Human Resources Committee on Oct. 23rd, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

I would like to call this meeting to order. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), a study on employability in Canada, I would like to get this meeting started.

I want to thank the guests right off the top for coming out. We appreciate your taking the time. We know you're busy individuals.

We want to give you just a few housekeeping items right now. We have until 9:30, so after each organization has had their seven-minute opening, we'll then proceed with questions from the committee members, and they'll have some time to question you on some of your thoughts.

Once again, thank you very much for coming and helping us with our study of employability, which we can take back and make recommendations on.

Why don't we start with the physicians. Who is going to speak on their behalf?

Mr. Jong, seven minutes.

[Dr. Michael Jong, President, Society of Rural Physicians of Canada]

Good morning, honourable members.

Let me begin by thanking you for the opportunity to appear before your committee to speak on behalf of the Society of Rural Physicians of Canada. My name is Michael Jong, and I am a rural physician in Goose Bay, Labrador. I am the president of the Society of Rural Physicians of Canada.

I am joined here today by two other members of our society. Dr. John Wootton is a rural physician in Shawville, Quebec, editor of our Canadian Journal of Rural Medicine and former director of the office of rural health at Health Canada. Dr. James Rourke was a rural doctor in Goderich, Ontario, for 25 years before becoming dean of Memorial University's medical school here in St. John's.

The Society of Rural Physicians of Canada is a voluntary professional organization and national voice for Canadian rural physicians. I consider it a privilege to be here today to speak to you regarding human resources solutions to rural health access problems.

You may wonder why I'm here today. I and my rural physician colleagues are faced on a daily basis with the sad realities of limited access to health care in our rural communities. I know some honourable members with rural constituencies who are very familiar with this.

Let me give you some examples. I had a patient who preferred to die rather than relocate to get dialysis. I've had patients who've had to mortgage their homes in order to continue to receive cancer care in a faraway place, without the support of their families and friends. Mothers and babies in rural remote communities are routinely evacuated from their homes, their families, their communities, their culture, and their support systems so that they can be assured of appropriate care during childbirth. Women who are 35 or 38 weeks pregnant have to leave their loved ones behind and travel somewhere else for what is the most important time of their lives, sometimes for as long as eight weeks.

Rural health is in need of repair. The Centre for Health Information's report in September 2006 on the health of rural Canadians shows that rural residents have higher mortality rates and shorter life expectancies. Those living in the most remote communities are the most disadvantaged. Life expectancy is lower in rural areas as compared to urban areas by as much as three years.

Health care access is a major concern for rural Canadians. While 31% of Canadians live in rural areas, only about 17% of family physicians, and 4% of non-family medicine specialists, practise there. The rural problem is one of access.

Urban-focused approaches, such as the wait times strategy, have made important gains in reversing some of the efficiency losses caused by reductions in operating times and days. These measures have limited or no rural impact, where the system is already very efficient. Although the rural population has poor health status, the cost of capital in dollars spent on the health care providers engaged is well below urban standards.

Dealing with this issue is the most complex and challenging aspect of health care policy. Mr. Romanow suggested that we devote $1.5 billion to developing a comprehensive rural health access strategy. To be fair, a significant commitment is needed to address this problem. However, significant gains can also be made on an incremental basis.

To build a strong link between rural health and the national economy, we cannot ignore the link between health care and the sustainability of rural communities. Having access to health care is important in ensuring that people will be willing to live, and companies will be willing to develop industries, in rural communities.

From a sovereignty, self-sufficiency, and economic perspective, rural depopulation has negative long-term implications for our country. The primarily rural-based natural resources sector accounts for approximately 40% of our national exports. Canada's rural natural resources provide employment, forest products, minerals, oil and gas, food, tax revenue, and much of our foreign exchange.

Health care is a service industry, and it requires professional human resources.

