Thank you.
We do very much appreciate you coming and sharing your thoughts, advice, and concerns with us. We can see there's a wide range of issues to balance and deal with and you've done a very good job of helping us.
I'm going to start with literacy, because as a former teacher that's something I care about very much. I was surprised too at the numbers, with nearly half of Canadians being able to read only simple material. And as a former teacher I'm embarrassed by that. How can it be that children get out of 12 years of compulsory education, or at least until the age of 16, 10 years, without either being able to read or write or doing so in only a minimal way? Have your studies or your discussions disclosed what can be done at that end? Because that's really where it all begins; it's much harder to learn later than earlier.