You are standing in the grocery store, doing the math in your head again. The peppers cost more than last month. The rice you buy in bulk has gone up. The brand of chips your kids love disappeared from the shelf entirely, replaced by a sign that says “supply chain disruption.” You put a few things back. You do not tell anyone.
That quiet calculation, the one you do standing in the aisle, the one that follows you home, that wakes you up at three in the morning with a low hum of dread: that is not just a financial challenge. It is now a mental health challenge as well. The effects of economic anxiety on BIPOC communities in Canada, and it can land differently than it does for the general population.
What is Affecting Us Right Now
The US-Canada trade war, which began in February 2025 when the United States imposed sweeping 25% tariffs on most Canadian imports, has escalated significantly through 2026. As of August 22, 2026, the United States added a new 50% tariff on a broad range of Canadian goods, including dairy products, honey, and other food items. Canada responded with retaliatory tariffs of 15 to 50% on an equally broad range of American goods.
The result for households is tangible. Food prices across Canada are rising. American products that were standard grocery items are disappearing from shelves or becoming prohibitively expensive. Supply chains built over decades of cross-border integration do not reorganize overnight. Businesses are passing costs to consumers, and consumers in the lowest income brackets absorb those costs with the least cushion.
This is not the first time. Trade disruptions, inflation crises, and economic shocks have a long history of arriving in BIPOC households first and leaving last. The 2008 financial crisis hit racialized communities disproportionately, with Black and immigrant families losing housing and income at higher rates than the general population. The COVID-19 pandemic compressed years of economic precarity into months, with BIPOC workers overrepresented in the essential and precarious employment sectors that bore the greatest risk. The current tariff crisis follows the same pattern: policies made at the level of governments and corporations, consequences distributed unequally across bodies that were already carrying more.
Sources: Canadian Federation of Independent Business, August 2026; ABC News, August 2026; Timeline of the 2025-2026 United States trade war with Canada, Wikipedia
What Economic Anxiety Does to the Body and Mind
Economic stress is not abstract. It lives in the body.
Food and housing insecurity drive high levels of anxiety. Research from the Canadian Institute for Health Information confirms that the proportion of Canadian adults who reported always or usually feeling worried or stressed about having enough food quadrupled from 2020 to 2023. That number has only grown as food prices continue rising.
An Edmonton-based study published in 2025 found that food insecurity was associated with three times the odds of mental illness among individuals experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage. Financial barriers to accessing healthcare more than doubled those odds further.
The mechanism is not complicated. Financial stress activates the same threat-response system as physical danger. Chronic activation of that system, the sustained low-grade alarm of not knowing whether you can cover the grocery bill or the rent, produces measurable physiological harm: elevated cortisol, disrupted sleep, suppressed immune function, increased risk of depression and anxiety. The body treats economic precarity as a survival threat, because historically and practically, it has been.
For BIPOC communities, this threat response arrives on top of existing activation. Racialized stress, hypervigilance in white-dominant spaces, intergenerational trauma, immigration anxiety: these do not pause when the trade war escalates. They compound.
Sources: CIHI, Canadian Community Health Survey 2023; Tandfonline, Factors associated with mental illness among individuals experiencing socioeconomic disadvantages in Edmonton, Canada, September 2025. doi: 10.1080/09581596.2025.2562873
Why BIPOC Communities Carry This Differently
Research confirms that younger adults, single-person households, and people who identify as BIPOC are more vulnerable to experiencing food insecurity in Canada. This is not coincidence. It reflects a set of structural realities that have never been adequately addressed.
Racialized workers in Canada are overrepresented in precarious, contract, and gig employment. They earn less on average for the same work, face higher rates of employment discrimination, and are more likely to send remittances abroad while supporting family members in Canada simultaneously. When food prices rise, families operating on these margins have far less room to absorb the increase.
Cultural food also carries a specific weight in this moment. Many BIPOC families eat foods that are already expensive or difficult to source in Canada: specialty ingredients, imported staples, the particular brands and varieties that carry the taste of home. When supply chains are disrupted and prices rise, it is often these foods that disappear first or become unaffordable first. The loss goes beyond nutrition: cultural connection, identity, and the rituals that make a house feel like a place where your particular life is lived all get severed alongside it.