The ability to provide health care is very dependent on the ability to recruit and retain highly and broadly skilled professionals. Because of the challenges of isolation, sicker patients, and limited infrastructures, rural communities need the best doctors with a broad range of skills sets. The Society of Rural Physicians of Canada believes it's time to take a step forward and proposes the following human resource solutions—and I believe you have them in front of you.

Rural access scholarships will increase the medical education of rural and remote community residents, who are ten times more likely than urban-based students to choose rural practice. The other solutions are rural access development programs; enhanced training of residents in rural residency; rural medicine skill enhancement programs; expansion of medical schools to the rural communities, to provide training of medical students in rural communities during an entire clinical training period, thereby leading to higher retention of medical graduates in rural communities; rural health research; and a national rural medical round table.

Why do we do this today? Right now, we have to. There is a serious lack of services in rural and remote communities. We can fix this, but it requires political will and leadership. We need a specific rural health strategy that is formulated not by urban-based policy-makers but by rural communities and rural health professionals.

Rural communities need the best-trained doctors, and many more of them. We believe that we—health care professionals, legislators, and policy-makers—all have a responsibility to ensure that all Canadians, whether rural or urban, have reasonable and equitable access to health care. A two-tier health system—a lower tier for rural Canadians and a higher tier with better access for urban Canadians—is not acceptable.

I believe that with your help, we can implement this proposed solution. We have the moral obligation to do so.

Thank you for your time and for your attention, knowing you came in at two o'clock this morning. Dr. Rourke, Dr. Wootton, and I would be pleased to answer any questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much for your presentation.

Mr. George, you have seven minutes, sir.

[Bradley George, Director, Provincial Affairs, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canadian Federation of Independent Business]

Thank you very much.

First, Mr. Allison, you're familiar with our organization. CFIB represents small and medium-sized businesses in this country and in this province. We are the largest business organization in the country and province representing small business. We conduct research. This research has allowed me to be here today to present to you on employability, one of the most important issues to our members and small business communities as well.

Let me start by saying that within our research over the last five years, CFIB has tracked the level of business confidence and optimism and we have found that in Newfoundland and Labrador, over the last year and a half, business confidence and optimism is increasing. We're very pleased to see that for small and medium-sized business. Over the next 12 months, small-business owners in this province expect to hire full-time employees, for the most part. Our research shows that 31% of owners of small and medium-sized business expect to increase their full-time employment. Only 5% expect to decrease that level of full-time employment. Things are looking up for small and medium-sized businesses.

However, in much of our research we found that unemployment insurance always tops the priority list as number one. This is unique to Newfoundland and Labrador. Across Canada, my colleagues always have the tax burden as number one. It would help me considerably if I could walk into our finance minister's office and say the same here.

A shortage of qualified labourers has been gradually creeping up the list. This year in September, according to our latest research, it has now topped the national average. It is becoming a significant concern all across this province, from northern Labrador to the west coast and the east coast. A shortage of labour, finding employees, is becoming more and more difficult.

To drive home that point, we've recently done a report on immigration, and in that report, which we will be releasing in November, we asked the same question we asked two years ago: will it become easier or harder for Newfoundland and Labrador small and medium-sized business owners to hire in the next five years? 79% of small and medium-sized business owners in this province said that it will be harder to hire employees in the next five years. So despite having the high level of optimism, despite wanting to hire, to increase the full-time levels of employment, 79% feel that it will be harder to hire, 3% believe it will be easier, 15% feel it won't change, and 3% were unsure--79% harder, 3% believe it will be easier. This too was above the national average of 67%.

Trust me when I say that these numbers have crept up over the last few years.

To drive home how much of a problem this has become--and it surprised me, really--we put out a report last year. We conducted a survey that determined that last year there were 3,500 long-term vacant positions in this province. We define “long-term” as positions that are vacant for more than four months. So with the highest unemployment rate in the country, business owners in this province last year had 3,500 vacant positions. You can imagine, when this report came out, how many phone calls I received asking where those positions were. But it's the matching of skills. It's fair to say the shortage of qualified labour is a significant issue for small-business owners in this province.

