Household Food Insecurity in Canada: Understanding the Economic Circumstances and Policy Options
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Food insecurity is an important public health problem that affected 12.6% of households in 2012. There is no policy intervention explicitly designed to tackle food insecurity, but there are growing interests in identifying solutions to reduce the problem. To help inform the development of effective policy actions, this thesis focused on better understanding the household economic circumstances related to food insecurity and the potential of housing and food subsidy programs in mitigating it. Using the 2010 Survey of Household Spending, the description of spending patterns revealed that the budget of food-insecure households tends to prioritize more immediate, basic needs. The in-depth examination of the intersection between homeownership and food insecurity highlighted important food insecurity disparities between households with different homeownership status and housing asset level and suggested that housing policy may play a role in mitigating food insecurity by promoting homeownership and ensuring mortgage affordability. However, other policy actions are needed to build the economic resilience of lower-income renting households. Social housing is the primary approach to improve housing affordability among low-income renting households, but study findings indicated that those living in government-subsidized housing remained highly vulnerable to food insecurity and that improving housing affordability seemed insufficient to compensate for income inadequacy. Food subsidy programs have been a key policy tool to improve food access and affordability in remote, northern communities, but the evaluation conducted using data from the Canadian Community Health Survey raised serious concerns about its effectiveness and highlighted the need to develop effective initiatives to reduce the high rates of food insecurity in Canada’s North. Together, the findings suggest that existing housing and food subsidy programs have limited potential to mitigate food insecurity and that different policy actions working in tandem are required to build the economic resilience of all households and reduce food insecurity in Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".