Why Canada Can No Longer Have Nice Things

What is behind the exponential rise in food bank usage in Canada?

When I was a child in the early 2000s, my elementary school would do a food drive each year, usually around the holiday season. Students in our class would bring non-perishable food items to school and place them in a large cardboard box in our classroom. After a couple of weeks, the item our school had received from students would be donated to a local food bank, a charitable organization which offers free food to those in need. Our teacher set goals for us, which if we achieve, we would be rewarded with prizes such as a pizza party or a sports day.

Not only do I remember being excited by the prospect spending a Friday afternoon playing dodgeball and eating pepperoni pizza rather than sitting in math class, but I also remember feeling like I was doing my civic duty. I imagined that somewhere there were Canadian boys or girls enjoying meals of spaghetti, baked beans, or Kraft Dinner rather than going hungry over the cold winter months on account of my good deed.

The existence of food banks is a product of a prosperous, socially cohesive, high trust society. First of all, said society needs to have enough wealth to go around that a sizeable portion of the population are able to spare some extra dollars to help those less fortunate than them. Secondly, it requires that average citizens are not only capable of making such contributions, but that they are also inclined to do so out of a sense of belonging in and solidarity with the broader society. Lastly, it requires on a sense of honour among the lower classes. There are no laws regulating who can or can’t use food bank services. They rely on the public having enough honesty to only use them out of necessity and not simply exploit the goodwill of others.

These three qualities made Canada, as a country, the envy of the world 20 years ago. It is these same three qualities which the Canadian political, educational, and media establishment has been deliberately and maliciously working to undermine since then. According to CBC, a report released by Food Banks Canada stated that food banks across the country are overwhelmed with a 90% increase in demand from 2019 to 2024. The report states that 30% of food banks nationwide have run out of food all together.

Canada has gained a reputation in recent years as an exorbitantly expensive place to live. Our country’s two largest cities, Toronto and Vancouver, have both earn a spot on a recently published list of the top 10 most “impossibly unaffordable” cities in the world. Canada’s cost-of-living crisis, spurred on by out-of-control inflation, has been identified as the culprit for the exponential rise in demand for food bank services by organizations like Food Banks Canada.

A major factor behind the cost-of-living crisis is the price of food itself, which has seen a major increase in Canada in the past few years. Part of the blame for this can be placed upon the Trudeau government’s controversial new carbon tax, introduced as part of the Liberal Government’s commitment to combating the supposed threat of climate change. What this amounts to is taxing the entire supply chain from agriculture, to manufacturing, to shipping, all of which is being felt by consumers at the grocery store where prices have risen significantly.

Aside from the price of food itself, an even more significant factor contributing to Canada’s enormous spike in cost-of-living is housing prices. According to the The Conversation, housing costs in Canada are some of the highest among OECD countries with prices increasing far more rapidly than wages. Representatives of food banks in Canada agree that the increase in demand for food bank services is largely driven by the unmanageable costs of housing in the country. Many are unable to afford food due to the large portions of their incomes which they are forced to put towards paying rent. The report by Food Banks Canada states that 70% of food bank clients are in the rental market for housing.

However, there is one underlying issue upstream from all of this: immigration. Canada has had some of the highest rates of immigration in the Western world for the past 30 years, but in 2021, the number were increased exponentially. Statistics Canada reports a massive increase in quarterly immigration numbers starting in Q3 2021 and continuing onto Q2 2024, the most recent time period for which data is available. According to Reuters, Canada’s population increased by 1.27 million in 2023 alone, 97.6% of which was due to immigration, putting Canada’s population growth among the highest for developed countries.

And I thought mass immigration was bad in 2018…

Housing is a finite commodity with an inelastic demand. In addition, the supply of housing increases very slowly as new housing developments take a long time to build. It doesn’t require a PhD in Economics (just a little moral courage) to realize that increasing the population by such a vast amount so suddenly will cause a major jump in demand for housing, thus causing the price to follow suit. Labour is likewise a commodity. Rapidly increasing the supply to the point at which it outpaces demand will cause wages to fall proportionally to prices, thus making housing (and other necessities) even more unaffordable.

So, Canada is in some economic turmoil. But isn’t it times like these which food banks were made for? Shouldn’t these hard times bring out the best in us? With a little of that benevolence which I felt as a grade schooler as I placed cans of corn in that cardboard box in my classroom, we’ll get through this, right? Times are tough, but there are still some out there with the ability and generosity to help those in need, aren’t there? Unfortunately, it is not just the prosperity of the Canada of my youth which is quickly evaporating, but the entire social fabric which made things like food banks possible.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, the existence of food banks isn’t simply a product of excess material wealth, but of a high-trust and socially cohesive society. That society-wide level of integrity, much like Canada’s material comfort, is a thing of the past now too. The most common country of origin of recent immigrants to Canada is by far India. The first job I ever worked in my life was at a fast-food restaurant run by Indians. I’ll save that story for another time, but if there’s one thing I learned from that job, it’s that the Indian mentality is the absolute antithesis of the values of honesty, compassion, and civic duty which I grew up with.

Food banks rely on both the upper classes having the generosity to give out of the goodness of their hearts and the lower classes having the integrity to only use them as a last resort. Anyone who has ever had any extensive experience with Indians will know that they would never in a million years give away food for free, regardless of their socio-economic standing. Yet, they would feel no shame whatsoever in taking advantage of the naivety of those who would, even if it weren’t out of necessity. For them, it would just be an opportunity to save a couple of bucks.

According to National Post, the same report from Food Banks Canada stated that “newcomers” to Canada (those who have lived in Canada for less than five years) accounted for 80% of new food bank clients in Toronto. It also states that 32% of food bank clients across the country have been in Canada for less than a decade. If so many recent arrivals in Canada are in fact incapable of affording food, that should serve to further disprove the lie that immigration is good for our economy. However, general poverty isn’t the only explanation for why food banks are suddenly running out of food.

A massive number of recent immigrants to Canada have entered the country on student visas. At the end of 2023, Canada had an astonishing 1 million active student visas, 41% of which were held by citizens of India. Since the Trudeau Government opened the floodgates in 2021, numerous videos have been posted to social media of Indian students boasting about how they can use food banks to get free food in Canada in foreign languages, presumably to persuade more of their compatriots to immigrate to our country and exploit our gullibility as well.

In order to receive a student visa, international students are supposed to be able to prove that they can support themselves financially while in Canada. Food banks are not intended for them. However, these organizations work on the honour system and honour isn’t exactly something India is known for. Not only are these dirtbags low enough to exploit Canadians’ good nature for their own financial gain. They have the gall to go on social media and brag about doing so. The average Canadian would consider this kind of behaviour repulsive, but I guess we shouldn’t expect citizens of a country where defecating in the street is commonplace to have much of a sense of shame.

I’m sure Indians and liberals in Canada would try to cope and say that these videos aren’t representative of Indian foreign students as a whole, but the implicit actions of one food bank tells another story. Recently, a Vancouver-based food bank announced that they will no longer provide food to first-year international students. This is the most politically correct way possible that they can deliberately limit the number of Indians accessing the food bank. While they’d never dare admit this openly, the reality is that if you want a food bank to function as it was intended, you have to exclude Indians. Otherwise, they’ll ravage the system until there’s none left for anyone.

If they told you why, they’d be fired.

Obviously, I have zero expectations that “newcomers” to Canada would ever have the compassion or sense of civic duty to do something as selfless as donate food to the needy, but going forward, will Canadians even do so? Perhaps a better question is, should we continue to do so? Not only do food banks require some semblance of honesty on the part of the poor, they also require a sense of social responsibility on the part of the well-off. There must actually be people who are able and willing to donate to them.