What's deeply disturbing is how small and medium-sized business owners are trying to solve these hiring difficulties. 59% of our members tell us they are hiring underqualified people, and 39% are passing responsibilities on to other employees. It doesn't do much for productivity in our workplaces when this is what they have to do. 38% are ignoring new business opportunities.

The next ones down the list are very difficult for employees and employers right now: improving salaries, hiring temporary help, use of overtime, increasing wages, high energy costs, and high insurance costs. These are significant issues for small and medium-sized business owners. It's something we have to get around.

And it affects training. Newfoundland and Labrador had the lowest level of training last year. We had the highest level of formal training, but that's due to occupational health and safety legislation we have in this province. SMEs in Newfoundland and Labrador desire to increase training, but training costs have increased as well.

We've asked our members in what ways government can help small and medium-sized enterprises. They've said the government can help lower the tax, lower the shortage of qualified labour, lower the tax burden, and give them money they can put into training.

We recommend that governments help, not hurt, the growing labour shortages, expand the growth of the apprenticeship programs--they had money in this past budget to help apprenticeships-- ensure that immigration systems reflect the needs of today's marketplace, and focus our multi-level approaches and policies related to immigration and EI. We have particular problems with EI, which I hope to expand on. Business owners understand they also have a role for training and co-ops, etc.

We'll be coming out with a report in November that we will present to government. We need to work with all levels of government, because this is a significant issue here in this province.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. George.

We will move on to the Literacy Newfoundland and Labrador, Mrs. Gillard.

[Kimberley Gillard, Executive Director, Literacy Newfoundland and Labrador]

Actually, Ed Brown is here with the Newfoundland and Labrador Workplace/Workforce Learning Committee. We're actually with both of these organizations. Can we co-present?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

You sure can. You have seven minutes.

[Kimberley Gillard]

Thank you. That may save time.

Literacy Newfoundland and Labrador is a provincial literacy coalition. Our sole purpose is to advance literacy and lifelong learning in the province. Interestingly enough, Literacy Newfoundland and Labrador was just formed this past year as an official coalition. We're due to tap into some federal funding of $137,500 through the National Literacy Secretariat, which has now morphed into a new program.

We were a victim of the cuts on September 25, though. Because of that, I apologize. We didn't have translation services, so this is not in French. You'll have to wait.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Ms. Gillard, I would ask you to slow down, because the interpreters are having a hard time keeping up.

[Kimberley Gillard]

I'm sorry.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

That's all right. I know you want to get a lot in over a short period of time.

[Kimberley Gillard]

Yes, exactly, and we do tend to talk fast in this province. I apologize.

We didn't have the capacity to translate this, nor do we have the funds to translate it, so I apologize for that. We did bring English copies, which you'll get later.

I think it's very timely that we're here, especially due to the fact that we are a new coalition and that the funding cuts happened on September 25. I know there was a motion made by this committee to do some talking about those cuts. I would certainly be interested, if there's time at the end, to hear if you've made any progress around those cuts.

I will defer for a moment to my colleague Ed Brown, who will briefly talk about the workplace committee.

[Ed Brown, Director, Newfoundland & Labrador Workplace/Workforce Learning Committee and Literacy Newfoundland and Labrador]

The Newfoundland and Labrador Workplace/Workforce Learning Committee is comprised of members from education, business, labour, and the community-based sector. It is provincial in scope. The focus is on advancing workplace/workforce learning, and we purposely cover off both. We're trying to develop areas for those who are not working as well as those who are, so we use that rather awkward expression, “workplace/workforce”.

It is supported by Literacy Newfoundland and Labrador because certainly a lot of the problems we have are with literacy--and I guess we should use the plural, “literacies”. We find we have problems with some people's ability to read and write and so on. We're looking at literacies in the workplace, which includes computer literacy and a lot of other literacies we'd like to go into.

