As I am speaking on behalf of the anglophone minority of Quebec, I'm going to present my remarks in English. I've been asked to keep the remarks very brief with the hope that we will have time to explore some of them in more depth during question period.
I bring a long history to this file, because I've been involved in the field for more than 30 years. I was the founder and executive director of the Centre for Literacy, which many people called the pre-eminent research and resource centre in Canada for many years until we closed in 2015. I've done research and written widely about this topic for a number of years.
I've just completed a study and inventory with Marc Johnson regarding literacy and essential skills, and the needs of minority language populations around literacy and essential skills. We're going to be doing presentations on that two weeks from now, each for our own communities, and then I expect that the office will share the report with people. I'm not at liberty to discuss any of the recommendations, but I will probably draw on some of the findings, because the study has been done in the last six months to a year.
The main message that I bring today is that the literacy and essential skills needs faced by the anglophone community in Quebec are not currently being well met by the services that are there, and that they face a number of barriers—some of them are quite similar to those faced by francophones outside Quebec, but some of them are unique to Quebec.
The large-scale impacts have been felt because of the changes in policy and funding from the federal level in particular, because the minority language groups are very dependent on federal funding that comes through Quebec. Quebec also has—in some ways, I would say—the privilege of having some core funding that goes to its community groups.
Anglophone groups in Quebec get some core funding. It's easy to take that to mask the reality, because the reality behind that core funding is that it's too small to really allow the groups to reach capacity or to serve the populations that they have to serve. I will leave that to Margo to speak about more fully.
I guess the other major impact that's been felt by the minority language community is the same as that has been felt by all the organizations across Canada, and that was the end of core funding for this activity in 2014 by the federal government. It said at that time that it was no longer going to fund research and organizations. It was only going to fund useful projects. What that essentially meant was that 30 years of work across the country was wiped out within a year or two.
Most of the major organizations that provided infrastructure imploded—there are almost none left. There is one that I think you met with last week, Le RESDAC. I still manage to sit on their conseil d'administration, but it is on the verge of collapsing as well. I hope that at least its mission will be carried forward.
Almost all of the English groups have disappeared except for one that is just a shell of itself. What it essentially means is that there are no grounds for doing research or providing networking opportunities, or spaces for people to meet and share best practices and knowledge, and so on.
There was also a great loss of collective knowledge and collective wisdom. Internally, what has happened over the past decade is a narrowing of policy focus at the federal level. When literacy first came onto the federal agenda at the end of the 1980s, when the National Literacy Secretariat was founded, there was a very broad vision of adult literacy and adult learning that tied it to citizenship, participation in society, participation in one's family, and participation in the workplace, so it was a very broadly focused vision.
Much of the funding, for many years, that came across the country came to the provinces through agreements that were signed. They were called federal-provincial agreements. There was money transferred to the provinces, but there were also matching funds with the provinces. A lot of the infrastructure, both at national and provincial levels, was based on those federal-provincial agreements.
Those ended in 2007, and the National Literacy Secretariat ended in 2007, and a new entity was created—the Office of Literacy and Essential Skills—which is still in place today.
What happened over that time was that the focus of balance between workplace, family, and community narrowed to be almost exclusively workplace, jobs, and employability. Today, the main focus of work in literacy that has any federal funds attached to it is workplace and employability.
The impact of these changes has been particularly hard felt by the minority language communities, because so much of their funding either came federally or through federal transfers. I hope we'll get a chance to talk about that a bit more.
Quebec has some promising activities going on right now that I hope we'll get to talk about as well. The Quebec government has been putting a lot of emphasis on literacy and skills right now. They've pledged that they're going to raise the levels on the next round of PIAAC international surveys in 2022. We don't know how that's going to affect the minority language community, but there is new money being injected.
I want to say that anglophones, again, have a different profile from our francophone colleagues. We perform better on PIAAC than francophones perform on PIAAC. That doesn't translate into better access to jobs or better access to any of the opportunities that are normally tied to PIAAC scores. The fact that we did better on PIAAC doesn't mean we're doing better overall.
We're a scattered community. We have the bulk of our population in Quebec, but the population has grown in the last few years. We're also a community where the numbers that are counted by Quebec and federally are not the same. Federally, you include the first official language speakers in your numbers of population. In Quebec they recognize only mother-tongue speakers of English. The difference in the numbers that are accepted becomes a difference in the long term in what's potentially available for funding.
I will just end my introductory remarks there and hope that we will come back to talk about some of these things in more detail. I would like to share with you some very specific stories that we heard while collecting data in the last six months, because they give you a portrait of a community that sometimes looks more vital than it is.
I'm going to let Margo talk about her sector, because I think it's a case in point, and then I might want to add something to what you have to say.