The Hive Free Food Program offers free lunches and grocery giveaways
Student Hunger needs Solutions not Band-Aids
Why Canada’s Grocery Benefit Won’t Fix a Broken Food System
by Nasreen Begum
Standing in the grocery aisle of Super Marché PA in Montreal, I stared at a $7 price tag for a box of organic spinach, then looked down at the heavy tote bag on my arm with fresh produce from Innovation Assistance Solidarity Market. I couldn’t help thinking: no rebate can fix a food system that is structurally broken.
On January 26, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government officially introduced the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit (Bill C-19), promising a one-time payment of up to $950 for individuals and $1,890 for families. Although I would not reject the cash, this policy is a textbook "band-aid" solution that treats hunger like a temporary problem rather than a symptom of ecological collapse.
We are incurring an ecological debt for a supply chain that prioritizes corporate profit over local resilience.
In January and February 2026, Canada recorded the highest rate of food inflation among the G7 countries at 7.3%, more expensive than the same month last year. A recent Concordia campus report reveals that 67% of students are currently facing some level of food insecurity. These conditions force students into impossible trade-offs between rent, textbooks, and nutrition. Nationally, the situation is no better: one in four Canadian households can no longer afford the essentials; half to three quarters if they are Indigenous. As Pellow and Brulle (2006) argue, ecological justice is not only about environmental protection, but about equitable access to the basic conditions necessary for human well-being.
The government’s response to give us money to buy food provides temporary relief, but it does nothing to stop that food from becoming more expensive in the first place. In the last year alone, the prices for fresh or frozen beef increased by 17.7%, and for coffee by 27.8%. These aren't just market fluctuations; they signal a global supply chain that is precariously vulnerable to increasingly adverse weather conditions and political conflicts. Every time a drought in California or a flood in the Maritimes damages a crop, the price at our grocery store spikes. Every time a government shifts its stance on tariffs to influence trade agreements, the impacts ripple across the world. In a market that heavily relies on imported produce with a small number of large grocery stores, these supply shocks translate into higher retail prices, and consumers bear the brunt of these losses.
We are incurring an ecological debt for a supply chain that prioritizes corporate profit over local resilience.
To Carney’s credit, the new measures do include an interesting tax write-off for greenhouse buildings to encourage domestic production. And it is true that the grocery benefit provides some immediate relief from the cost-of-living crisis. Yet emergency funds without a sustained long-term solution and structural reform risk trapping us in permanent crisis management. Canada’s 2026 Food Price Report projects that the average family will spend nearly $1,000 more on food this year. A one-time check from the government won't stop the next climate disaster from clearing out the produce section at our local supermarket. We need a much larger shift.
To ensure that every Canadian, from the student in Montreal to the family in the North, has a seat at the table, we must rebuild our food system from the ground up.
True affordability requires a radical localization of our food infrastructure. We need to go further than a rebate; we should look to the models already thriving at the local level. For instance, student-run food initiatives like the Hive Café Co-op and The People’s Potato serve free vegan meals from Monday to Thursday, during the school year. These student-led organizations are examples of non-market-driven, anti-corporate food systems that provide local, affordable, and sustainable food to the community out of a sense of solidarity and care. They were started as fee levy groups with funding as low as $ 0.15 per credit, meaning full-time undergraduate students were paying less than $5 a year for a healthy daily lunch at school. The Hive Free Food Program at Loyola currently serves breakfast and lunch five times a week on a fee levy of 35 cents, funded by Arts and Science students. This program aims to expand become an undergraduate fee levy group next, in order to increase the frequency of their new dinner program, which currently runs 3 nights weekly.
The Concordia Food Coalition Board
At the municipal level, in New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently proposed a $70 million plan to launch city-run grocery stores. Similarly, the City of Montreal is planning on requiring grocery stores and restaurants to donate their unsold food to food banks and charity organizations like Moisson Montreal through the Food Recovery in Supermarkets Program (FRSP). This proposal recognizes that food is not merely a private commodity but an essential infrastructure for a community’s resilience during volatile global market fluctuations.
The Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit might help me pay for my groceries this week, but it won’t protect me from the next climate disaster that wipes out a harvest. No one can buy their way out of an ecological crisis. To ensure that every Canadian, from the student in Montreal to the family in the North, has a seat at the table, we must rebuild our food system from the ground up. This means investing in local greenhouses, protecting gardens in the city, and supporting local food organizations across communities and universities across the country, creating infrastructure for food sovereignty. It is time to start building our future from the soil beneath our feet.
Nasreen Begum is a Human Environment student at Concordia, Montreal, QC. She is passionate about food justice, sustainability and community-driven change. As an outreach intern at the Concordia Food Coalition, she aims to strengthen an equitable, student-run campus food system.
Bibliography:
Legislation Passes to Deliver New Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit. Government of Canada - Canada.ca (2026, February 12)
Student Food Insecurity Report - Concordia University (2023/2026)
Dalhousie University. (2025, December). Canada’s Food Price Report (2026)
Montreal grocery stores and restaurants may soon be required to donate unsold food - Cult MTL. (2026)
Environmental justice: Human health and environmental inequalities. Annual Review of Public Health, 27, 103–124 - Brulle, R. J., & Pellow, D. N. (2006)