[Kimberley Gillard]

I think we'll start with a very quick definition of literacy. When we talk about literacy, people still tend to use the word “illiteracy”. In the literacy field, we don't talk about illiteracy anymore. There are very few people out there who still use an X for their signature, although there are some, believe me. We talk more about skill levels.

We talk about our literacy challenges. Recently there was an international adult literacy and skills survey. It was conducted in 2003 and released to the public in 2005, and it painted a picture of skills proficiencies across the country. What we saw were devastating statistics around the literacy levels that Canadians had in 2003, but I'm sure they're still the same in 2006.

Just to give you a very small piece of some of those statistics, they were broken down into five different components. Most of the statistics talk about prose literacy, because it's the most common one that people understand. It's just straightforward document reading.

There are five levels of skill proficiency. Level three is deemed to be what people need to function well to be successful in today's society. We had 18.8% of those aged 16 to 65 in our provinces scoring at level one, 31.6% scored in level two, 43% of our youth aged 16 to 25 scored below level three, and 61.1% of our population aged 16 to 65 scored below level three in numeracy. It's staggering to realize that there were such low levels of literacy and skills proficiency still in existence in 2003.

This is not isolated to Newfoundland and Labrador, although we are on the lower end when it comes to literacy skills. It is a huge problem all across the country: 42% of Canadians score in level one and level two. That's 42% of Canadians who do not function well in today's knowledge-based, technologically advanced society.

This obviously has a huge impact on employment. How can it not? Jobs require skills. We are advancing every day, more and more, toward technology information databases. Everything is in print form, for the most part. Everything is advancing with computers and other forms of technology. People need to have higher levels of skills. People who don't have those skills are being left behind on a daily basis.

Studies have shown that adults with low literacy skills are less likely to be employed. I don't think that's a shocker. If you're functioning at a level one, how do you get a job? How do you read an ad to find out where the jobs are? How do you fill out an application? How do you do a resumé?

Once you find a job, low literacy skills tend to hamper any training if it's available, and any form of advancement. If you get into the entry level and you have to do training to advance, you're likely not going to get it, because you just don't have the skills to move on.

Employees with low literacy skills tend to earn less. There's a clear pattern. The higher your level of literacy skills, the more you're going to earn. Then, you're disadvantaged if you get in and get a job. You're probably not going to earn a living wage, especially if you're at level one.

One minute?

[Ed Brown]

We thought we had 14 minutes between us.

[Kimberley Gillard]

Could we get a couple of minutes extra because there are two of us?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

I'll give you two minutes extra.

[Kimberley Gillard]

The other thing is that literacy affects all aspects of a worker's life. It doesn't just affect the job. It spills over into health care; our ability to take care of our children, to help them with their homework; our civic participation. All these things are affected by literacy.

What are the solutions? The solutions include a framework for a national literacy strategy. Literacy has been piecemeal. It has been severely under-resourced for years, ever since literacy became a topic we talked about.

I have five recommendations. They replicate the recommendations that came from the Movement for Canadian Literacy, a group that presented to you in September.

We're asking the federal government to position literacy as a policy and funding priority and to work with the provinces and territories. With the cuts of September 25, we are seeing a reneging on responsibilities that the federal government has told us are provincial and local. The result is that we're losing the only piece of infrastructure that existed in literacy. The Literacy Coalition, including Literacy Newfoundland Labrador, will suffer and will likely disappear.

We're recommending that additional federal funds go to literacy immediately, as recommended by this committee back in 2003. We recommend that HRSDC provide federal leadership to literacy across jurisdictions. In the past, they did this through the National Literacy Secretariat. That office is now being morphed into an office of literacy and learning, and we need to make sure that leadership remains a crucial part of this office.

