CityNews

Professor Valerie Tarasuk, with the University of Toronto, is an expert on food insecurity and says food banks are the last resort for Canadians.

She feels a universal basic income would help people avoid having to turn to food banks in the first place.

“We can think of food banks as a kind of the canary in the coal mine, that it when people end up in those places. It’s a signal to us that our system of income supports isn’t sufficient or that there’s a crack in it that’s causing some people to tumble down like that,” she says. “Because using a food bank is really a strategy of last resort. It’s not something that Canadians do easily.