Food insecurity in Black communities in Victoria: research after COVID-19

A table at a farmers' market, a line in a survey

The question that opens most food insecurity surveys in Canada sounds mild: did you worry that food would run out before you had money to buy more? Large national surveys ask it, and so do many smaller community-based research projects. It is followed by harder ones about smaller meals, skipped meals and whole days without eating. The answers are scored, and the score decides whether a household counts as food insecure. Behind each tally sits a kitchen. And when researchers sort those kitchens by who lives in them, one result keeps returning: food insecurity in Black communities in Canada runs at about twice the rate for people who are neither racialized nor Indigenous. This article sets out what the national figures show, what the COVID-19 years changed, how thin the data becomes once you reach Greater Victoria, and why community-based research has become the method many local food organizations reach for to fill that gap.

What national research shows about food insecurity in Black communities

Two sources carry most of the evidence. One is Statistics Canada's Canadian Income Survey, which has published food security figures for every year since 2018. The other is PROOF, a research program at the University of Toronto that studies household food insecurity and publishes analyses of the same survey data.

PROOF's earlier work, based on the Canadian Community Health Survey from 2005 to 2014, found 28.4% of Black households food insecure against 10% of white households. After adjusting for income and other household characteristics, Black households still had 3.56 times the odds of being food insecure. More than a third of Black children (36.6%) lived in a food-insecure household in that period.

The newer income survey keeps the pattern and raises the level. The table below uses Statistics Canada's own food insecurity table, which was revised with the release of the 2024 survey data to reflect 2021 Census population counts.

Years for the income survey follow Statistics Canada's reference years. PROOF reports its own annual totals from the same survey, most recently 9.8 million people in food-insecure households in 2025.

Why the rate is higher

Income explains a large part of food insecurity in Black communities, as it does for food insecurity generally. The PROOF fact sheet on race goes further, and its findings are uncomfortable. Owning a home normally protects a household, yet Black homeowners in the data carried about the same risk as white renters. Among white households, being an immigrant was linked to lower risk; among Black households, being born in Canada or abroad made no difference, and the risk stayed high either way. The researchers concluded that being racialized as Black was the overriding factor.

That points past individual budgeting toward hiring, wages, housing costs and the wealth families have been able to build across generations.

There is a quieter cost too. Culturally familiar food, such as cassava, plantain, Scotch bonnet, okra or the leafy greens described in the piece on African and Caribbean greens for island gardens, can be harder to find, and dearer, in a mid-sized city with few specialist grocers. A household can be food secure on paper and still unable to cook the meals it knows.

What COVID-19 changed, and what it did not

In the first spring of the pandemic, Statistics Canada ran a quick web panel. In May 2020, 14.6% of Canadians said their household had experienced food insecurity in the previous 30 days. The agency flagged that the panel under-represented groups known to be at higher risk, so the true figure was likely higher.

The annual figures tell a slower story. The national rate sat near 16% in 2019 and 2020. Then it climbed: 18.5% in 2021, 23.1% in 2022, 25.7% in 2023. Those were the years of rapid grocery inflation, and households already near the line were the first to cross it.

For Black people the curve started higher and rose further, reaching 47.0% in reference year 2023 before easing to 41.3% in 2024. The post-COVID increase did not create the gap in food insecurity in Black communities. It widened a gap that had been documented for well over a decade.

Victoria and British Columbia: where the data runs thin

British Columbia's overall rate tracks the national one closely: 23.2% of people lived in a food-insecure household in 2024. For Black British Columbians the picture blurs. Statistics Canada suppressed the provincial Black estimate for 2020 and 2021 as too unreliable to publish, then released 39.4% for 2022, 24.7% for 2023 and 35.2% for 2024, every one of them flagged use with caution. Swings that large usually say more about a small sample than about real change.

A number marked use with caution is still a number, but it cannot carry a local food plan on its own.

At the metropolitan level, the national survey gives no breakdown by race for Victoria. Greater Victoria is also less diverse than the province as a whole: in the 2021 Census, people who identify as a visible minority made up 16.7% of the metropolitan population of 388,470, against 34.4% across British Columbia. Black residents are a small share of that. Small populations are exactly the ones that national surveys struggle to see.

This is the practical case for local research in Victoria. If a food hub, a farmers' market voucher scheme or a municipal food strategy wants to know whether Black residents can reach fresh, familiar food, the answer will not arrive from Ottawa.

What community-based research is, and how it works

Community-based research (sometimes called community-based participatory research) is an approach to research in which the people affected by a problem are partners in studying it, not only subjects of it. In food research that usually means a few things:

• Community members sit on the team as co-researchers and help write the questions.
• Data collection mixes short surveys with longer conversations, such as interviews, kitchen-table discussions and small group sessions, often run by people the participants already know.
• Findings come back to the community before they go into a report, so people can correct, add and decide what is said publicly.
• The goal includes action: changes to programs, purchasing, land access or policy.

For Black communities in Greater Victoria the method fits the problem. Food insecurity among newcomers is tangled up with immigration status, credential recognition, housing and employment, and a short standard questionnaire cannot follow those threads. A conversation can. It can also capture what a national survey never asks: whether the food a family can afford is food they would recognize as dinner.

Community-based research is slower and messier than reading a table. It needs trust, interpreters, honoraria for participants and time to report back. Anyone who has watched a survey go out to a community and never return with results will understand why that last step matters as much as the first.

From findings to food on the table

Research of this kind tends to feed straight into growing and buying decisions. It shows which crops are missing from local markets, which is the starting point for trials of culturally relevant crops on Vancouver Island. It shows where land access blocks would-be growers, a theme picked up in the piece on land-based healing and food sovereignty. And it gives food banks and market programs a reason to stock yams, not only potatoes.

What remains open in Victoria is who will fund the next round of questions, and whether the people answering them will still be at the table when the results are read.