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.