A collective call to action: Right To Food’s recommendations to the government’s Standing Committee on Finance

Right To Food’s pre-budget recommendations were endorsed by 180 organizations across Canada, demonstrating a growing, united call for action from frontline organizations. These recommendations reflect what communities across the country are calling for: policies that uphold dignity, reduce poverty, and recognize food as a human right.

Watch the video of Jasmine’s speech:

Or, read the transcript of Jasmine’s speech here:

Speech to House of Common’s Standing Committee on Finance, May 28, 2026

Good morning, and thanks for having me. It’s great to see some familiar faces on the committee.

My name is Jasmine Ramze Rezaee. I’m the Director of Policy and Community Action at Right To Food. We are a national food security organization that leads the community food centre movement, and we collaborate with more than 400 partners across the country.

Today, May 28, is actually World Hunger Day, and hunger — as you can appreciate — is a growing crisis around the world, including here in Canada.

We are a talented, resourceful, and abundant nation, yet we continue to grapple with an uncomfortable reality: nearly a quarter of our population is food insecure. That is almost 10 million Canadians including 2.4 million children.

In a country as wealthy as ours, many people can’t afford to eat.

Hunger in Canada is not primarily about food scarcity in the way it may be in other parts of the world. Our grocery aisles are well stocked. We talk about food insecurity because for millions of Canadians there simply isn’t enough money to afford food — especially healthy food.

Food insecurity tracks income insecurity far more closely than it tracks food availability in our country. Which means one of the key solutions to food insecurity is improving people’s incomes.

So our pre-budget submission was co-created with partners across our network and – I’m very pleased to share – endorsed by 180 Canadian organizations. We have four recommendations:

• First, we’re calling for a national target to cut household food insecurity in half and eliminate severe food insecurity.
• Second, we’re calling for improvements to the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit, including increasing the amount and making it permanent.
• Third – like so many others – we’re calling for major improvements to the Canada Disability Benefit because people with disabilities continue to experience some of the highest rates of food insecurity and poverty in our society.
• And fourth, we’re calling for greater investment in Indigenous food sovereignty, particularly in northern and remote communities where food insecurity remains very high and is also related to access to land and removing barriers to traditional foods.

For all the reasons I have just mentioned, we believe the federal government’s recently announced National Food Security Strategy needs a strong income-security lens. We penned a sector-wide letter to several ministers calling for income security to be a key pillar of the strategy but we’re concerned it may be glossed over. We are certain that if we don’t address inadequate incomes, food insecurity will continue to proliferate in our country regardless of broader food-system discussions.

Perhaps the most important point I want to impart on the committee is this: Canada’s food insecurity crisis is entirely solvable. We already know what policies reduce poverty and hunger. What is required now is the political courage to act — from the government and from all parties.

Municipalities across the country are declaring food insecurity emergencies. But the issue isn’t receiving comparable federal attention.

When 10 million people are struggling to afford enough food, it’s not a marginal issue. It’s not the outcome of individual failures or poor decision-making. It is a structural economic issue tied to rising housing costs, labour market precarity, and a social safety net that has not kept pace with the cost of living. The rising cost of food has only made things worse.

One in three workers in Canada is now precariously employed. Many of those people are food insecure.

What is festering in communities across this country is profound stress and anxiety about the future. We’re hearing from people working full-time jobs who can’t buy fresh produce. Parents skipping meals to feed their kids. People taking on more and more debt. All of this has devastating economic, health, education, and social costs for our society.

Community organizations are doing everything to respond to rising needs, but their rapid expansion is itself evidence that governments have offloaded the responsibility of upholding the right to food onto an underfunded and overstretched sector.

We are asking you to treat food insecurity with the same urgency being applied to other major national challenges. Again, we are a resourceful and abundant nation. How we share our collective wealth matters — and right now, too many households are being told to hold on a little longer while their quality of life steadily erodes.

The decisions made in Budget 2026 will have serious ramifications for generations to come. This is a really important budget. Many of you entered public life because you believe governments can improve people’s lives. This is one of those moments where Canadians are really counting on you.

At Right To Food, we are ready to work with you to make hunger a thing of the past.

Thank you for your time, and I welcome any questions you may have.