Inside Vancouver’s 40,000-square-foot food bank

David Long, the CEO of the Greater Vancouver Food Bank, is seeing something new these days: the people who are visiting his food bank often have full-time jobs. They have decent salaries but spend the majority of their income on housing costs. Sometimes his food bank clients are gig workers. Sometimes they are teachers and nurses whose salaries don’t cover the cost of living. And every week, more people show up to the food bank than the week before.

When Long became CEO in 2019, the Greater Vancouver Food Bank was supporting 6,500 clients per month. That number has nearly tripled in just five years. In a painfully vivid account of what it’s like to run a food bank in the age of inflation and skyrocketing rents, Long describes how his supply chain operates, where his donations come from and how he has set up his Amazon-style warehouse equipped with multiple industrial fridges. “We run the GVFB like a business,” he says. “But our goal is the opposite of most businesses—we want our customer base to shrink. It breaks my heart to see things speeding in the opposite direction.”

—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief

David Long, CEO of the Greater Vancouver Food Bank.

Gabi Abdalla has worked at Metro for over 10 years. Despite the grocery chain’s booming profits, Abdalla says wages for grocery store workers like him have not kept up with the pace of inflation and the rising cost of living. “I cannot afford to live at the current wage,” Abdalla tells Maclean’s. Here’s why he’s planning to strike, along with 3,700 others, and what they’re fighting for.

A pair of university friends teamed up to build this 1,500-square-foot modern summer cottage, hidden away on a secluded beach on Nova Scotia’s South Shore. It’s since gained fame for its unique sustainable features, like its cantilevered roof and UV filter system that turn rainwater into drinking water. “We’ve grown so attached to it that we never want to leave,” says owner Teri Appleby.

CULTURE PICK
OF THE WEEK

In 17 panels projected onto the National Gallery’s facade, Deanna Bowen’s exhibit, The Black Canadians (After Cooke), charts five generations of her family, including her great-grandfather’s flight from racial violence in Oklahoma and migration to Canada. Through the lens of her own family tree, Bowen explores the Black experience in Canada within a broader global context of social change, including the U.K.’s abolition of slavery in 1833 and the lingering legacy of colonialism. (Cooke, if you’re wondering, is journalist Britton B. Cooke; his 1911 article “The Black Canadian” argued against Black immigration in Canada in the pages of Maclean’s.)

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