I'd like to answer by saying that when you look at RESDAC, as we just said a few minutes ago, you see that we have roughly 30 partners across Canada working with our team.
Interestingly enough, related to your question regarding program evaluation, last summer when we went back to the government for our project, what we did was a kind of program evaluation. We sat together and asked how we can do things better.
We came up with a new pan-Canadian partnership. RESDAC sat with all the partners, such as the CLQ, which is an anglophone community group in Quebec working with us on community literacy. We sat with the CDÉACF in Quebec as well, which is
…the Centre de documentation sur l'éducation des adultes et la condition féminine.
We sat with coalitions from Ontario and Saskatchewan and from across the country, and we said that we needed to look at innovation, at how we can have a better relationship with different partners, such as the industries, different community partners, and provincial, municipal, and federal government entities and departments and so on and so forth. What should we do in terms of research? How can we make sure that we are fully aligned with what the federal government wants to do in terms of developing competencies, for instance, the competencies that will support the creation of jobs and put Canadians back to work, and so on and so forth? As well, how can we inform Canadians of what we're doing?
What we've done is exactly that. When we say that we work with partners of quality, we don't mean that other partners are not of quality. We mean quality in terms of our field of expertise, which is literacy and basic skills. Some organizations have developed a very good expertise, for instance, in competency development, in training people in the work environment, in making sure that they have the right level of literacy and basic skills to embrace the 21st century in terms of new technology, new job development, and so forth. That's what we mean by this.
Again, when we say “quality partnership”, it means working with the real experts in the field and making sure that for what we do, we do it the right way, and that we're using our funding in an efficient and effective way to make sure that where we spend a dollar, that dollar is well spent and serves as a lever for other investment and so on and so forth.
As I said, if you go with the integrated model, that's exactly what we're trying to do. We've done a lot of research on that. Now we're working with enterprises, with firms and so forth, and it has a real impact for them as well.