We recommend that there be a cross-departmental look at literacy. This affects more than employability. It affects immigration, heritage, first nations, and corrections. We need to be looking through a literacy lens. We also recommend that the federal government support workplace literacy by developing supportive policies, infrastructure, public awareness, and tax incentives. Employability is a huge issue, and literacy is the most fundamental issue affecting it. We need to take some steps to support literacy—not just on the ground in the communities but also in the workforce. There will always be a lot of individuals at levels one and two who are unemployed, but we were staggered to find that many people in these categories are actually employed, and this hampers them from going into a lot of the traditional literacy programs.

We need to take a broad approach to literacy. It needs to be supported federally, because we are a country, even though you slice us up into provinces and territories. It's the work that happens within those provinces and territories that filters off into what we call our country. We need federal support for literacy.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Mr. Brown.

[Ed Brown]

In Newfoundland and Labrador, we're looking at the lowest level of training in Canada. We're looking at people in the workplace who couldn't take advantage of training even if it were there. So we have this very awkward situation.

The Workplace Education Committee is trying to increase the disposition of small and medium-sized businesses to conduct education. We're talking education. We use the words “education” and “learning” versus “training”, because we know that the employer does some on-the-job training. We're talking about developing the citizen of Canada to be a better person. As you can see from Kim's statistics, a lot of these people need that development.

If employees are developed to a certain level, workplace learning operates as an investment in a company and in Canada. When we look at barriers, one of the things we find is this: those who have tend to get. Those who have, get. That's unfortunate, because those in the workplace who don't have don't get the necessary education and learning. In a professional setting, man, if you have your doctorate and you work at a university, you can spend your time travelling to different conferences and so on. However, we can't seem to instill a similar understanding into the workplace.

Many people need the basic skills. We're trying to develop a model for addressing the requirements for successful workplace training. There are certain essential skills, and many people don't have them. We have to develop them. Thus there is a natural marriage between the Literacy Newfoundland and Labrador and the Workplace Education Committee.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Mr. Loder, seven minutes.

[James Loder, Director and Board Member, Newfoundland and Labrador, National Association of Career Colleges]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to St. John's. As you can see, we've turned the fog machine on in your honour. It's ordinarily about 30 degrees and sunny here, but we're trying to keep a stereotype going.

On behalf of the National Association of Career Colleges, the NACC, I would like to thank your committee for the opportunity to present to you today. My name is James Loder. I serve on the national association as the provincial representative from Newfoundland and Labrador. I bring greetings on behalf of our board of directors. At my day job, I'm the principal of Academy Canada Career College, the largest independent college in Newfoundland and Labrador. I am also the immediate past president of the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Career Colleges.

During my presentation today, I will be referencing a brief that was submitted to the standing committee in September of this year and will be highlighting five recommendations. However, perhaps I could begin by providing a brief background on private career colleges and the national association.

Private independent colleges have provided quality career training in Canada since 1868—that's more than 138 years ago. The earliest incarnation of the NACC was established in 1896 to serve and support the needs of private career colleges, their faculties, partners and students.

Today the NACC is the umbrella organization for affiliated provincial career college associations. Every year, Canada's 1,200 private career colleges train over 100,000 students for a wide range of careers, in fields such as health care, apprenticeship trades, multimedia, business, engineering technology, child care, and many other areas. Our programs range in length from six months to three years and ultimately grant diplomas, certificates and, in some cases, undergraduate degrees.

Private career colleges are licensed by the provincial ministries charged with regulating private education under the respective government acts. These provincial acts regulate the content of programs, the quality of facilities, the credentials of instructors, entrance requirements for students, tuition fees, and the amount of security that must be provided by the colleges, as well as a host of other criteria.

Private colleges operate without subsidies in both large communities, where students have many options to choose from, and in small communities, where there are no or few public options. Furthermore, private career colleges have the ability to offer niche programming to meet specific local needs. Many private career colleges offer programs that are accredited by industry bodies such as the Canadian Dental Association, Canadian Medical Association, Canadian Institute of Travel Counsellors, and the provincial councils of technicians and technologists, to name a few.

