this article for the full interview and the solutions being proposed by the group.
With files from CTV Vancouver’s Regan Hasegawa
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