Around 15,000 Pointe-Claire homes were visited Saturday morning as volunteers went door to door collecting food donations for the annual Porch to Pantry community food drive.
Organized by the West Island Mission, the door-to-door collection event marked its fifth year as food insecurity across the province is skyrocketing.
Thousands of residents left their donations outside their doors as about 40 volunteer drivers travelled through Pointe-Claire streets between 9 a.m. and noon to collect them and bring them the charity’s warehouse.
“It’s great to give back to your community and people always need help,” said Shelagh MacDonald, who has been a volunteer since Porch to Pantry began five years ago.
“In the coming months, November, December, January, February, our shelves are full,” said Suzanne Scarrow, executive director of West Island Mission.
“Instead of asking residents to find the time to drive somewhere and drop off their donations, we come directly to them. One porch, one bag and one family at a time, it adds up to an incredible amount of food for our neighbours.”
About 8,000 kilograms of food was estimated to have been collected Saturday, ahead of the holiday season.
“Right now, we’re currently just sorting, dating everything, getting it ready to be boxed and put in our inventory,” said Jesse Brisco, staff member at West Island Mission. “It should take about take about a week or two to go through everything.”
The food collection drive, organized in partnership with the City of Pointe-Claire, comes off the heels of Quebec’s annual HungerCount 2026 report, published Wednesday, that said demand for food assistance in Quebec reached a historic high this year, with more than 3.27 million food bank requests met each month in 2026.
The figure represents an increase of more than 150,000 monthly requests compared to 2025.
Nearly half of those living with food insecurity were in Montreal, which has a quarter of the province’s nine million population.
West Island Mission has also seen a 71 per cent increase in demand with 600 households are now registered for its services, about a 25 per cent of them in Pointe-Claire alone.
“You might have the big house in the car in your driveway,” said John Belvedere, mayor of Pointe-Claire. “Guess what? you might not be able to make ends meet at the end of the month, and where do you cut? You cut the food.”
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