Every year, Food Freedom Day is calculated by taking Canadians’ total expenditure spent on food and non-alcoholic beverages and dividing it by the total Canadian household disposable income to create a per centage of the year by day.
This year, food Freedom Day was Feb. 8. Last year in 2021, it was Feb. 9. Even though most food prices have risen, the fact that Canadians spent 10.7 per cent of their disposable income on food in 2021, compared to 11 percent in 2020, Food . . .
Freedom Day 2022 was Feb. 8, compared to a day later, Feb. 9 in 2021. (A complete calculation can be found by googling Food Freedom Day. It’s a long read.)
Tax Freedom Day in 2022 is May 24. Calculation is similar. The increased strain and cost of our health care can be substantially blamed on the COVID virus. Similar increases can be found in the USA and other countries.
Sadly, the lower paid citizens have been hit the hardest in the per cent of their disposable income spent on both food and taxes. The Canadian Federation of Agriculture is very concerned about both food security, or the ability of the country to feed itself and the growing division between the rich and the not so rich.
Although Canada is much better than the USA, where the top one per cent make 40 times more income than the bottom 90 per cent combined, Canada sees a yearly increase in the dependency on food banks, Although the average home price in January in Canada hit $748,439.00, it was a market that only a small percentage of Canadians could even dream about. If anyone could afford it, it was a 20 per cent increase from 2021.
Even in a communist country where everyone is supposed to be treated equally, the top one percent of Russians captured 20 per cent of the national income.
Although most of us can agree that there is too much inequality in both wages and wealth I cannot name anyone, in any wage bracket who wishes to volunteer to have their wages or wealth cut? It seems like the older a country gets the greater the division in wealth becomes.
Our elected officials (municipal, provincial and federal) are our representatives and we have the right to contact them with complaints and preferably suggestions. (In writing is a good start.)
Inequality has been the norm for thousands of years. Don’t expect immediate change, but never give up.
