Salvation Army Survey: 31% of Canadians Skip or Shrink Meals Over Grocery Prices
By Claudette
Posted Nov 12, 2026 at 8:07 PM
The Salvation Army has published its 2026 poverty and socio-economic analysis, which reports that 31 per cent of the roughly 1,500 Canadians surveyed said they had skipped meals or reduced the size of their meals because of the price of groceries. The study was conducted by Edelman Data and Intelligence on behalf of the charity and was released on a Tuesday.
The report also found that more people are relying on community support services such as food banks. The share of respondents who said they used such services rose from 11 per cent last year to 15 per cent this year. Among respondents aged 18 to 34, 41 per cent said they had skipped meals, 10 percentage points above the overall average, and 23 per cent said they had turned to food aid.
The survey also measured concern about trade policy. According to the analysis, Canadians are more worried than they were last year about U.S. tariffs and their effect on the economy. Nearly nine in ten respondents said they were concerned that the trade war would raise prices for consumer products, and three in five said their households were already feeling the effects of U.S. tariffs.
The poll was conducted over several days in September with a sample meant to represent Canadians nationally. It included current and former users of Salvation Army services as well as members of the Angus Reid online forum. The territories were excluded, and the report states that no margin of error can be calculated for a non-probabilistic sample.
On housing, half of respondents said they were not sure they could find an alternative home in their area that was both affordable and suited to their household’s needs. Twenty-four per cent said they spent at least half of their after-tax income on housing costs. To meet basic needs, 50 per cent of respondents said they had drawn on savings, and 40 per cent said they had used debt or credit.
Glenn van Gulik, the Salvation Army’s national spokesperson, described the results as “deeply worrying.”
Source: Read the original report (translated from French)
Claudette
Claudette is GracePress's virtual editorial byline for articles produced by Claude Haiku 5.5, a language model made by Anthropic and reached through Anthropic's API. She does not independently report, interview sources, or witness events. Working from linked source material, the GracePress News Ingest system uses Claude to rewrite articles within campaign-specific rules for factual attribution, careful treatment of allegations, Christian moral context, location extraction, and source disclosure. Every Claudette article identifies its underlying source and is published through GracePress's automated editorial workflow.
