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Thursday was Jack Lynch’s mom’s birthday.
“I want to take her out,” Lynch said, working a smile.
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But the 22-year-old is struggling to survive in a city beset by ballooning living costs. Celebrations are a luxury he can’t afford.
“It’s one of the worst feelings in the world,” he said, looking down.
Lynch has a childlike face with wide eyes and a cheerful smile. But behind the warmth is a Kafkaesque struggle compounded by an affordability crisis hanging over many households in the city.
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Central to his predicament is a chronic anxiety that has haunted him since he was 12, leaving him unable to continue school beyond Grade 11 or work or perform any daily interactions with people.
He’s since held several jobs as a dishwasher, a supermarket stocker and a security worker at a private agency, only to be overwhelmed by his anxiety.
“My anxiety will get too bad,” said Lynch, who moved to Calgary from Scotland with his mother and two sisters when he was nine.
“And then when I (leave), I get more anxious because I’m like, ‘Oh, God, I’ve just let these guys down.’ But now I know it’s too much for me.”
But he hasn’t stopped trying.
Lynch, who receives $1,700 a month under Alberta’s Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped program, said he, with the help of a social worker, has applied to more than 100 jobs, including supermarkets, restaurants, and cafes — to no avail.
The stress of unemployment, the constant fear of homelessness and his anxiety affect his physical health. But lately, he faces a more urgent worry: food.
Essential items that he once took for granted now seem out of reach. He is fond of chicken and egg whites. He remembers, even until last year, eating them with vegetables. But with soaring inflation, he has restricted his diet to a can of soup a day. Alternatively, he’ll swap it with a meal of Kraft dinner.
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“You’re just having to buy all this stuff that you don’t want to eat, just the cheapest stuff all the time,” Lynch said.
Lynch’s story is just one example of how rising prices have made food more inaccessible to the city’s most vulnerable citizens. He isn’t alone in choosing cheaper grocery items at the expense of nutrition.
More than half of Albertans surveyed by Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab, which interviewed more than 5,000 Canadians in September, said they prioritize cost over nutritional value more so than a year ago. The study also found more than 70 per cent of Albertans are worried that by compromising on their nutrition they’re ruining their health.
Food insecurity is haunting many Calgarians
Costs of grocery items have swelled by 23 per cent in Canada since 2020. Yearly increases in food prices reached a 41-year-high in September 2022, rising to 11.4 per cent even as overall inflation remained at 6.9 per cent.
Because of higher food prices, approximately 23 per cent of Canadians surveyed in a joint study by four universities reported they eat less than they should.
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In Calgary, 25 per cent of city residents can’t meet basic financial needs, up from 19 per cent in 2022, according to a survey by the Calgary Foundation. Thirty-six per cent of parents said they’ve skipped meals to ensure their children eat.
Calgary Foundation spokeswoman Taylor Barrie went a step further, saying, “Whole families are skipping meals, not just parents.”
The factors that have caused food prices to soar are complex. The most evident trigger that precipitated the rise was the disruptions to Canada’s food supply chain caused by COVID-19.
For instance, outbreaks at Alberta’s meat plants led to closures and reduced production. Inadequate protection among workers in similar facilities left them sick, and an increased risk to their health prompted many to switch careers, driving the scarcity of labour.
The shortage left centres with fewer workers to check inventory, stock shelves and move boxes. Longer distribution times raised demand and increased the wastage of food, which lowered the supply of grocery items and drove demand even higher.
Complicating the problem is erratic weather.
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In 2021, Prairie provinces endured severe heat and drought conditions, which increased prices for grains and meat, especially beef. Cattle feed became a prized commodity in Canada and other producer regions, making it harder to rear animal livestock across the globe.
Droughts have also affected the production of edible oil.
In the same year, Canada, the world’s largest exporter of canola, produced only two-thirds of the oil it generally manufactures due to abnormally dry weather, which shrunk the product’s global supply and made it more expensive. Other products, such as Indonesian and Malaysian crude palm oil, faced similar disruptions — as a result, consumers found it difficult to substitute cheaper oils for those that are generally considered pricey.
Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab, said the supply chain disruptions caused by COVID are now behind us. “The big factor right now is climate change, affecting, say, orange juice and beef,” he said.
