Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to explore a little bit off the top here in terms of literacy. I think we'd all agree around the table the cruciality of that in terms of getting out of poverty, staying out of poverty. The gaps in income, obviously, are huge because of different levels of income or literacy, I guess, using it as a bit of a cipher at the same time here.
I am curious about this in respect to.... One can home-school or one can use other forms of education, too, but most of our children are in either public or what they call out my way as the Catholic or separate system. In terms of elementary education up to a certain level—I'm not sure the exact age cut-off requirement in Ontario—you have to be in school over that period of time. In the old days, at least, way back in history, reading, writing, and arithmetic were at least the basics you should be learning there.
Are we saying that the schools...? I want to kind of explore beyond the schools here, but that's the fundamental kind of area where you're supposed to learn the literacy. Then there are reasons why people fall between the cracks. But is there something more that needs to be done there? This is provincial, but why do we have so many people simply passing through their grade up to the next grade, and they're really not getting a handle on the basic required literacy? Then they supposedly finish their grade 12 and maybe don't take any post-secondary education. If twelve years is not enough for literacy, then we have a fundamental problem with the school systems, the elementary school system and the high school system.
I'd like a response on that, and how can we...? We can do these things around the edges—and I say that quite respectfully—but at the core of it, what is required, when we have the bulk or the mass of our kids coming up and we're not doing it right there?