Thank you for your question.
At Elementary Literacy, we're doing two things.
There's the whole literacy file. We know that people with low literacy are more likely to be unemployed and to be engaged in the social system and the criminal justice system. There is a range of impacts that are costly to government and also to the person in terms of the opportunity cost loss. Even just generally, I would illustrate that as the literacy issue. In New Brunswick, over 50% of adult anglophones have low literacy. Over 60% of our francophones have low literacy.
Our low literacy levels are really holding our province back. There has been much conversation lately. We're often looking at literacy and the economy, and how the economy is being held back in New Brunswick because of our low literacy levels.
What we did with Elementary Literacy, as I mentioned, was to really go to the evidence to see how we could help. At the time in 2009, there was a private sector movement afoot to say that we really needed to get this under control. The private sector was saying that it was affecting their bottom line. They couldn't find workers, and the innovation and entrepreneurship that they wanted to see in the province just wasn't there, and a lot of that was coming back to our low literacy levels.
We went to the evidence. It showed that reading problems emerge early in children. That's really the time to remediate. What we're advancing at Elementary Literacy is that if we can get to our children and if we can get to more children, we will not let them leave school before they are reading well, and then we will advance the adult literacy rate in that way and have the cascading effects on the economy.