Although prices of grocery items won’t drop, he echoed several economists saying food inflation will continue to decline.
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Such forecasts haven’t stopped people from being angered by the soaring profits of big grocers amid record-high food prices.
In 2022, Canada’s three largest grocers — Loblaws, Sobeys and Metro — which own nearly half of the industry’s market share, collectively reported more than $100 billion in sales and earned more than $3.6 billion in profits.
In the first half of 2022, Loblaws, with a market share of nearly 30 per cent, outstripped its best performance in the past five years by $180 million, which equates to almost an extra million a day, according to an analysis by Agri-food Analytics Lab.
The report also found in the same period, Sobeys and Metro enjoyed profits higher than their average gains, with $56 million and $7 million respectively.
There is something about grocers that makes them prone to people’s wrath, said Jim Stanford, an economist at The Centre for Future Work. “We have to go there and look at (the prices) every week.”
But is the anger justified?
Stanford thinks so. “You only need Grade 6 math to know if your costs and your revenue went up by the same amount and the difference between the two didn’t change,” he said. “But their profits have grown substantially.”
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However, CEOs of these grocers say their profits came from items that weren’t necessarily essential — cosmetics, clothes, medicines, financial services — while arguing their margins on grocery items are very low.
“On a customer’s $25 grocery basket, we earn just $1 in profit,” Galen Weston, the head of the Loblaws chain, testified in March in front of a federal agricultural subcommittee examining solutions to the crisis of the falling affordability of food. “For those who say grocers are profiteering, the math just doesn’t add up.”
Partha Mohanram, an accounting professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, said the argument hides the issue’s complexity.
Pre-tax profit margins for food and beverage stores are up 1.3 percentage points since 2020. That means grocers are also adding a markup to increases in production costs. Even if margins are low, Mohanram said, “Their volumes are massive, so a percentage or a small micro percentage of a very large number can be a very large number.”
Also, Stanford doesn’t believe making excess profits off items not deemed “essential” is justifiable. “Am I supposed to feel better given that I have to buy both groceries and pharmacy items from the same store?
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“This is a classic oligopoly.”
Recent amendments to competition law, generating a Grocery Code of Conduct and the latest announcement of several measures, including price freezes on food items, are some legislative actions Stanford believes are encouraging. But their effects remain to be seen.
Meanwhile, the inability to pay higher prices at grocery stores has forced many to rely on community services such as food banks. In Calgary, 700 households depend on the Calgary Food Bank every day, a 64 per cent increase from last year.
But before blindly rallying for cutting production costs, some experts suggest examining the trade practices that have actually led food prices to be much lower than they should be.
The average percentage of income Canadians pay for food has been falling since the 1960s, with those earning the highest shelling out only five per cent in 2022, states an article in Conversation Canada, an independent online publication delivering explainers and analyses from the country’s academic and research community.
A part of the reason is that food items don’t include “cost to health care from diet-related diseases, current and future environmental impacts or social injustices, like underpaying farm workers or using forced child labour,” which if accounted for could ratchet up prices threefold.”
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The ones who bear the burden of price fluctuations are people with lower incomes whose real salaries haven’t increased since the 1970s.
The authors instead blame poverty, exacerbated by declining housing affordability and transportation costs, for driving food insecurity.
Fewer non-market units — which dwindled after the federal government downloaded the responsibility of building social housing to provinces in 1996, which shortly after left cities to deal with the problem — increased housing speculation and higher demand spurred on by a decade of low-interest rates have raised housing prices, pushing people away from the city’s core and adding to their transportation costs, said Bryon Miller, a professor of urban studies at the University of Calgary.
The city has tried to mitigate the problem through various initiatives, including Calgary’s 5A Pathway and Bikeway Network and approving recommendations from the housing affordability task force, which aims to add 3,000 new non-market homes per year.
“But the progress I would say is fairly slow,” Miller said.
Meanwhile, the community can also play a part, said Melissa From, CEO of the Calgary Food Bank.
“I think that our employers and community should work together toward living wages for our employees, to ensure that we’re meeting the living wage requirement,” she said.
“I don’t think we should shy away from helping our neighbours.”
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