Many schools have also chosen to apply for institutional accreditation by a third party, such as the International Organization for Standardization, the Private Career Training Institutions Agency of British Columbia, the Newfoundland and Labrador Provincial Apprenticeship and Certification Board, and the Canadian Education and Training Accreditation Commission.

Both types of accreditation provide the student with a level of assurance of the quality of the institution and the programs that are offered, over and above what is required by registration and licensing.

All of these steps are taken towards the goal of meeting our top priority: the training of students for fulfilling and rewarding careers.

I would now like to take a couple of moments to highlight some of our recommendations to the committee.

Recommendation one is that students must have educational choice. The NACC supports the right of the student to choose the learning environment that best suits his or her needs. Students choose to attend private career colleges for a number of reasons. Whether it's because of the need for practical skills or efficient, highly focused training close to home, or flexibility, or the individual attention that comes with small class sizes, students are coming to us in record numbers.

In understanding why we succeed, one must first understand who our students are and the niche that we fill. According to a 1998 survey, 65% of our students were female; 46% of our students had previously attended either a university or a public college; 31% were over the age of 30; 13% were single parents; and 5% of our students, or 1 in 20, came to us with either a physical or a learning disability. They come, therefore, with a host of unique needs that schools like ours readily meet.

Recommendation two deals with the NACC's support for literacy. In order to succeed at the post-secondary level and to be successful in the increasingly competitive global environment, learners need superior literacy and numeracy skills. These skills are fundamental to the success of the learner and to the worker. Too much time is taken at the post-secondary level to address deficiencies that should have been addressed at the elementary or secondary level. The NACC supports the work of organizations such as Literacy Newfoundland and Labrador and the Movement for Canadian Literacy in their efforts to assist anyone who needs those basic skills once they've exited the normal school system.

The third recommendation stresses the need for recognition of prior learning and credit transfer. Recognition of prior learning is the key to the successful transition of any student as he builds a lifelong learning plan. Right now the ability to have prior learning and skills training recognized at another school is at the discretion of the receiving institution. While some private career colleges have established articulation agreements with other public and private institutions, there remains a significant gap. In too many cases the decision on credit recognition and transfer is not made on the basis of demonstrated learning outcomes; instead it is based solely on whether the training was received at a public or private institution, with little or no attention being paid to the quality of that training. NACC supports the use of demonstrated learning outcomes and established national standards as the basis upon which credit transfer is granted.

Our fourth recommendation addresses the issue of worker mobility. NACC supports the need for industry-defined national standards in skills training. These standards would ensure that skills and the people who hold them are transferable across Canada. Since the job market is fluid and the demands of the workplace ever changing, workers may find themselves having to move several times to keep or find a new job. Creation of transparent, broadly accepted national education standards for programs will go a long way towards creating the truly national workforce that we all envision. The NACC also contends that these national standards would assist in facilitating recognition of the foreign credentials of our emerging immigrant workforce.

The final recommendation that I have time for today focuses upon the financial needs of students. Access to education and training for many is dependent on access to funding. With the demise of the once widely used grants program, students are now relying widely on access to student loans and federal or provincial programs that support training. The Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation does offer bursaries; however, those are for students enrolled in a program of at least two years in length. This leaves many private career college students ineligible for the bursary and totally dependent on student loans for funding. We recommend that your committee study this issue and adjust financial programs to ensure equal access for all students. I should also point out that the NACC supports an income-contingent student aid program that allows graduates to repay their loans based on individual income levels.

In summary, the NACC contends that private career colleges strongly complement the publicly supported college system. Both offer strong training and skills for students to enter the labour market upon graduation. They differ, however, in the type of student each is designed to serve, the way in which instruction is delivered, and the time it takes for program completion. With the ability to adapt quickly to changing demand and the flexibility to offer training options to accommodate students, with multiple intakes, and with quality training by professional faculty and staff, private career colleges are an integral, cost-effective component of the post-secondary education and training sector. Private career colleges are responsive to the demands of the workplace and its students.

