Food Security

Let me say this clearly first: no child in this city should sit in a classroom hungry. If a child needs a meal at school, they should get one. I will never take food from a child’s plate.

But we need to be honest about what it means when that meal becomes the centrepiece of a re-election campaign.

A sign of failure, not a trophy

This month, the mayor promised free school lunches if re-elected, saying it would save parents an estimated $1,800 a year.^[1] Earlier, City Hall celebrated a 2026 budget that expanded school food programs to an additional 155 schools and 62,000 students.^[2]

Think about what is being celebrated. In one of the richest cities in North America, so many families cannot afford to feed their own children that the city must do it for them, and leaders treat that as an achievement.

A fire department doesn’t brag about how many houses burned. When the number of families who can’t put food on the table keeps rising, the people in charge should be asking why, not lining up for photographs.

The numbers don’t lie

Toronto food banks recorded an all-time high of 4.1 million visits in a single year, a 340 per cent increase since 2019.^[3] That means more than one in ten Torontonians now rely on food banks to feed themselves and their families.^[3] One in four food bank clients is a child.^[3] And it is still getting worse: Daily Bread’s network recorded more than 2.5 million visits between January and August 2026, nearly four times the 664,876 visits in the same period of 2020.^[4]

And these are not people who stopped working. Nearly half of food bank users said someone in their household had a job, and more than a third of those working held multiple jobs. More than half hold a post-secondary degree or higher.^[3]

These are nurses’ aides, drivers, cleaners, students, and newcomers with professional degrees. They work full days, sometimes two jobs, and still end up in a food bank line. That is not a safety net. It is a city where people work for survival and fall further behind every month.

Food banks are not a campaign stage

On the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, Mayor Olivia Chow and Councillor Brad Bradford joined Premier Doug Ford and hundreds of volunteers at the Daily Bread Food Bank’s annual Thanksgiving food sort.^[4] Over the same holiday weekend, the campaigns turned their attention to Scarborough.

I don’t question the volunteers who sort that food. They are doing heroic work. But think about what it means when the most powerful people in this city and this province gather at a food bank, two weeks before an election, to be seen helping with a crisis that grew on their watch.

Food banks were built as emergency help. They have become part of everyday life for hundreds of thousands of our neighbours. Even food banks say this: Daily Bread’s CEO has said that every food bank visit is a policy failure.^[5] He is right. The people who made those visits necessary should not be taking a bow.

Mayor Chow also came to speak at our local mosque, the Islamic Society of Toronto (Darus Salaam) in Thorncliffe Park, on Friday, October 9. She talked about her plan to feed children. She did not talk about local jobs, and she did not talk about the large corporations that use Canadians’ resources to drive record profits while families line up at food banks. Feeding children matters. But if we never ask why their parents can’t afford to feed them, we are only managing the problem.^[6] That same weekend, she was sorting food at Daily Bread Food Bank alongside Doug Ford and Brad Bradford, posing for photos instead of fixing the causes.^[7]

I was in Scarborough that same weekend too, and not for a photo op. I sat with families and drivers and listened. They didn’t need another photo op. They needed someone to fix what is pushing them into those lines.

Free meals help people who are struggling, and I support them. But there is a difference between helping people through a crisis and keeping them in one. A city that manages hunger, year after year, instead of ending it, keeps families waiting in line and depending on handouts, grateful for the very people who failed them. That is not compassion. That is a disaster. People don’t want to be kept. They want a fair wage, a home they can afford, and the dignity of feeding their own children.

Fix the cause, not just the symptom

Families go hungry because rent eats their paycheque, transit costs too much, and wages haven’t kept up.

Too often, city money flows to the same few large corporations and developers, through deals made far from public view. Every dollar the city spends could be creating jobs in our own neighbourhoods. Instead, too much of it goes to those who already have the most access at City Hall.

That’s where I will act:

• Put money back in people’s pockets with a one-year freeze on residential property taxes, then work toward property taxes geared to income.
• Make transit free, phased in so every stage is funded, so getting to work stops costing families hundreds of dollars a month.
• Fight for homes people can afford, keep public land public, and crack down on bad landlords.
• Protect workers’ pay, starting with the taxi, rideshare and delivery drivers the city licenses.
• Create jobs by opening city contracts to more people. Break big contracts into smaller pieces that local and small businesses can actually bid on. Cut the bonding, insurance and red-tape barriers that shut them out. Pay small suppliers on time, and require local hiring and apprenticeships on city construction.
• End the backroom deals. Every major contract goes through open, competitive bidding, with sole-source deals only in true emergencies. Every lobbying meeting with City Hall is made public. Donors get no special access, developers get no special favours, and public land is never given away.

My plan includes hot lunch in every school too. The difference is I measure success by how many families no longer need it, not by how many meals we hand out.

Toronto will no longer throw its people away

A city that has to feed its children because parents who work full time can’t is not a city that is working. It’s a city that has accepted a broken system as normal.

I don’t accept it. Toronto should be the place that takes care of its people, and I will change the rules of the game.