Challenges of Literacy and Essential Skills for the Twenty-first Century

Honourable senators, I rise today to make a humble contribution to the inquiry launched by Senator Bellemare last January, and continued by Senator Gagné, on the challenges of literacy and essential skills for the 21st century.

I would like to start by thanking my colleagues for bringing to the Senate this important issue that affects our communities and has a significant impact on our democratic life and on Canadians’ participation in the development of our country.

I would like to thank all those who spoke on the challenges of literacy and essential skills for the 21st century over the past two years. According to many reports on literacy, awareness-raising plays a key role in this field. The Senate of Canada, therefore, has the important role of questioning the federal government and the population to make literacy a national priority.

Literacy issues are obviously not new. From an historical perspective, we can see that the literacy of citizens has always been a concern for legislators and civil society, particularly from the moment a particular society sought to combine the principles of universal suffrage and the secret ballot.

When the young democracy of France’s Third Republic wanted to give everyone the vote and ensure that citizens could vote as they wished, it had to deal with some very technical but real issues related to the fact that many individuals could neither read nor write and, consequently, were unable to record their vote themselves. Although short-term measures were put in place to ensure, among other things, the presence of scrutineers who could help citizens vote with almost full confidentiality, the long-term solution was much more radical and visionary for the times.

By the end of the 18th century, the right to free education for all was institutionalized in France. It was a means to increase the entire population’s level of literacy and a way to ensure that all would be able to exercise their rights as citizens. At the same time, it contributed to the welfare of the new emerging French political system of democracy.

At the same time, in France, the great poet, the immortal Victor Hugo, was writing about the emancipatory power of books. For him, books gave readers a gateway to the world and access to the accumulated wisdom of all the previous generations, and thus served as a powerful tool for democracy.

In his poem À qui la faute?, which asks who is to blame, Hugo explains to a young man who just set fire to a library the importance of this symbolic place and the sacred power of books by saying to him:

Books are your wealth,

Your inheritance and fortune, your treasure, your joy.

They are knowledge.

And all that you destroyed.

To which the vandal can only respond:

I know not how to read.

This young man had never discovered the power of reading and therefore did not understand its intrinsic value and the negative repercussions of his destructive act.

This challenge of another era highlights a very current reality, namely the central place that literacy should occupy in our society, and not only as a means for all to be active in a labour market and contribute to our country’s economy but to see that all may have the necessary skills to fully participate in democratic life.

Unfortunately, even today, there are significant divisions between those who are highly literate and those who face significant literacy challenges. If our reality is different from that of the time of Victor Hugo, our responsibility remains the same, namely that of creating an environment favourable to and ensuring the optimal conditions for increasing the level of literacy of every member of our society.

In that sense, the ability to read and access to books are certainly essential conditions for ensuring this paradigm shift. To this day in our societies, books continue to be a gateway to a world of knowledge and wisdom, and that is why it is important to support events to connect books with readers.

That is why I am especially pleased to be the honorary chair of the “Gift of Reading” campaign of the Acadian peninsula book show, an initiative to promote books and to encourage reading habits at an early age. The purpose of this campaign, which is currently under way, is to make books available to young school-aged children living in precarious situations.

Although access to books is an important component of promoting literacy, that alone will clearly not end illiteracy. The fundamental question we need to ask ourselves is the one that Senator Bellemare so wisely asked in her inquiry: What essential skills do people need if they want to live and work decently in the 21st century? To that I would add, “and that will allow them to participate fully in our country’s democracy in an informed way?”

To answer that important question, let’s take a brief look at what we mean by literacy in the 21st century. In Canada, we increasingly use the word “literacy” as a short form for the concept of developing literacy and essential skills. This means that literacy encompasses a wide range of basic skills, as well as specific skills connected to certain tasks involving different forms of literacy.

Literacy applies to numerous sectors, whether it be related to health or financial issues, or even to digital, household or civic literacy. That being said, all literacy skills are understood as belonging to a particular contextual environment where the individual is required to have a more or less wide knowledge of an appropriate lexicon to understand a specific situation. A person can be literate in a given field of expertise and have poor literacy skills in other fields.

Organizations like the Réseau pour le développement de l’alphabétisme et des compétences, or RESDAC, consider literacy to be part of lifelong learning. We have to keep working to maintain these skills, and we must always be learning and refining new skills. Take, for example, digital literacy, which has been constantly evolving since the emergence of the Internet.

We see literacy as belonging to the big continuum of education, as we must continually work to develop and acquire these potential skills at every stage and in every aspect of our lives. That is to say, we must work on these skills at school as much as at work, but also in more informal contexts, such as at home, in the community and in various cultural settings.

