Date: Jun. 25th, 2026 - 11:06 PM
Food Banks Canada Report:
Nova Scotia’s Failing Grade Should Start a Better Conversation About Poverty
By Dr. Denaige McDonnell
Nova Scotia received a D in Food Banks Canada’s 2026 Poverty Report Card. That grade should concern us. But it should also slow us down.
A failing grade is useful only if it helps us understand what is failing. Otherwise, it becomes another headline in a province already tired of bad news.
Food Banks Canada’s report is serious work. It evaluates poverty using 13 indicators across four areas: experience of poverty, poverty measures, material deprivation, and legislative progress. Its methodology combines Statistics Canada data, Labour Force Survey data, survey-based indicators, and qualitative assessment of government action.
For Nova Scotia, the numbers are sobering. The report shows a 10.9 per cent poverty rate, a 26.2 per cent food insecurity rate, 38 per cent of people spending more than 30 per cent of income on housing, and social assistance for a single adult reaching only 30.9 per cent of the poverty line, the lowest among provinces.
Those are not abstract statistics. They describe households making impossible trade-offs.
They also align with what organizations on the front lines are seeing. In a recent interview, Feed Nova Scotia Executive Director Ash Avery said food bank usage continues to rise at unprecedented levels. Feed Nova Scotia’s network recorded more than 43,000 visits in March 2026 alone, a 10 per cent increase over the previous year and a 69 per cent increase since 2019. Avery described food insecurity as becoming “more widespread, more complex and more normalized.”
But a good public conversation cannot stop at “things are bad.” It has to ask why, how we know, and whether proposed solutions will actually work.
That is where the report becomes most interesting.
Food Banks Canada is both a service-network organization and an advocacy organization. Its own description says it has worked for more than 40 years with more than 5,500 food banks and community organizations, serving people who made nearly 2.2 million food bank visits in one month. Food Banks Canada’s HungerCount also reports that food bank visits in March 2025 were the highest ever recorded and had doubled since March 2019.
That history gives the organization credibility. It also gives it a point of view.
Food Banks Canada is correct that poverty is structural. It is also fair to ask whether a food-bank-centred system, after 40 years, has become too normal in Canadian life. Food banks were never supposed to be permanent infrastructure. They were emergency responses.
Avery made a similar observation, noting that the food banking system emerged as a temporary response to economic hardship but has gradually become a permanent part of Canada’s social safety net because the systems intended to prevent poverty have failed to keep pace with the cost of living.
If usage keeps breaking records, the question is not whether food banks are working hard. Clearly, they are. The question is whether Canada has accepted charitable food distribution as a substitute for economic security.
The answer should make us uncomfortable.
There is strong evidence that food insecurity is tied to income, housing costs, disability, family structure, and broader vulnerability. Statistics Canada found household food insecurity in the provinces rose from 16.8 per cent in 2019 to 22.9 per cent in 2023. Statistics Canada has also shown that persons with disabilities face higher risk of food insecurity than those without disabilities.
Avery noted that nearly one-quarter of people accessing food banks now report employment as their primary source of income. That statistic challenges one of our most persistent assumptions. Work, once considered a reliable pathway out of poverty, is increasingly failing to provide economic security for many Nova Scotians.
So, no, poverty is not just about personal choices. It is about systems.
But systems thinking also requires discipline. Not every well-intentioned program is effective. Not every rebate is strategic. Not every subsidy changes the underlying conditions that make people poor.
The report recommends increasing social assistance, expanding rental benefits, improving tenant protections, restoring employment and skills training funding, reducing clawbacks, and creating a new provincial poverty reduction strategy. Many of these recommendations are reasonable. Some are overdue.
At the same time, Avery offered an important reminder: food insecurity is not fundamentally a food problem. It is a poverty problem. Food banks can alleviate hunger today, but charity alone cannot eliminate poverty.
Maytree’s Welfare in Canada data supports the report’s concern about income inadequacy. In 2024, total annual welfare income in Nova Scotia ranged from $9,415 for an unattached single considered employable to $15,117 for an unattached single with a disability. These are not livable incomes. Calling them inadequate is not ideology. It is math.
The strongest case for more income support is that help that does not meet basic needs does not actually help. It may keep someone technically alive while leaving them in crisis. That is expensive, in human terms and public terms.
