VANCOUVER—An annual awareness campaign that challenges British Columbians to eat on a welfare recipient’s budget for a week won’t take place this year because the calculated food budget is too low to buy even three loaves of bread.

Raise the Rates, a B.C. coalition of anti-poverty and housing advocates, has run the Welfare Food Challenge since 2012. Each year, organizers calculate how much money B.C. welfare recipients would have left for food each week after they have paid for a cheap room, some bus tickets and basic hygiene supplies.

Last year the amount was $19. This year — even without budgeting for hygiene and a phone — the money left over after rent is $6 per week.

Based on a B.C. Centre for Disease Control report released last month, the minimum cost for a week’s worth of healthy food in 2017 would be around $68.40 for a woman and $80.40 for a man.

The $6 budget, according to Raise the Rates volunteer and recently elected Vancouver City Councillor Jean Swanson, is too little to ask anyone to live off of, even for a week.

She wrote an op-ed in The Tyee this week explaining that the challenge could not take place this year.

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Reached by StarMetro on Wednesday, Swanson said the reason the food budget Raise the Rates calculated went down so much in 2018 was a spike in housing costs.

“The reason we wanted to make the announcement is to show how dire things are in spite of the fact that we have a minister of poverty reduction,” Swanson said.

She said measures taken by B.C.’s NDP government, like lowering MSP premiums, may help individuals get out of poverty if they were close to the poverty line to begin with.

“But people on welfare are really, really far below the poverty line, and it’s going to take some bucks to get them up,” she said.

Shane Simpson, minister of social development and poverty reduction, said in an interview Wednesday that the province’s Poverty Reduction plan to be released by the end of March will tackle both affordability and food security as related issues.

The ministry consulted with about 9,000 people during the drafting of the plan. Individuals living in poverty in B.C. reported three main expense concerns: housing, food and transportation.

“We heard lots of people making choices between those, choices that many don’t have to make,” Simpson said. “Figuring out how to bring those costs down or increasing people’s incomes — That’s part of the challenge of the plan.”

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The Welfare Food Challenge attracted some high-profile participants in previous years, including musician Bif Naked. Swanson hopes her new platform as a city councillor could help shine a light on the campaign’s message, even though it’s not happening this year.

“If anything will make a difference, I want to use it,” she said.

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