We've been serving the needs of Canadian students for almost 140 years and look forward to another 140 years of graduate success and strong involvement in the educational sector of Canada. Perhaps we can also help to solve some of the problems that have been addressed here today.

On behalf of the NACC, I thank you for the opportunity to present our report and recommendations.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Loder.

We're going to start our round of questioning. Our first round will be seven minutes for questions and answers, and we'll move through all the individuals. Then we'll have a second round of five minutes. We'll just keep going until our time is out at 9:15.

I believe we'll start with Mr. D'Amours.

[Jean-Claude D'Amours, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

First, I would like to thank you for being here this morning. The issue before us is certainly something on which depends the capacity for Canada to go forward, especially in rural areas. I appreciated your presentations, and I have several questions to ask, the first one being on literacy.

I think what you said earlier about cuts is a confirmed fact. But there is something unreal about this. I get the impression everything should come from Ottawa, and not from the regions. As far as literacy is concerned, it is certainly not from Ottawa that we can improve the literacy level in each of the provinces, and in each of the regions inside each province.

I come from New Brunswick. I had already noticed that situation in my province, but when I went in other provinces, I realized the situation is the same.

First, this is not the right message we should send to volunteers. In most cases, we depend on volunteers to contribute to an improvement in the literacy level. Second, I do not think we are sending the right message to the Canadian public. We are saying we want to make sure everybody can read and write adequately. But what we have seen in the last several weeks is that we are in fact trying to a point to make sure Canadians remain illiterate.

I would like to have your comments on this.

[Kimberley Gillard]

I think it's totally understandable that provinces and territories would do their part. In Newfoundland and Labrador just recently we saw a huge increase in funding to the province in ABE, adult basic education, level one. It's understandable that provinces have to play their role. But the federal government 20 years ago, under the Brian Mulroney government, established the National Literacy Secretariat. They saw that illiteracy filtered up and affected the country as a whole, and established the National Literacy Secretariat to help make the work in literacy more cohesive across the country. What happens in one region of the country obviously can help inform another region.

Out of that National Literacy Secretariat we also saw the formation of the Literacy Coalition. Literacy is very piecemeal and always has been. It's not a formal system like the K-12 system is. We're trying to help build an infrastructure for literacy from the ground up. The cuts coming right now, after proposals were supposed to come out in our province in January...and they were delayed until August. The deadline for proposals was September 15. People put time and energy into that. We had been waiting those eight months to see if the funding was coming or not. A lot of people had used up all their funding at that point, and any surplus they had. Then the cuts came ten days after.

What we're saying is that this doesn't give us time to be flexible and to adjust. We haven't had that opportunity. That's not to say there's not a role; we believe there's a role for the federal government, provincial government, municipalities, labour, and business. I can sit here and I can tell everyone in this room that you have a role to play in literacy. We need to readjust and we need to re-evaluate how the cuts came, where they're levied, and how we adjust so that people do continue to have services at the grassroots level.

Another thing that's innovative about the National Literacy Secretariat--or the National Office of Literacy and Learning, as it's called now--is that their funding created innovative approaches. What we're finding is that in the IALS data, obviously things have not worked for the last ten years. We do need to look harder at what we've been doing. But a lot of programs, such as ABE programs, are 9 to 3 during the day. If we have people in the workforce or if we have child care issues or transportation issues, they don't get to partake. This funding was allowing us to get at the grassroots level in the community, to start offering programs that were more innovative and could touch more people.

It was never perfect. That's why we've always talked about how we were under-resourced in literacy and how it was piecemeal. We were this close, we thought, to having a national strategy put in place by the federal government. The framework is there; MCL has already presented it, and it's in my brief as well.

We thought we were this close to having the federal government sit with the provinces and territories to talk about what the roles would be and how it would all filter out into a collaborative approach to literacy. Now that's in jeopardy.

Certainly I feel that everybody has a responsibility--the federal government, the provincial government, municipalities, and on down the line. We need to be able to sit and look at that collaborative approach and see where everybody fits in.