For low-income Canadians, filing a tax return should unlock access to the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit. As tax season approaches, will it make a meaningful difference at the dinner table?
The Carney government announced the new benefit in January 2026 for Canadians who are struggling with the cost of food. It will go out to more than 12 million people who are registered in the GST credit program for those earning $56,000 or less. No application is required — the Canada Revenue Agency calculates eligibility automatically based on the previous year’s tax return.
Structured as a sweetener to the existing GST credit, the benefit delivers a one-time top-up worth 50 per cent of the credit’s annual value, reduced to a 25 per cent annual increase for five years beginning in July 2026. According to H&R Block, that means a single person can get up to $950 this year ($700 in future years), up from $540; a family of four can receive as much as $1,890 this year (up from $1,100 last year) and $1,400 in future.
However, experts say that the benefit isn’t enough to make a difference for low-income households that are trying to make ends meet, especially coming on the heels of the Carney government cancelling the Canada Carbon Rebate program (along with consumer-facing federal carbon tax on fuels), worth $1,120 a year to Ontario families of four, in March 2025.
“It’s much, much, much too small,” said Valerie Tarasuk, professor emerita in the department of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto and principal investigator of PROOF, Canada’s leading food insecurity research program. “It’s coming on the heels of the cancellation of the carbon rebate cheques. So in fact, it doesn’t even equal what people are losing.”
Tarasuk is also skeptical of the benefit’s framing. Advocates had long pushed for a groceries and essentials benefit, but what was announced is a pale version of what they envisioned, she said. “The government has taken the name, but the people advocating for this wanted something much more adequate and more permanent,” she said.
The original modelling behind the benefit assumed Canadians were still receiving their quarterly carbon rebate cheques. “All of those assumptions hinged on a baseline that got changed when the carbon tax was cancelled. Where is the calculation that says those amounts are enough?”
Canada’s Food Price Report 2026 predicts food prices will increase by between four to six per cent this year. Tariffs, climate shocks, global trade instability and strain on domestic food manufacturing are pushing costs higher.
Sylvain Charlebois, a food economist and senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, warns that Canada’s affordability crisis runs far deeper than any single payment can fix. “Our food inflation problem is structural. It is not cyclical, it’s not temporary,” he said. “And I don’t think we’ve accepted that yet in Canada.”
Charlebois argues that the roots of food affordability issues stretch back to the financial crisis in 2008, when food inflation began outpacing general inflation. “When you look at the historical data in Canada on the cost of living index and the food price index, our problems really started in 2008, under Stephen J. Harper,” he says. “You saw this decoupling between inflation and food inflation, and we never recovered since. The Trudeau era made things worse.”
He credits the efforts of the Carney government in trying to support struggling Canadian families. “It’s good to see Ottawa help people in need. It is targeted, but at the same time, we need to figure out other ways to help the food economy and eventually stabilize prices over time in Canada,” he said.
The scale of the food affordability crisis is difficult to overstate. In Ontario, food bank use has risen 87 per cent since 2019, according to Feed Ontario’s 2025 Hunger Report. Between April 2024 and March 2025, one million people turned to Ontario’s food banks for help, collectively logging more than 8.7 million visits. That’s nearly double the number of people using these programs half a decade ago.
In Toronto alone, there were more than 4.1 million food bank visits last year, which is 636,000 more than the year before and 340 per cent higher than in 2019. For the first time, that surge came even as unemployment remained relatively low, suggesting that employment status is no longer a reliable shield against hunger.
The federal government says it moved quickly and is aware of the scale of the problem. “Our new government moved quickly to deliver meaningful support for Canadians,” Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc said when the legislation received royal assent in February. “With many people feeling the strain of rising everyday expenses, our government is taking a responsible and pragmatic approach: tackling long-term structural challenges while acting now.”
The government says the benefit will also reach 500,000 Canadians not previously covered, at a projected total cost of $8.6 billion over five years. (Despite its name, there are no strings attached — the money does not have to be spent on food.)
Nick Saul, CEO of Right to Food Canada, a non-profit organization that creates and supports community food centres across the country, says the food crisis has been hiding in plain sight for years.
“Food insecurity is one of those things you can kind of hide,” Saul says. “You keep a roof over your head as best you can, you put your kids in after-school programs, you make sure they’re clothed. It is, weirdly, as foundational as it is to health and well-being, one of those things people can hedge against, and that’s not right.”
It is a reality that the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit does little to change, he said.
“There’s a tension we’re trying to navigate to acknowledge that the government is paying some attention, but also to underline that it is so far from adequate,” Saul said. “It just does not deliver, nor is there a single thing that can deliver.”
Natasha (Yu Chia) Hu, is a journalism fellow at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and a food systems and public health professional in New York City.
