Finance committee  Your guess is as good as ours. The main proponent is the coalition in New Brunswick. They've put it forward, but we're all partnering. We're all putting our resources and assets into it. It's a fisheries sector project. They keep us hanging on and say that we're going to get a ye

Finance committee  We asked for four last year, and that was considering that, during that time, the office of literacy and essential skills underspent on their budget by $13 million, so it wasn't like it wasn't there to give us.

Finance committee  We have statistics for our own organization, such as how many learners are served, and how many practitioners receive professional development. That's a big thing. In Nova Scotia, in particular, the province pays for a lot of the actual learning programs, but those learning progr

Finance committee  It's very small. In fact, we worked it out in the budget. It's 0.00018% of the projected expenditures from last year. When I sit here, I think, maybe if we would ask for more, we'd be taken more seriously.

Finance committee  Maybe what we're telling you is too small. If we were asking for $100 million to $200 million to fix the problems of literacy, it would be....

Finance committee  There are four provinces that we want to cover. In Newfoundland, of course, they have lost their literacy coalition. There is no leader in that province currently at our college level. For New Brunswick, P.E.I., and Nova Scotia, we're asking for $600,000 per year. That's a hundre

Finance committee  One other thing is that project-based funding doesn't cover the entire cost of the project. The organization and other partners always have to contribute as well, so it's taking away from our organizational capacity and resources to put into specific projects.

Finance committee  Canadian...? I think it's a little higher, maybe, than the Atlantic. In the Atlantic, it's 50%.

Finance committee  It's 60%.

Finance committee  We're about average.

Finance committee  There's a huge area of productivity that's lost. There are people who have the physical skills but they don't have the literacy skills in order to get the certification, for instance, Red Seal approval, so they're working under the level that they could be so that affects the bus

Finance committee  Thank you. In my speaking notes, the first page has just some facts. I won't go through those. On behalf of the Atlantic Partnership for Literacy and Essential Skills, which is a collaboration of the P.E.I. Literacy Alliance, Literacy Nova Scotia, and the Literacy Coalition of N