One in four Canadians live in households experiencing food insecurity.

That’s the finding of a report from Statistics Canada, released in December 2025.

Over the last five years, the rate of “severe food insecurity,” situations in which Canadians skip meals, has doubled. Food insecurity is highest in Nunavut – 60-70% of households experience it there — and the lowest in Quebec.

For insight into the nature and drivers of food insecurity in Canada, the GPM reached out to Valerie Tarasuk, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto. Tarasuk is the lead investigator for PROOF, a research program that explores policy interventions to reduce food insecurity in Canada.

Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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Zohran Mamdani … Prior to his historic victory in the New York City mayoralty election, last November, his name was barely known.

Zohran Mamdani is the first South Asian, and first Muslim to be elected mayor of the U.S.’s most populous city.

He’s also the first Democratic Socialist mayor of a major American city. 

In the very first line of his acceptance speech, Mamdani tipped his hat to America’s most illustrious, trailblazing democratic socialist – Eugene Debs.

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“The sun may have set over our city this evening,” Mamdani declared last November 4, to huge applause, “but as Eugene Debs once said: “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.””

How many of Zohran Mamdani’s supporters actually knew who Eugene Debs was? Few, for sure.

Eugene Debs was one of America’s great trade union leaders and political radicals. In contrast to late 19th/early 20th century labour leaders like Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labour, Debs was a man of the left, with a distinctive class-based analysis.

Debs was an anti-capitalist, a socialist, and a fierce political radical. He marched with Susan B. Anthony, America’s trailblazing women’s rights activist. Emma Goldman was his friend.

Perennial socialist candidate, Eugene Debs ran for president three times in the early 20th century, under the banner of the Democratic Socialist Party.

The most radical, personally hazardous of Debs’ positions — his opposition to and active promotion of resistance against American involvement in the First World War. 

On September 14, 1918, U.S. District Judge David C. Westenhaver sentenced Eugene Debs to ten years imprisonment for an anti-war speech he’d delivered to a Socialist Party gathering in Canton, Ohio, three months earlier, in alleged violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. 

In response to the jail sentence, Debs famously declared:

“Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.”

To learn more about Eugene Debs, the GPM reached out to Shawn Gude.

Gude is the author of a new biography of Eugene Debs, due to be published on the 100th anniversary of Debs’ death, this coming October. Gude is a senior editor for Jacobin Magazine. His book — American Socialist: The Life & Times of Eugene Debs – will be released by Simon & Schuster in October 2026.

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Listen to our conversation with Shawn Gude. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here: