Public Option For Food?
By Keith Porteous
Food Banks Canada supports a network of over 5,500 food banks and community organizations across Canada, funded by the Federal and Provincial governments. These organizations saw nearly 2.2 million visits in a single month in 2025, which represents a doubling of usage since 2019, and continuing to trend upward, while many people simply skip meals. Recently, former NDP leader Thomas Mulcair declared that NDP Leadership front runner Avi Lewis’s proposal to create a food distribution alternative as a public option to the price fixing grocery monopolies is unrealistic.
MULCAIR: “I guess [Avi Lewis] wants the govt to run grocery stores because the govt’s so good at doing everything else. Actually, no … they can’t get you your passport or pension check (sic)”
Notwithstanding that my pension cheques arrive like clockwork each month, and putting aside Mulcair’s intentional fear-mongering to support the established centrists currently controlling the NDP, let’s examine the idea of a public option for distributing food more fairly, equitably, and most importantly, affordably. Why does a wealthy country like Canada, with so many corporate billionaires and big banks posting record profits, increasingly need food banks to feed its people? The truth is that it already has some socialized food distribution systems feeding people hiding in plain sight, but we can still do much more for food security.
Food banks operate, for the most part, in buildings that are funded by tax dollars, including the Denman Island Food Bank. The responsible local agencies, DICES and DIRCS, both receive government funding, and in some cases tax funded local employees, with the aid of volunteers, direct these activities in support of food security in our community. As well, our publicly funded school now works with these tax funded agencies to support subsidized hot lunches for our school kids. They’ve even received tax dollars to purchase food service appliances and equipment.
In the case of food banks, residents must show up to the publicly funded locations to receive some urgently needed food, because of high rents, low wages, and small public assistance and pension cheques that don’t meet their basic needs. In its own way, this represents socialized food distribution, tax supported, and making it possible for every adult and child in our community to be able to receive what they deserve as a basic right. To eat. These activities go on across our region, across the Province, and indeed across Canada. To be blunt, Thomas Mulcair is full of shit.
Avi Lewis must be doing something right because he has the establishment Party scared to death of his popularity, breaking all the previous records for fundraising in the history of the NDP, adding many new members in almost every riding. Avi is poised to win in spite of centrist opposition to his bid for NDP leadership. Bottom up democratic-socialism is on the rise, as a populist movement supported by the local grassroots efforts of a broad spectrum of Leftists who are tired of the Liberal-Lite policies that recently resulted in the loss of official party status for the first time in the NDP’s history. Doing more of the same would define insanity for the Left.
The closer Avi Lewis gets to victory, expect to see and hear more of this kind of centrist fear-mongering and more dishonest tactics to discredit him. When Tommy Douglas proposed socialized healthcare, he was met with the same kind of derision. The Liberals hated him, as did the Conservatives The media hated him, as did the medical establishment, and especially as the Americans did. They all did everything they could to stop him, and yet the citizenry overwhelmingly supported his proposal, later adopted by a Liberal government to stave off the very real challenge from an authentic populist Left NDP.
We should extend our gratitude to each tax supported local agency and their employees and volunteers, and the local growers and farm food producers, for their dedication to improving food security for every resident of the Denman Island community. It should be said that there are similar efforts on Hornby Island. Creating a world where people have affordable access to food and housing are the issues of our time. Respect to you all.
