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.