As I said, if the government had asked me prior to this round of cuts for my opinion, I would say don't do that, because there is an infrastructure place and some of it is being affected, there's no question about that.
As I said earlier, I met with Mr. Allison and other members of the Conservative caucus. They're aware of the issue, and I think there's an openness there to look at this question: what infrastructure is in place, and how can we build it up so that we can teach more people? I know I'm repeating myself.
It's a question of money. More money has to be put into it. A year ago, the minister responsible for literacy was from New Brunswick, Claudette Bradshaw. We were talking to her about annual budget for literacy in the order of $500 million to $600 million per year to start. When I was talking about that number, the officials at the table blanched; they went white. I asked them what the annual budget was for the University of Toronto for one year, to reach 50,000 people, and they didn't know. I said it is $1.3 billion. That's one university for one year.
We keep repeating these figures--that 25% to 30% of adult Canadian citizens have serious literacy problems, and the amount of money that has been spent on it over the past 20 years has simply been too modest. That's why the numbers aren't moving forward.
The good news is, as I said, that if an adult does not know how to read, whether they're a hotel worker, an unemployed worker in my colleague's industry here, a senior, an aboriginal youth, or a homeless person in downtown Winnipeg, we know the programs are in place to reach those people. But there are too few of them and we need to scale it up. So my advice, and I hope I will have the opportunity to continue dialogue--and I think I will--with the government, is that we do need to increase our investment in literacy and we do need to build on the existing infrastructure and increase the capacity so that more people are able to fully realize their potential.