Toronto welfare recipients can’t afford a minimum healthy diet as defined under the province’s own nutritional guidelines, says a recent U of T study.

The study looked at the bare minimum expenditures of three hypothetical households, compared to what welfare provided.

“If there are families out there who can’t even put food on the table with welfare assistance, we have to re-examine what it means to be on welfare with what type of housing,” said Dr. Valerie Tarasuk, of the Department of Nutritional Sciences. Tarasuk co-authored the study, which appeared in the latest Canadian Journal of Public Health, with Nicholas Vozoris and Barbara Davis.

“The interesting part of the study is that our figures use the conservative food estimates from the provincial government,” he said.

At normal Toronto rental rates, single-person households and those with two parents and two children fell significantly short of being able to meet basic needs. Single-parent, two-children families fared only marginally better.

But in rent-geared-to-income housing, only single-person welfare recipients could not make ends meet. Unfortunately, the waiting list for such housing is 50,000 people long—meaning a 10-year wait in most cases.

Government statistics say it takes a single parent with a young child a minimum of $38.21 per week to eat nutritiously. It also notes that food costs have risen more than 10 per cent since the previous year.

“Our current welfare program doesn’t adequately take into account the rise of these food costs,” said Tarasuk. While she acknowledges that welfare can be argued to be a short-term solution to unemployment, she questions its value if families supported by it have to depend on food banks to make ends meet.

“…It is unconscionable that what little support welfare recipients receive does not provide for the basic needs as outlined by the Ontario government’s own standards. On campus, the struggle to close the food gap is evident in the usage numbers at the U of T food bank,” says its director, Michelle Mitrovich.

Last year, an average of 60 students used the food bank per week, she said, and “the [student] numbers have definitely increased this year.”