But the strongest critique of the report is that it sometimes moves too quickly from identifying hardship to recommending more program spending, without enough attention to performance, delivery cost, or long-term system design.
Nova Scotia’s own budget shows significant spending in related areas, including $100.4 million for school food programs and $32.5 million for the Heating Assistance Rebate Program. These may provide real relief. But relief is not the same as resolution.
If public money is going into food, housing, training, and rebates, citizens deserve clear performance reporting. For every dollar invested in employment and skills programs, how many people found work? How many stayed employed? How many earned more? For every housing dollar, how many affordable units were created, at what cost, and for how long will they remain affordable?
This is not an argument against helping people. It is an argument for taking help seriously enough to measure whether it works.
The report is also right that Nova Scotia needs a renewed poverty reduction strategy. The province’s current strategy dates back to 2009 and was built around four goals: enable and reward work, improve supports for those in need, focus on children, and collaborate and coordinate. Those goals still sound fine. That is part of the problem. A strategy that still sounds fine after 17 years may also be too broad to drive accountability.
Canada’s federal poverty strategy offers a useful contrast. It established an official poverty line and set targets to reduce poverty by 20 per cent by 2020 and 50 per cent by 2030. Targets do not solve poverty by themselves, but they make failure harder to hide.
Nova Scotia needs that kind of clarity.
The child poverty data makes the case even stronger. The 2025 Report Card on Child and Family Poverty in Nova Scotia found that 22.7 per cent of children lived in poverty, including 26.4 per cent of children under six. It also found Nova Scotia had the highest child poverty rate in Atlantic Canada and the third-highest provincial rate in the country.
The same report found much higher poverty rates among some groups, including 43.5 per cent for on-reserve Indigenous children and 28.9 per cent for racialized children, compared with 17.2 per cent for non-racialized children. That does not mean policy should reduce people to demographic categories. It means honest measurement has to show where harm concentrates.
A serious poverty strategy should be universal in dignity and specific in evidence.
That means improving income adequacy where supports are plainly too low. It means reducing clawbacks that punish people for trying to work. It means connecting housing targets to labour force realities. It means investing in trades, construction capacity, food production, transportation, childcare, and healthcare access as poverty policy, not as separate files.
It also means being honest about trade-offs. Broad tax cuts may help many households, but they often provide the greatest dollar benefit to higher-income earners. Food Banks Canada makes this point in its discussion of Nova Scotia’s budget, noting that broad tax measures can deliver limited benefit to very low-income households because non-refundable tax credits are less useful to people with little taxable income.
That is a fair critique.
Still, targeted benefits have their own problems. They can create administrative burden, cliff effects, and dependency if they are not designed carefully. They can also miss the working poor who sit just above eligibility cutoffs but still cannot afford rent, food, heat, transportation, and childcare.
The solution is not to choose between compassion and discipline. We need both.
Nova Scotia’s D grade should be treated as a warning, not a verdict. The province is not without progress. Food Banks Canada notes that Nova Scotia’s material deprivation score improved substantially, with severe deprivation dropping from 26 per cent to 20 per cent and moderate deprivation falling from 37 per cent to 29 per cent. That matters. It suggests some households are experiencing real improvement.
But improvement from a weak baseline is not enough.
The question for Nova Scotia is not whether poverty exists. It does. The question is whether we are willing to build systems that reduce it rather than endlessly manage it.
Food banks should not be Canada’s poverty plan. Rebates should not be our affordability strategy. Emergency shelters should not be our housing policy. And annual reports should not be where accountability goes to die.
As Avery observed, food bank statistics are more than measures of charitable demand. They are indicators of how well society is performing in addressing poverty. Rising food bank use is not merely a reflection of need. It is a warning signal that larger systems are not working as intended.
The Food Banks Canada report gives Nova Scotia a D.
The next step is not outrage. It is sharper public management.
Set measurable targets. Publish program outcomes. Raise supports that are plainly inadequate. Build housing that people can actually afford. Invest in work pathways that lead somewhere. Track child poverty, disability poverty, Indigenous poverty, Black poverty, rural poverty, and working poverty with enough precision to act.
And above all, stop confusing activity with progress.
Poverty is not solved by proving we care. It is solved when fewer people need emergency help because the ordinary systems of life finally work.
