There was a full house Tuesday for the free community lunch at Dartmouth non-profit The North Grove — a regular occurrence these days due to the high cost of food.
“Right now the reason is people don't have adequate access to affordable food,” says Wendy Fraser, executive director of the Dartmouth-based non-profit.
Fraser says attendance at its community meals has increased 45 per cent year over year.
As well, North Grove’s food trading program was visited a record 143 times in May, which is an almost 200 per cent increase from December.
“Food prices are not manageable,” Fraser says.
“At the end of the day, I don’t feel like this is a food insecurity problem, it’s a poverty problem, and as long as people are living on an extremely limited income with no increases…. then people are being left further and further behind.”
For Dartmouth resident Troy Pallo, the services at The North Grove, including its community garden, are essential at a time when living on a fixed income means making difficult spending decisions.
“We sort of have to give and take,” says Pallo, who lives on disability.
When asked what he would like to see to make a difference, he says he has a few ideas.
“We need competition so they can bring down (food) prices,” he says, “or either raise the disability to come up above poverty and inflation.”
In a highly-anticipated report released Tuesday the Competition Bureau agrees that Canada’s concentrated grocery industry, dominated by a handful of corporate players, plays a part in the rising cost of food.
“Without changes in the competitive landscape, Canadians will not be able to fully benefit from competitive prices and product choices,” the report reads.
“The report states the obvious, we need more competition, but how do we get there?” asks Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University.
The Bureau’s recommendations for all levels of government include creating a national strategy to support new types of grocery businesses, introducing unit pricing requirements, and limiting a company's ability to shutout potential competitors by buying up neighboring real estate.
“Some companies buy land and leave it empty just to make sure the competition doesn't build another store right across the street,” Charlebois says.
But the report fails to address an even larger issue, he says.
“The food industry in Canada has a price fixing culture,” says Charlebois. “And there are emails out there now that suggest that more verticals than bread have been impacted by price fixing, so that’s the big elephant in the room that is not properly addressed in the report.”
“Instead of relying on companies coming forward with admissions,” he adds, “perhaps it’s time (for the Competition Bureau) to go after criminals…. Consumer trust is being impacted by that.”
The report also calls for more government support for independent grocers.
The co-owner of Dartmouth’s Gateway Meat Market agrees.
Tamara Selig says what her business needs right now is municipal support to expand the business and meet the demand for affordable groceries.
“As far as being able to get building permits pushed through a little bit faster, or just having less hoops to go through would be helpful,” Selig says.
“Something has to happen, the prices of groceries have been going crazy and we’ve seen that demand where people are coming to us now,” she says.
“Competition is necessary…(consumers) might not have access to come to us or go to other options. A lot of times in the communities they live in, (the big grocers are) their only choice, so competition is not a bad thing,” she explains.
The Bureau plans to check back on whether there has been progress made on its recommendations in three years.
In the meantime, shoppers continue to find savings wherever they can.
“Prices are too high and these big companies are just sucking up everything,” says shopper James Kearsley, who came from the Annapolis Valley into Dartmouth to shop at Selig’s store.
“We gotta eat, we gotta buy food,” he says, “we don't have a choice.”
