By Zenith Wolfe
Food banks in the Gatineau Hills region are struggling to meet increased demand as prices continue to rise. Some reports suggest the food bank system is hitting its limit.
According to Food Banks Canada, a national charity, Canadians visited food banks a record two million times in March 2024. This year’s food bank usage is up 90 per cent from March 2019, the report continues.
Moisson Outaouais provides food to around 50 soup kitchens, homeless shelters and food banks in the Outaouais region. Marie-Pier Chaput, Moisson Outaouais’s director of community development and charity relations, says they’ve gotten around 91,000 demands for food per month in 2024. This is up from around 62,000 per month in 2021.
Chaput adds that around 20 per cent of the people they served in 2024 were employed. That’s up from 10 per cent in 2022.
These findings are echoed by food banks that receive produce from Moisson Outaouais, including Grenier des Collines.
Paul Desbiens, the director of Grenier des Collines, says they had around 2,000 food bank visitors over the 2023–24 period, up from 1,500 the previous year, and more of them were full-time workers.
Chaput says that among the employed people they serve, more used to have “temporary or situational needs: a family crisis, a move, or sudden unemployment… But more and more, we’re seeing people coming to get food bank services once a month despite working.”
She says most of these visitors are minimum-wage workers or single parents struggling to keep up with the increasing cost of rent. They’re largely from the urban parts of Gatineau, Chaput adds, saying that Moisson Outaouais has gotten more demand from areas on the region’s outskirts.
“More and more, people are living further away from urban areas because they want to save on housing costs, but what happens is that people moving to these areas have a harder time accessing our services. It’s because of things like transit, which are sometimes harder to use than in urban areas,” she says.
Food Banks Canada found that housing and food inflation “hits those with low incomes hardest.” The report also says a third of food bank visitors were children in 2024. This is consistent with Chaput’s observations that they’re sending more food baskets to families with children than usual.
Since 2023, Moisson Outaouais has been working with six schools in the Outaouais region to provide hot meals to students. The schools use a flexible price model that reduces meal costs based on financial need.
“We frequently have schools that approach us to say there are more children coming to school without lunches or snacks or without having eaten breakfast,” Chaput says.
“There’s some things that don’t work in the system right now,” Desbiens says. “Help coming from governments is decreasing year by year, and it’s more difficult to obtain finances. The way [the government does] it currently is great, but the amount of money they give is not accurate to the demand.”
Desbiens says people have gotten more sensitive to the needs of food bank users, but their donations are not enough to offset demand. Grenier des Collines is continuing to ask for donations, but he says there’s little they can do to adapt if conditions worsen.
“If the food and money that comes here goes a little bit lower and the users increase, it’s not going to work for a long time,” he says. “It could be dangerous one day. I don’t know when, but it’s the same [right now] for all organizations in Quebec.”
Moisson Outaouais has received more funding over the last year than in previous years. According to annual reports, over the 2023–24 period they raised around $675,000 from third-party fundraisers and campaigns with companies like Metro or Walmart. This is up from the 2022–23 and 2021–22 periods, where they raised around $475,000 and $455,000 respectively.
Chaput says their organization operates with the help of over 200 local volunteers, but they’re still looking for additional volunteers to receive and sort produce at their warehouses.
Moisson Outaouais also needs help preparing food, which includes washing, cutting and packaging.
As the winter season approaches, Chaput encourages anyone who has financial stability to donate their time or money to local food banks.
“We’re anticipating a winter that won’t be easy, so we want to give a moment of respite to families everywhere through our Christmas baskets. We’re at 3,000 baskets this Christmas, but that won’t meet the demand across the region,” she says. “There’s a need everywhere.”