Jamie Sarkonak: When your food bank donations subsidize fraud and video games

The struggling food bank has been a recurring motif in the news in recent weeks. Food aid agencies across the country are presenting various regional hunger reports to the public, and the results are consistently depressing: usage is higher than ever, donations are down and “we don’t know how we’re going to keep up.”

On the other hand, food bank abuse seems to be a recurring problem. What’s being done to prevent it from happening? It’s not all that clear.

Here’s who I think about when I’m confronted with the donation bin at the grocery story: immigration YouTuber MR PATEL, who in 2022, as an engineering student on a study visa, showed his viewers how to get $500 in free food by simply visiting the food bank. Media caught on — True North (as it was then) breaking much of the coverage — and a whole lot of negative attention was drawn; Patel eventually the video.

To his credit, he made a in 2024 of himself donating food to a food bank and explaining that people shouldn’t use such services unless in serious need. Of his past actions, he said he didn’t know any better at the time: he saw a long line of international students at his university one day, was told that they got free food on Thursdays, and figured that was that.

“I am not making a video here because True North talked about me…. If I were in (the reporter’s) place, I would have done the same,” he in Hindi. “If any students post this stuff in the future, then nothing can be more vulgar than this.”

But there are many others who never blew up online and who quietly got to enjoy their free food. One woman who moved from Nigeria to Canada in 2022 uploaded a video of herself purchasing and — followed a month later by a video about a .

And one couple who appeared to have moved from India to Sydney in Cape Breton in 2022 filmed themselves touring their local food bank in 2023: aside from a couple of local seniors, the primary clients be newcomers. Most speakers in the video conversed in Hindi, but one man by the couple gave the following message in English to viewers overseas: “Whatever is there in your own country, just leave everything behind you, and just come over here…. You come here and taste Canada like me.”

Search up some variation of “free food Canada” and you’ll find many others.

If you were born here, you were likely inoculated with the strong taboo for taking freebies from baskets destined for people in serious need — people escaping spousal abuse with nothing; people who can’t work due to severe physical disability; people who suddenly lose their home in a fire. Some recent immigrants might not be aware of that convention; others might be, but simply don’t care to follow it; others still might be in need, and perhaps shouldn’t have been granted visas in the first place. Times are already tough in Canada, and we shouldn’t be welcoming more people who are in need of support.

But it seems that food banks have largely been working to make themselves more exploitable. From website FAQs to media interviews about increased strain, many appear to assume that every single person accessing their services is in need.

Last week, CTV News reported on a report showing that the number of food bank users has nearly doubled; those interviewed blamed the rising cost of living — which is no doubt a large factor. And news outlets across the country covered the annual hunger report from Food Banks Canada, gasping at the skyrocketing usage figures.

That report’s findings correlated roughly with the rise of free food videos: among newcomers who have been here for less than 10 years, 34 per cent are using food banks — but back in 2019, that figure was 13 per cent. In addition to that, one-fifth of food bank users have a job, according to the report’s methodology.

What the report didn’t include were figures that could restore confidence in their institutions. What proportion of food banks have family income requirements for eligibility? How many serve international students? What steps were taken in the past year to stop bad actors from taking what they shouldn’t? The odd food bank here and there has announced restrictions on international students, but there’s no collective voice being used to instill confidence in food banks as a whole.

And while some food banks are reducing access for all clients as a means of rationing what little they have, they’re dealing with fewer donations. The Central Okanagan Food Bank in B.C. pleaded to the news last week about it, as did a food bank in Victoria; they didn’t explain how they were preventing abuse, though. On the other side of the country, Nova Scotia’s food banks are seeing donations drop — but if that food bank tour video is representative of everywhere else in the province, you can see why.

Ideally, we’d care to enforce our cultural expectation of self-reliance. The inconvenient fact is that the shame and stigma we’ve all been trained to feel is the force field that keeps charity services intact. Take that away and, well, people aren’t going to want to give if they think they’re supporting non-citizens looking to offset their gaming console spending.

National Post