AI Analysis: Food insecurity by selected demographic characteristics

Executive Summary

Food insecurity in Canada rose sharply from 16.8% in 2018 to a peak of 25.7% in 2023 — a near 9 percentage point increase in five years — before modestly easing to 24.0% in 2024, remaining far above pre-pandemic levels. Indigenous peoples, racialized communities, and certain immigrant groups face disproportionately severe food insecurity, with Inuit aged 15 and over averaging 41.2% nationally and Southeast Asian individuals in Manitoba reaching an extreme outlier rate of 85.1%. These trends, drawn from Statistics Canada Table 13100835 covering 40 demographic groups across 17 regions from 2018 to 2024, reveal deep and widening structural inequities in Canadian food security.

Key Findings

• Overall food insecurity climbed from 16.8% in 2018 to a peak of 25.7% in 2023, with the sharpest single-year jump occurring between 2021 and 2022 (+4.6 percentage points), before a modest decline to 24.0% in 2024.
• Severe food insecurity nearly doubled over the study period, rising from 3.6% in 2018 to 6.9% in 2023, indicating rapidly worsening conditions for the most vulnerable Canadians.
• A brief dip in food insecurity to 15.8% in 2020 is likely attributable to pandemic-era income support programs, after which rates rose sharply once those supports ended.
• Inuit aged 15 and over face the highest national average food insecurity rate at 41.2%, followed by Black Canadians at 26.5% and First Nations aged 15 and over at 25.9%, highlighting persistent disparities for Indigenous and racialized groups.
• The most extreme statistical outlier is Southeast Asian individuals in Manitoba, with an 85.1% food insecurity rate — 6.3 standard deviations above the national mean of 18.2%.
• Nunavut recorded the highest provincial food insecurity rate at 45.3% (2022), while Quebec recorded the lowest at 5.8% (2019), representing a nearly 8-fold difference across Canadian jurisdictions.
• Nearly 1 in 5 Canadians (18.4%) now face moderate-or-severe food insecurity as of 2024, up from 11.7% in 2018, underscoring that food access challenges have become a mainstream rather than marginal issue.