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Just as the Liberals were announcing their budgetary plans to cut the size of government, a Vancouver-area researcher was granted $600,000 in federal monies to figure out how to ensure more African food is made available in Canada’s major cities to serve growing populations of African immigrants.

As per a press statement announcing the program, Black and Caribbean immigrants are increasingly migrating to Canadian urban centres, only to discover that it’s more difficult to obtain “culturally preferred food” such as cassava and yams.

As such, Surrey, B.C.’s Kwantlen Polytechnic University is inaugurating a new position to study the “cultural, social, economic and environmental factors” of why that is.

“Some of the pilot data that has been collected tells us that food security, along with access to culturally preferred food items, continues to be problematic for this population,” said Cayley Velazquez, the university’s new Canada Research Chair in Race, Food and Health.

Metro Vancouver, just like B.C. generally, has a relatively small Black population as compared to the likes of Toronto, Edmonton or Montreal. As of the most recent census, there were 41,180 people of African descent in the entirety of the Lower Mainland. Of those, 12,870 were counted as living in Surrey, the target city for the study. 

Kwantlen’s “Race, Food and Health” program was recently profiled in a CBC report which noted that the definition of “food insecurity” doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of food. Rather, it can also be food that is unfamiliar.

“When we’re talking about food insecurity, a lot of the time the narrative is you’ve got at least something that should be good enough,” Anna Spyker, a collaborator on the project, told the broadcaster. She added, “you should have the availability of food that would be appropriate for your culture and as well as your body and your health.”

And this jibes with the official Government of Canada definition of “food insecurity.” As per Health Canada literature, “food insecurity is the inability to acquire or consume an adequate diet quality or sufficient quantity of food in socially acceptable ways.”

The CBC report also noted that there is a thriving district of African grocery stores in North Surrey. Just in the immediate vicinity of Surrey’s Gateway SkyTrain station are at least eight retail locations offering Caribbean and African goods.

Nevertheless, the fact that these stores are concentrated only in one part of Metro Vancouver is identified as a “barrier” that will be studied by the new Kwantlen program.

As Velazquez said in a statement, “there is a lot of work to be done to strengthen marginalized voices and collectively dismantle barriers being experienced by BAC (Black, African, Caribbean) groups.”

A federal government writeup on the research similarly framed a lack of cheap and readily available African and Caribbean food as a net drain on the health and success of Black communities.

“Their findings will fill critical gaps in race-based data and reveal how systemic structures create or intensify inequities,” it reads.

The funding for all this comes via the Canada Research Chair (CRC) program, one of the largest conduits of federal money into the Canadian university system.

The 2025 federal budget, tabled last month, promised broad cuts across the federal government, including the elimination of 40,000 civil service positions. The CRC program, however, was left entirely untouched.

In charge of distributing $311 million annually, the program provides the money to keep more than 2,000 full-time researchers on staff at Canadian universities and colleges.

Like much of Canada’s grant-funding infrastructure, the Canada Research Chairs program has in recent years become subject to a series of mandatory quotas on race and ethnicity.

Most notably, recipients of Canada Research Chair funding must meet strict guidelines regarding the race and identity of their research appointees.

As per the program’s most recently updated “equity targets,” 33.2 per cent of Canada Research Chairs must be “racialized,” while 53.1 per cent must either be women or a member of a “gender equity-seeking group.”

This requirement is often the reason that Canadian universities have begun publishing job positions that actively limit candidates based on their race or sex.

UBC is currently advertising for a Canada Research Chair in Medical Physics, for instance, and the posting explicitly excludes white, able-bodied male applicants. “UBC is currently restricted in the recruitment, selection, and nomination of (Canada Research Chairs),” it reads.

The $600,000 to fund the new Canada Research Chair in Race, Food and Health was announced as part of a recent tranche of $198 million in new CRC funding.

Simon Fraser University, also in the Lower Mainland, similarly announced that it had inaugurated six new chairs as a result of the funding outlay. Of those, just two — positions in computer graphics and particle physics — had no equity component.

The other four ranged from “Indigenous self-determination in health governance” to “the relationship between caste and computing” to “more equitable HIV prevention.”

IN OTHER NEWS

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms has started filing a lawsuit intended to challenge a federal policy of incarcerating prisoners based on their self-declared gender. Ever since the policy was unilaterally ordered by then prime minister Justin Trudeau in 2017, any male inmate in a Canadian prison needs only to declare themselves to be a woman in order to apply for transfer to a women’s facility. As per a 2022 study by the Correctional Service of Canada, several dozen inmates have indeed secured transfers based on gender self-ID.

The JCCF is litigating on behalf of Canadian Women’s Sex-Based Rights, and the first step of the suit is filing a motion to establish that the group can represent incarcerated women in a constitutional challenge. Like many constitutional challenges, this one would argue that incarcerating women alongside trans-identifying males is a violation of charter guarantees against “cruel and unusual punishment” and the right to “life, liberty and security of the person.”