The neighbourhood I grew up in and the elementary school I attended in the suburbs of Toronto were supermajority white. While this was years before I understood the issues of race, ethnicity, and identity, when I made my contributions to my school’s food drive as a youngster, my default assumption was that those reaping the benefits would’ve been white Canadians too. I just assumed that they shared my culture, values, and ethnicity. The only difference I imagined was their socio-economic status. This made me actually want to contribute.

However, the mental image of “new Canadians” with names like “Pooja” or “Akshit” carrying home sacks of canned goods, laughing as they take advantage of my naïve altruism doesn’t exactly put me in a charitable mood. Other than ageing boomers who have secluded themselves from society’s problems by buying houses in the suburbs 30 years ago, who would actually feel impelled to make such contributions in present-day Canada?

Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints tells the story of an armada of ships which set sail from India for France, carrying a million passengers hoping to trade the squalor of the Ganges for the prosperity of Europe. Paralyzed by an overwhelming sense of pathological altruism and a foolhardy belief in the universalist egalitarian brotherhood of man, the Western world does nothing to stop the armada, allowing them to disembark in the south of France. This signals that the West is free for the taking, and further waves of migrants swamp the white world.

Since its publication over 50 years ago, The Camp of the Saints has been called far-right white supremacist propaganda, but did anyone predict the world of today more accurately than Jean Raspail? The numbers of migrants from India who flood into France in his fictional novel aren’t too far off from the number of Indians who have actually entered Canada in the past couple of years. And if we take into account that France had a larger population in 1973 than Canada does today, proportionally, the numbers are even higher. You can’t really write his warning off as paranoid racist fear mongering anymore, can you?

Not only did Raspail correctly predict the catalyst of the present-day dystopia, but he also perfectly foretold the psychology behind it. Within my lifetime, Canada has gone from a world class country in terms of standard of living to a punishingly expensive, woke madhouse. What happened? We sacrificed all our fortune on the altar of this universalist egalitarian delusion. Ironically, it’s this same excessive sense of empathy and compassion which got me to enthusiastically haul cans of peas to school for our food drive campaigns as a kid.

Mass non-white immigration to Canada didn’t start with Justin Trudeau. It has been going on for longer than I’ve been alive. Even though I always assumed other white Canadians would be the beneficiaries of my benevolence, a look at the demographic data of Toronto from when I was in school shows that that probably wasn’t the case even back then. While we might not have felt the consequences of our luxury beliefs a few decades ago, that doesn’t make them appear any less foolish in hindsight.

What is the root cause of Canada’s fall from grace? You can point to Jewish subversion in the institutions, resentful leftist nihilists who just want the world to see the world burn, or greedy capitalists who want to undercut wages by importing a low-IQ slave class. These are valid points, but all of this only could’ve happened because of one thing: our good nature. The fact that our moral compass could be inverted against our own interests to such a degree was only possible because had a moral compass to begin with, something which our “newcomers” have shown is not a universal.

Canada is a cautionary tale which proves the truth of the proverb that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Now, I haven’t thrown the baby out with the bathwater. I still think that empathy is a genuinely good human quality. But the moral of the story is that empathy should be reserved for those who would extend it to you if your roles were reversed. Otherwise, you’re just inviting every ghoulish bastard in the world to take advantage of you. I’d like to live in a country where we give out free food to the needy out of the goodness of our hearts like its candy on Halloween, but that’s not the country we have anymore.

Speaking of Halloween, that’s another nice thing which may also soon be a thing of the past. It’s a common practice for homeowners to leave bowls of candy by their front doors on October 31st each year, inviting gleeful kiddies to help themselves to some delicious chocolate or lollipops. They just leave the candy there for the taking. Afterall, no one would sink to such lows of depravity as to literally steal candy from children on Halloween, right? In the old Canada, that was the case, but not anymore. This year, a woman was caught on a dozen different door cams in Markham going from house to house, looking for unattended bowls of candy and dumping them into a large sack, claiming them all for herself. And there are no prizes for guessing her ethnic background…