This story is part of a partnership between The Green Line and The Trillium for readers who care deeply about Toronto and the people, policies, and politics at play. We’re pairing The Green Line’s unique community-driven, solutions-oriented journalism with The Trillium’s signature insider coverage of Ontario politics and policy to dig deep into the city’s problems and connect you with the plans the Toronto mayoral candidates are proposing to fix them. This article was originally published on TheGreenLine.TO
As part of our ongoing coverage of the 2023 Toronto mayoral byelection, The Green Line asked both our audience and all candidates to complete a survey, which included a question where they had to rank the policy issues they’d prioritize for the city today. For our audience, the issues of food insecurity and homelessness tied for second place. So, in this explainer, we’ll look at what the mayoral candidates have said they’ll do about food insecurity, and unpack what a good meal has to do with housing and taxes.
More and more Torontonians are finding it harder to put food on the table. According to the City of Toronto, almost one in five people in Toronto were living with food insecurity households as of 2021. What’s more, the city reports that affording food can be especially difficult for marginalized groups, such as renters and people living on Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) payments. This all falls rather short of the promise the City made in its 2001 Toronto Food Charter, which said “Every Toronto resident should have access to an adequate supply of nutritious, affordable and culturally-appropriate food.” Twenty-two years later, we’re far from that goal, and the problem is only getting worse: The Daily Bread reported that from April 2021 to March 2022, visits to Toronto food banks hit record highs.
So what do the candidates for mayor have to say about it? Surprisingly, not much. Of the 31 mayoral candidates who completed The Green Line’s survey, only a few said anything about food. Candidate Cory Deville proposed a Food Accessibility Rebate, a monthly payment from the government to cover food costs. Another, Bahira Abdulsalam, said she would “stand up” for those living with food insecurity. Others mentioned it in passing: Isabella Gank included food as just one of the costs of living that provincial ODSP payments fail to cover, while Sarah Climenhaga promised to expand community food gardens and Erwin E. Sniedzins pledged “hydroponic food sources” in all-new highrises. One of the leading candidates, Josh Matlow, mentioned food but did so to pivot to speaking about housing.
Only two front-runners, Mitzie Hunter and Ana Bailão, put forward specific policies to address food insecurity in their publicly available platforms; both are quite detailed. Hunter promised to double the funding for food-oriented Community Service Partnerships (CSP), which are city grants to non-profits that deliver services. Her plan also proposed improving coordination across city departments to better provide food, updating the Food Charter (she didn’t mention specifically how) and building grocery store spaces in all new city-built housing to break up food deserts (i.e. areas where places to buy fresh food are few and far between).
For her part, Bailão pledged more cash for the CSP program, as well as dedicated funding for food security and sustainability programs. She promised to help out food banks by letting them use vacant City facilities for cheap, till gardens in vacant green spaces like hydro corridors, connect grocery stores with community food organizations to reduce food waste and launch an annual City-run food drive.
The remaining candidates voiced their perspectives on May 25, 2023, when the Daily Bread Food Bank hosted Toronto’s first televised mayoral debate of the byelection, and directly asked candidates about food insecurity. Six of the leading candidates were invited, though Mark Saunders declined the invitation, leaving the stage to Bailão, Hunter, Brad Bradford, Josh Matlow and Olivia Chow.
But how does a candidate discuss their food insecurity policies when they don’t have any (at least not publicly)? They simply use it as a way to talk about something else, like housing.
Indeed, every single candidate on stage — Bailão and Hunter included — used food insecurity as a segue into their housing policies (read The Green Line’s election explainer on housing.) There’s a logical reason for this: Rent and food are the two biggest expenses for Torontonians. According to Daily Bread, one in five food bank users pay 100 per cent of their income in rent, and the vast majority pay over half. With roughly half of Toronto’s population renting, candidates had an opportunity to share their ideas for rent protection and support programs. Chow promised to double the funding for the city’s rent bank, which provides grants to people requiring help with rent payments or deposits, while Bailão promised to triple it. Matlow promised to implement rent control on all new units built by the city. Meanwhile, every candidate put forward strategies to increase Toronto’s housing supply.
Food also served as an excuse to debate about taxes. There’s a slightly convoluted series of conversational jumps to get from meal talk to tax talk, but here’s the breakdown: programs to help renters have to be paid for, but the city is out of money. To get money, the city can raise taxes — namely property taxes — but that creates a new housing-related expense for the other half of the city, namely homeowners. And it’s an expense that, for some, could cut into their household grocery budget, leading us back to food.
This dilemma provided a prime opportunity for some political jousting, with Chow being the common target. As front-runner in the polls, her suggestion to raise property taxes by an unspecified amount drew the ire of her competitors. Without citing any sources, Bailão claimed that the levy could be as much as 39 per cent more than homeowners already pay, and called it a big blow to the pocketbook. (Chow didn’t respond directly.)
Bradford was even more pointed, saying Torontonians were “terrified” of Chow’s spending promises, and demanded to know how much she planned to “jack” their taxes. In response, Chow reiterated her various planned revenue tools, such as raising the vacant home tax and the land transfer tax for homes valued at over $3 million. “When you add it all up, it’s balanced,” she replied. When pressed again by Bradford, Chow acknowledged that many homeowners are “house rich and cash poor,” and said that as a city councillor, she had never voted for a large tax increase. “That is not my style,” she explained.
Bradford, whose platform prefers easing restrictions on the private sector over expanding publicly-funded programs (and notably, does not provide a breakdown of his own proposals’ costs), warned that the other candidates’ policies would make life more expensive for Torontonians, claiming their math doesn’t add up and therefore each would have to raise taxes by more than they’ve promised so far. (For context, each candidate’s proposals are at least marketed as ways to reduce costs for Torontonians, whether by reducing the cost of housing or something else.)
If the debate seemed to be drifting off-topic, it’s because, like most issues in this campaign, food insecurity is something over which the city has only limited control. As one audience member pointed out, Torontonians living off of provincial ODSP payments receive just $1,200 per month — an amount that places them well below the poverty line, and doesn’t even cover half the average rent of a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto. At the Daily Bread debate, Bradford slammed this as “legislated poverty,” yet pointed out that ODSP is a provincial program, so not something the city has the power to change. In the same vein, Matlow said he wished he could have debated Ontario Premier Doug Ford that day.
You can read more about the province's impact on food security in an article by The Trillium, here.
