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Since June 2022, the price of groceries in Ontario has gone up more than 11 per cent. Vegetables, in particular, have shot up by almost 20 per cent. Meat? 9.2 per cent. Dairy and eggs? 10.6.

Shelter? That other big thing the United Nations counts as a universal human right? That hasn’t been easy, either. Between October 2022 and October 2024, the price of an average two-bedroom rental in Ontario has gone up 12.8 per cent, according to the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation. (The CMHC does its national rent survey each October.)

Sure, the annual rate of inflation has dropped from its post-pandemic peak, but just because it’s back down to the Bank of Canada’s target range of roughly two per cent doesn’t mean life’s getting any cheaper, said Pedro Antunes, chief economist at the Conference Board of Canada.

“Inflation is back down to normal, but that still means we’re incrementally increasing prices from the surge that we saw,” said Antunes. “And I think people are still feeling the pain of that.”

In June 2022, the wave of inflation sweeping across the world hit its Canadian peak, at a staggering annual rate of 8.1 per cent.

While inflation has come down across most developed economies, Canadians spend a much greater proportion of their household income on housing, said Antunes, meaning there’s less money left over for everything else. And in the priciest province in the country for housing, that pain is particularly acute, and isn’t shared equally.

“People areÌýfeeling the pain of rent. This is really affecting lower income households and younger households most of all,” said Antunes.

At the Daily Bread Food Bank, which supports food banks across the Greater º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøArea, CEO Neil Hetherington sees evidence of people’s struggles with affordability every day.

A million Ontarians regularly use a food bank to help make ends meet, said Hetherington, up from 587,000 in 2022. And many of them have work. The cost of living, he said, is so high that even a regular job is no guarantee of stability.

“Fundamentally, the social contract we all grew up with — that if you go to school, you get a job, you work hard, you’ll be fine — is broken,” said Hetherington.

Roughly 60 per cent of new food bank users have a post-secondary education and a full-time job.

“They did things right. … So at that point you need to say like what? What should they have done differently? They went to school. They’ve got a job,” said Hetherington. “They’re working hard, but because of the price that they’re paying on housing or on food, they have to rely on friends, family and charity in order to get by. So that to me is maddening, quite frankly.”Ìý

If it’s maddening to him, it’s shocking and frightening to people it’s happening to, many of whom have a hard time coming to terms with the fact they now need help.

“Well, ‘It’ll never happen to me’ is now happening to 2.8 million Canadians. It’s hard to cross that threshold over a doorway into a life where you have to kind of admit to yourself that perhaps through no fault of your own, you are in a situation where you’re requiring food, charity. That’s hard,” said Hetherington.

Ontario, he said, has the second-highest levels of food insecurity in the country, behind only Nova Scotia — in large part, he argues, because of the high price of owning or renting a home in this province.

There are also other signs of an affordability crisis. In the fourth quarter of 2024, 12,890 people in Ontario filed for insolvency, according to statistics from the federal Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy. That’s up from 8,817 in the second quarter of 2022.

And roughly 50 per cent of Canadian households report they’re living paycheque to paycheque, according to surveys done for BDO Canada.

But with prices still rising pretty much everywhere, are things wildly out of whack in Ontario compared with the rest of the country? Not really, at least when taking a look at the Consumer Price Index, a broad-based measure of inflation used by Statistics Canada.

According to numbers compiled by the Conference Board of Canada from Statistics Canada data, since June 2022, prices across the country have risen a total of 0.5 per cent. In Ontario, prices have risen by 0.3 per cent, with just one province — Saskatchewan — faring any better. The worst-hit province over the last two and a half years or so? British Columbia, where prices have risen a total of 6.5 per cent.

While those inflation numbers are down substantially from their 2022 peak, it doesn’t mean local political and fiscal choices are the cause, cautions the Conference Board’s Antunes. Nor, he added, were local factors the cause of the rapid rise in inflation. Instead, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, plus pandemic-era supply chain woes, sent prices soaring. The supply chain woes are now largely gone, and energy prices have come back down.Ìý

“This cycle of inflation that we’ve had through the pandemic, and post-pandemic, I think were mostly out of the hands of local events or local policies, really,” said Antunes. “I think that affected Ontario and Canada much the same way as it affected the rest of the world.”