Please allow me to finish, Minister. I want to bring this to your attention, because you question why adults should be receiving literacy program skills. I want you to understand that there are some 9 million Canadian adults whose inability to read is holding them back. Approximately 5.8 million can't cope with the demands of a typical workplace, and the remaining 3.2 million can't even read medicine bottles, job applications, or election ballots. These are important issues that you need to address and talk about.
I'm not going to go back to the earlier comment and refute what you said. It's “he said, she said”. The cuts speak for themselves. You clearly indicated that the federal government has no role to play when it comes to literacy. So when you talk about national productivity and a more skilled workforce, it seems like rhetoric. The C.D. Howe Institute last fall came out with a report indicating that if there were an increase in literacy of even 1% it would improve our productivity.
It bothers me a great deal when you talk about productivity, waste, and mismanagement, while cutting literacy, which is very important to our productivity and to adults as well.