Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Journalist

The sudden increase in Pontiac food bank users caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is not showing any signs of slowing down, according to Bouffe Pontiac director Kim Laroche.

In 2024, the number of people using the Campbell’s Bay food bank increased from 718 to 800, and this number doesn’t account for one of the organization’s busiest times of year – the holiday season.

“That’s a big jump for a small food bank,” Laroche said, still adamant this increase would in no way affect Bouffe’s ability to feed people, just as it usually does, through this holiday season.

“I thought that after the pandemic, [the number of people we get] would stop increasing, but it’s still going up,” Laroche said. “What we’re hearing is that high housing costs are bringing more people to the food bank.”

In 2019, the food bank was serving between 400 and 500 people. She said of these people, almost none actually had jobs.

“Now, we have many, many people who do have minimum wage jobs – in grocery stores, restaurants, depanneurs – and still need to use the food bank. They’re people who were able to get by on minimum wage before, and now they’re no longer able,” Laroche said, noting she’s also seen an increase in the amount of unhoused people relying on Bouffe Pontiac for food.

Among the minimum wage workers who use the food bank are two of Bouffe Pontiac’s own employees.

One, who requested to remain anonymous to protect his privacy, said he has two jobs to pay his monthly bills, working on average 15 hours a day, five days a week.

“Everything is so expensive. The food has gone up since covid, the gas has gone up since covid. The rent? My god, it’s unbelievable. Who can afford a $1,300 rent? It’s not livable anymore,” the employee said. “It mentally burns me.”

One of the greatest challenges for Bouffe Pontiac in meeting the growing need is that the donations received from the community are not keeping pace, which means year over year, the organization has to use an increasing amount of its budget on buying food to meet the growing demand.

In 2020, Bouffe Pontiac spent $43,139 of its budget on food. In 2021, it increased to $54,281, to $81,576 in 2022, and a total of $128,827 in 2023.

“We know we got more clients, and the cost of food has also gone up, and we think we have fewer food donations than we’ve had in the past, which means we need to buy more food to feed our clients,” Laroche said. “I can’t make a box for our clients with only what we receive in donations. They would go hungry.”

So while the number of community members it serves has more or less doubled since 2019, the amount of its budget spent on food has more than tripled, and in less time.

This makes it very difficult for Laroche to pay her employees the wages she knows would make it possible for them to stay at the food bank long term.

“The second a position opens anywhere else [in the area], I lose them,” Laroche said. “When I put all my money towards food, I cannot [pay them enough].”

A challenging location

Part of the challenge for Laroche is that as food banks go, Bouffe Pontiac is fairly isolated.

The food donations she receives come from a few different sources – private donations, grocery stores giving away expired products, and a weekly delivery of five or six pallets of products from food bank supplier Moisson Outaouais.

But private donations, according to Laroche, are slowing, and while the donations she gets from the local grocery stores is critical to the food bank’s survival, they can’t match the massive donations urban food banks receive from larger box stores like Walmart and IGA.

“They’re not mega-big grocery stores so we don’t receive as many donations from them, which means we have to buy,” she said.

Laroche recently began visiting food banks across the Outaouais to get ideas for how to manage Bouffe, and said when other directors learned of how much of her budget goes towards purchasing food, they were shocked.

One such food bank is the Aylmer Food Centre, which currently serves about 16,000 people.

Its director Denis Parizeau said 95 per cent of the food that passes through this food bank has been donated, either by individuals or by any of the many large grocery stores that surround it.

In the 2023-2024 budget year, the centre spent $82,000 on buying food.

“We have all the food chains that are helping us every week,” Parizeau said. “So that helps a lot, but they don’t have that luxury over there [in Campbell’s Bay].”

Lack of funding

Bouffe Pontiac receives various forms of funding from the province’s health ministry in the form of both grants that are to be dedicated to special projects, and general funding that goes towards what she calls “la mission globale,” or the general mission fund.

She can use this money for whatever she needs to keep the operation going, whether it’s building repairs, buying food, or paying staff salaries.

But according to the Table régionale des organismes communautaires autonomes de l’Outaouais (TROCAO), a group dedicated to advocating for social service organizations across the region, the provincial funding to services like Bouffe Pontiac is seriously lacking.

In a press release last week, the TROCAO called on Quebec to more than double the $54 million in “mission globale” funding it estimates will be offered to the 180 community action groups across the Outaouais – a need it said is based on each organization’s assessment of how much money it would need to be able to accomplish its mission.

“There’s a lot of organizations that are having trouble paying a decent living wage because of the lack of funding, and there’s always increasing needs of the community,” said TROCAO director Daniel Cayley-Daoust.

He said while labour in the community services has historically been undervalued, it is essential to “how we build resilient communities and support people at the margins,” and for this reason believes the province should be investing far more money into it.

Bouffe Pontiac did receive an increase of about $3,000 to the “mission globale” pot this year, but Laroche said this is pennies compared to the expenses she is facing.

“I know that if I had more money coming into that general pot, it would solve a lot of my problems,”she said.

Laroche said Bouffe Pontiac’s food drive, this year scheduled for Dec. 5 from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m., will be critical to the food bank’s ability to give out Christmas hampers, just as it is ever year.

“It’s an approximately $18,000 cost for the hampers. We raise close to $10,000 each year and are hoping to get at least that amount.”