CCHS - Food security for City of Ottawa health region in 2016 (or more recent)

Question:
We have a graduate student who is looking for food security, he is specifically interested in insecurity, for the City of Ottawa (by health region). We found that CCHS 2015-2016 included a derived variable for food security, but it would appear that Ontario did not opt in for the food security module. Is there another data source for these data that we missed?

Also, does the CCHS 2017 or 2017-2018 documentation happen to indicate if Ontario opted in to the module for this latest cycle? If so, how soon could the student find the latest weighted number of people having food security (moderate or severe) compared to all respondents in the City of Ottawa health region?

Answer:
The CCHS 2017 and 2018 did include the food security content for Ontario. The PUMF for the two-year 17-18 data is currently in production and will be available early 2020. In the meantime, I am able to provide the information you need. For 2017-2018, in the City of Ottawa health unit (HR), 6.7% of people aged 12 or older lived in a household that was classified as food insecure. This estimate has a confidence interval of 4.7% to 8.6% and a coefficient of variation of 14.95%.

Longitudinal Food Insecurity or Food Poverty Candian Survey

Question

A researcher at MRU mentioned that they were looking for a Canadian longitudinal food insecurity or food poverty survey... Does anyone know if such as survey exists, please? Or can the researcher use one of our already existing  DLI surveys?

Answer

Variables related to food insecurity are available in the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY - http://www.statcan.gc.ca/dli-ild/data-donnees/ftp/nlscy-elnej-eng.htm) and the National Population Health Survey (NPHS - http://www.statcan.gc.ca/dli-ild/data-donnees/ftp/nphs-ensp-eng.htm).

However, in order to protect respondents from the disclosure of their identity, recent PUMFs from these surveys aren't available in the DLI collection (they stop in 1998-1999).  If the researcher wishes to use these surveys, he/she could use the synthetic files that are in the DLI collection and request data through remote job submission (important note: Synthetic files contain modified data and must never be used for analytical purposes. The synthetic files should not be used for purposes other than to develop and test the computer programs that are to be submitted by remote job submission.) or access the master files in the Research Data Centres (RDCs).

Other surveys like the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) (and CCHS 2.2 and 3.1 in particular) also include variables on food insecurity.

To quickly browse these variables, you could access the StatCan Nesstar site (www62.statcan.ca) and do an Advanced Search for variables containing the word "food".

I hope that these suggestions are helpful.