Thank you for the comments and the question.
From my perspective, the situation you've laid out underscores the reason why we need to take an integrated and strategic approach to reducing poverty. It doesn't just reside within the household and with the parents and the children.
I'll give you an example from my own community. We had large group of immigrants from the Sudan arrive in the past few years. When the children and their parents came, of course, they were not able to speak, read, or write English. Faced with that problem, how does a community respond? Well, it responds in a number of ways. First, work with English as a second language for the parents and try to enable them to get into the workforce. The school boards in my community realized that they had to put something together that could bring the families together into the schools and help the children succeed in the class, because if we just relied on their parents, given their situation, it wasn't going to work. It required a community-wide initiative.
We need these kinds of strategic approaches. I think Mr. Finnie's point was very good about people being in poverty for different reasons, and we have to address those multiple reasons. Unless we do it in an integrated approach, not just within one level of government but across levels of government and in community programs, we're going to keep running up against problems.
So yes, literacy is very important. Then the question is, how do we achieve that for both the parents and their children?