I absolutely agree. That it is definitely a very widespread problem. I think we have some national figures around literacy and workplace essential skills, numeracy, and those kinds of things.
My hope would be that community-based funding would be made available, and that community-based funding would be available very quickly and be accessible, flexible, and nimble for the communities to help deliver community-based programming around literacy and essential skills to bring grade levels up, or at least workplace skills up. Let's face it, not everyone needs to have a grade 12. Not everyone needs to complete even a trades training program. But I think everyone deserves and needs to learn how to read, write, and have essential workplace skills, so that they can take their rightful place in the Canadian economy.
I guess my hope would be that this gap funding would exist to ensure that communities have the ability to deliver the programming in local communities. Often people are not well situated to leave communities for those skills, so helping to deliver those locally is really important, before trades or other training is expected.