AI Analysis: Food insecurity by economic family type

Executive Summary

Food insecurity in Canada rose sharply from 16.8% in 2018 to a peak of 25.7% in 2023 — a nearly 9 percentage point increase driven largely by post-pandemic inflation — before a modest improvement to 24.0% in 2024. The dataset (Statistics Canada, Table 13100834) spans 7 years, 17 regions, and 20 economic family types, revealing that vulnerability is highly concentrated among specific household categories such as one-parent families and persons not in an economic family. While a slight stabilization emerged in 2024, food insecurity remains substantially higher than pre-pandemic levels across most family types and regions.

Key Findings

• Food insecurity rose from 16.8% in 2018 to a peak of 25.7% in 2023, representing a nearly 9 percentage point increase over 5 years, before slightly declining to 24.0% in 2024.
• The sharpest single-year surge occurred between 2021 (18.5%) and 2022 (23.1%) — a 4.6 percentage point jump likely driven by post-pandemic inflation pressures.
• Food security correspondingly fell from 83.2% in 2018 to a low of 74.3% in 2023, with only a partial recovery to 76.0% by 2024.
• The percentage data is right-skewed, with a mean of 29.0% but a median of 16.4%, indicating that most family types cluster below the average while a subset of high-risk groups pulls the mean upward.
• The number-of-persons data is heavily skewed, with a median of 45,400 far below the mean of 354,284, driven by large national-level aggregates reaching up to 31.3 million persons.
• Statistical outlier detection (z-score > 2) flagged specific family type, region, and year combinations with unusually high food insecurity rates, with certain family types showing significantly wider distributions indicating persistent volatility.
• Year-over-year correlation with food insecurity rates was near zero (r = 0.012–0.013), suggesting that while aggregate trends shifted meaningfully, the relative ranking of family types by insecurity rate remained largely stable across the 2018–2024 period.