And underneath all of this sits a history. The economic precarity many BIPOC families navigate in Canada did not begin with the current tariff war. It began with colonial extraction, with policies that restricted land ownership and citizenship, with immigration systems designed to bring labour without offering security, with the systematic undervaluation of racialized workers over generations. The current crisis is not a new story. It is a new chapter in a long one.
How Economic Anxiety Shows up in BIPOC Communities
Economic anxiety in BIPOC communities shows up in specific patterns that mainstream mental health conversations rarely cover.
- The invisible labour of managing. Many BIPOC people, and particularly women, can carry the entire cognitive and emotional burden of managing household finances in a crisis: tracking prices at multiple stores, calculating which cuts to make, managing the shame of not being able to provide what the family is used to. This labour is invisible and it is exhausting.
- The shame that accompanies financial struggle. In many BIPOC cultures, financial difficulty carries stigma. The family sacrificed for you to be here. You are supposed to be building something better. Admitting that the grocery bill is stressing you out can feel like a betrayal of that narrative, a confirmation of something shameful- which can prevent people from naming that anxiety to anyone, including a therapist.
- The helplessness of systemic cause. There is a specific kind of distress that comes from understanding that the cause of your suffering is political, not personal, and that you have almost no power over it. The tariff war was not caused by anything you did. You cannot solve it. You can only absorb it. That helplessness is its own psychological burden, distinct from garden-variety financial stress.
- The activation of old fears. For immigrant and diaspora families who left countries experiencing economic instability, hyperinflation, or food scarcity, rising food prices in Canada can activate memories and fears that predate this crisis. The body does not always distinguish between the current situation and the historical one – so when the grocery bill goes up, it can feel like something catastrophic, when it’s not.
How Therapy Can Help
A therapist who understands economic anxiety in BIPOC communities does not ask you to reframe your thinking or practice gratitude. They understand that the anxiety is a proportionate response to a real situation, and that the work is not to make you feel better about the crisis but to give you somewhere to put the weight of it.
Therapy can hold the shame. The specific guilt of the child of immigrants who is struggling financially in the country their parents came to for a better life: a therapist who understands this does not minimize it. They help you locate where it came from and begin to separate it from your worth.
Working with what you can control, building the internal capacity to stay regulated in the face of something enormous and ongoing, distinguishing between the chronic stress that can be managed and the structural injustice that requires collective action: this is the work a therapist holds alongside you.
The cultural dimension belongs here too. The loss of cultural food, the disruption of the rituals that connect you to home, the specific grief of watching the things that make your particular life recognizable become harder to maintain: a culturally responsive therapist holds all of this as a legitimate and significant loss.
Ready to find a therapist in Calgary who already understands this weight? Browse culturally responsive, anti-oppressive BIPOC therapists in Calgary
Finding Support in Calgary
Calgary’s BIPOC communities span a wide range of cultures, immigration histories, and economic circumstances. What they share, in this moment, is the specific weight of navigating economic uncertainty inside a system that did not distribute its stability equally to begin with.
Healing in Colour connects BIPOC people in Calgary and across Alberta with therapists who already understand this context: who know that economic anxiety in racialized communities is not just about money, that it is about history, identity, survival, and the exhausting labour of holding all of it without enough support.
We are here. Find a BIPOC therapist in Calgary
Additional Resources
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Related Reading
- Your Cultural Food Is Not the Problem
- BIPOC Burnout and Impostor Syndrome: When Success Doesn’t Feel Like Enough
- When Collective Chaos Translates to Chaos in Our Minds
- Building Capacity to Hold the Polycrisis Together
- The Types of Unrecognized Grief We Carry in Our Bodies
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About Healing in Colour
Healing in Colour connects BIPOC clients across Canada with therapists and allied professionals who practice from anti-oppressive values. We believe BIPOC people, in all our intersections, deserve therapy that supports our healing and liberation.
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If you are in crisis, please reach out to Talk Suicide Canada: 1-833-456-4566 (24/7) or call or text 9-8-8 anytime. Hope for Wellness Help Line for Indigenous peoples: 1-855-242-3310.