Good morning. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. I'm thrilled to be here.
I was a keener and arrived a little bit early, and I was listening to some of the other sessions. So unlike one of my colleagues who was here earlier, I am going to link low literacy and poverty quite explicitly, I hope.
Frontier College is Canada's original national literacy organization. We're quite proud that this year we're celebrating 110 years of national literacy programming. We have always been working on the frontiers with those who are most marginalized. Our programs include one-to-one tutoring, homework clubs, reading circles, classroom support, ESL, prison literacy, aboriginal summer camps, and workplace literacy. The learners we serve are poor and often on the margins of society, and they include families living in social housing, newcomers from racial and cultural minorities struggling to survive on low-paying jobs, high-school dropouts and at-risk youth who are chronically unemployed and often criminalized, first nations people living on remote reserves across Canada, prisoners, and people with disabilities.
We believe literacy is a fundamental human right, so that people can participate fully in a wider society. Any successful strategy or plan to reduce poverty in Canada must address the issue of low literacy. Numerous studies have highlighted the link between low literacy and poverty, and the findings from these studies are sobering. People with low literacy levels are twice as likely to be unemployed as other adults.
I was listening to a story on the radio this morning about a retraining program from the manufacturing sector, trying to retrain their laid-off workers. They were teaching them food safety certificates, everything entailed with new food safety training so they could work as dietician assistants, etc. But one of the barriers to these women completing the retraining program was their low literacy levels. These women couldn't read or write well enough, after spending years in manufacturing and not using their literacy skills, so even the money going into retraining programs has to start with basic literacy upgrading.
People with literacy problems have only two-thirds the income of other adults. Individuals with the lowest levels of literacy earn $28,000 less than those with the highest literacy levels. We know that people from poor families have higher rates of both illiteracy and poverty. People with low literacy cannot fill out the forms or even access a lot of the supports that the government has for them. It's an important service. People need to understand that to access housing, or health care, or other government programs and services, they need to have a pretty high functioning level of literacy. They are much less likely to be engaged in civic participation, such as voting or attending community meetings, or school meetings.
Low literacy, we know, is intergenerational, as is poverty. For people who cannot help their children learn to read and write or do their schoolwork, we know their children often grow up also becoming adults with low literacy.
Children in poor families are likely to be labelled in the school system and are placed in classes where less is expected of them and less may be offered. As a result, many poor children either drop out of school or graduate without being fully literate.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives recently put out a paper headed “Poverty reduction is the best cure for an ailing economy”. It said that a grade 10 student who drops out of high school loses out on more than $120,000 in their lifetime earnings.
Poverty and low literacy are intertwined. We lose as a society when students drop out. We lose as a society when people cannot understand their prescription medicine instructions, when workers cannot read safety instructions, when parents cannot read bedtime stories to their children.
While we, like other literacy providers, would certainly welcome additional government resources for community-based literacy programs to better serve learners, we also know that only a small fraction, about 5% to 10%, of adults with low literacy skills enrol in literacy programs for upgrading. We believe that new approaches are required to raise the literacy levels and to reach more learners, so we propose the following: that HRSDC pilot projects be embedded in community-based literacy programs among non-traditional literacy service settings, such as food banks, health clinics, counselling services, and retraining programs, to access more potential learners.
We know people aren't accessing those programs because they're outside of their community. We know there's a stigma attached to having low literacy skills. We also know that people may not be aware of how low their literacy skills are. The woman I mentioned earlier coming out of a manufacturing job wasn't necessarily dealing with the barriers that her low literacy provided, until she was forced to re-enter or reattach herself to the workforce.
We know that the people who are suffering the effects of increased poverty are accessing more and more community organizations, so we would ask that literacy programs be embedded in those.
We'd also like to suggest that federal government departments review all their programs from a literacy perspective. For example, Health Canada could review its instructions for medicine bottle labelling and ensure the language was accessible to Canadians with low literacy skills.
To conclude, poverty and low literacy are intertwined, and any successful poverty reduction strategy must address this. We know from numerous studies that too many Canadians are living in poverty, being left behind by traditional educational systems, and not accessing programs.
I'd like to end with a quote from a report by TD Economics. Craig Alexander is the chief economist at TD. A few years back they did a report called Literacy Matters: A Call for Action. To quote the report in its conclusion:
The best news is that efforts to improve literacy can have dramatic and far reaching effects. Higher literacy can boost the economic and financial success of individuals and the economy as a whole. It can reduce poverty, improve health, lift community engagement and lead to a higher standard of living. In fact, it is hard to identify any other single issue that can have such a large payoff to individuals, the economy and society.
Thank you.