What are the current key issues surrounding literacy? Senator Bellemare shared a troubling statistic in her speech. In Canada, 49 per cent of the population failed to attain the level 3 literacy threshold, as defined by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. This does not mean that people do not know how to read. It means that they are not necessarily able to understand and interpret what they have read, which makes it very hard for them to carry out complex tasks. The vast majority of people in this group do not realize they are in it, which is why stakeholders believe that we must promote awareness about the challenges of literacy and increase the number of informal learning and development spaces.

But what are the economic, social, political and cultural consequences of this reality? While it is difficult to assess the full social impact, the World Literacy Foundation estimated in its 2016 report that illiteracy costs a little over US$32 billion annually to the Canadian economy. This statistic of 49 per cent also indicates that there is a significant gap between the graduation rates in Canada and the percentage of the adult population that does not have the essential skills necessary to obtain a high school diploma, a literacy level of 3 by the OECD.

The information provided by Senator Gagné on literacy challenges and the services provided to francophone minority communities, Indigenous communities, and immigrant communities clearly shows that the effects of illiteracy do not affect every region of the country in the same way. The literacy rates in these communities are lower than the national average, meaning that tangible measures need to be taken to improve not only employability skills and techniques, but also basic skills. For a whole host of reasons, the need for language training is part of the urgent measures that are needed for francophone minority communities.

Some communities are more vulnerable to the adverse effects of illiteracy, which results in greater disparities or even blatant inequalities in the distribution of skills and services offered in Canada and in the ability of all Canadians to engage in the democratic process.

For example, in my region of the Acadian peninsula in New Brunswick, more than 60 per cent of the population has a literacy level below 3, which limits the type of labour available in our region of the country and necessarily has an impact on the economic development of the region and its self-management. This alarming situation also has broader implications for our region and our province, particularly in considering the new access to information paradigms that will allow citizen participation in democratic life.

Today, in a highly computerized world where we are bombarded with information from sources of varying reliability, a greater level of skill is needed to understand and interpret the news. The emergence of “fake news” has had a real impact on the lives of Canadians, forcing them to acquire more and more skills in order to be able to differentiate between real and fake news and make informed decisions. Unfortunately, very few quantitative studies have been done on the tangible relationship between Canadians’ literacy levels and their electoral and civic participation. Nevertheless, a few reports and studies have addressed this issue, and we can draw some conclusions from them.

A document published by Elections Canada in 2007 entitled The Electoral Participation of Persons with Special Needs quotes a number of surveys, including one conducted by Elections Canada in 2005, which found, and I quote:

 . . . a clear link between proficiency in literacy and a set of key factors [related to electoral participation]: a person’s employability, quality of job, earnings, use of computers, health status and levels of community participation. . . . The survey found that lower levels of literacy are associated with lower levels of involvement in community groups and organizations and in volunteer activities.

The Elections Canada report goes on to say that the “[l]evel of literacy skills appears to be an important determinant of voter turnout.” Even more worrisome, the report points out that people with low levels of literacy are particularly vulnerable to misinformation campaigns.

As the report states:

 . . . literacy skill levels relate to the sources people rely on for their information about politics, their general knowledge about politics and the likelihood that they participate in voluntary associations.

Although there have always been misinformation and propaganda campaigns that distort reality, capabilities for circulating false information are exponentially greater today than at any other time in history. We witnessed it during the 2016 U.S. election, and we see it every day on social media and in our own elections. Whether or not they are deliberately wrong, false messages circulate, and many people accept them as being true. Things would be very different if our rates of civic and digital literacy were higher.

If we want to make sure our citizens develop the skills and reflexes necessary to cross-examine the information they see circulating on the Web, we need to increase awareness efforts and earning opportunities so that everyone can properly use and question the multiple new sources of information made available on the Web. We need to invest more in digital literacy, not only to counter the effects of fake news but also to make sure we have a population whose awareness on issues, such as cyberbullying, has been raised.

The Elections Canada report also highlights the importance of civic literacy for ensuring the good governance of our regions and our country. If we want our fellow citizens not to fall victim to misinformation, we must first make sure that the entire population better understands our political system at all levels.

In closing, colleagues, I fully support Senator Gagné’s suggestion about creating a national public literacy policy that “makes the success of the learner the focus of any endeavour.” Unless our approach is tailored to individuals, their baggage, their environment and their needs, we won’t be able to equip them with the skills they need. We won’t even be able to reach them and help them understand they need this training for personal and professional reasons.

What we need right now is a national public literacy policy that provides for services adapted to the unique linguistic, social and cultural landscapes across the country. We need to make sure the government and literacy organizations on the ground are on the same page. We need adequate funding —

What we need right now is adequate funding for literacy organization across the country, especially organizations working in the Atlantic region that are struggling to survive. Basically, this would be a national public policy for literacy that would propose a holistic and long-term approach centred on individual development and based on the expertise of the communities involved.

Honourable senators, I would encourage us all to do more to promote literacy in our respective regions and divisions so that all Canadians may enjoy an equal opportunity to thrive and fully participate in Canadian democratic life.

Thank you for your attention.