Let me speak to your question. Dr. Satya Brink is from HRSDC. She is the director of policy research for national learning, and I'm quoting her: “At the current level of investment and with current programming, any improvements achieved are slower than the population growth nationally. If we keep doing what we are doing now, the number of people with low literacy...will increase at the rate of about 100,000 a year.” That's a direct quotation from her.
There are two aspects to this.
One, Canada grows about 1% a year. Between 1994 and 2004, we grew 10%. We need to take this into consideration when we look at literacy performance and say there is no improvement. Second, as my colleague mentioned, literacy is like muscles: without the robust policy framework, without means and programs out there to maintain your literacy skills, as you get older you simply lose them. Take that into consideration.
We can successfully claim that we are performing well, but given the current level of programming and funding, we can only do so much.