Abstract

In 1998, the Department of Agriculture and Agri-food published a document entitled Canada’s Action Plan for Food Security, outlining seven commitments stemming from a 1996 World Food Summit in Rome. The goal was to reduce the number of undernourished people in the world by half by the year 2015. Instead, Canada witnessed a slow but steady growth of those identifying as food insecure in the two decades following the publication of the Action Plan. There are many hypotheses as to why that is the case, with the bulk of the literature focusing on a policy environment characterized by government inaction and
overburdened civil society organizations. This thesis argues that this policy environment was not an accident, but the result policy tools selected to address this social issue by successive federal governments. To that end, the thesis employs a policy tools analytical framework to categorize the types of tools chosen as either procedural or substantive in nature, and in doing so it assesses the amount of priority placed on household food insecurity. It quantifies the number of tools chosen to address food industry concerns versus those aimed at frontline service providers, and illustrates why the recently published National Food Policy was necessary to address an issue identified as worthy of government intervention two decades earlier.