Education — Issue No. 14 — Friday, Oct. 20, 2006 (HTML)

2006 Legislative Session: Second Session, 38th Parliament
SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
MINUTES AND HANSARD

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
EDUCATION



CONTENTS

		Page

Presentations		285
	R. Aucoin
	D. Miller
	J. Clare
	H. Hughes
	D. Kirby
	V. Noonan
	N. Randall
	C. Rettie
	D. Hamilton
	A. van Hanuse

Chair:	* John Nuraney (Burnaby-Willingdon L)
Deputy Chair:	Vacant
Members:	* Daniel Jarvis (North Vancouver–Seymour L) * Richard T. Lee (Burnaby North L) Lorne Mayencourt (Vancouver-Burrard L) Mary Polak (Langley L) John Rustad (Prince George–Omineca L) David Cubberley (Saanich South NDP) * Rob Fleming (Victoria-Hillside NDP) Norm Macdonald (Columbia River–Revelstoke NDP) * Doug Routley (Cowichan-Ladysmith NDP) * denotes member present

Witnesses:

Robert Aucoin (Canadian Council on Learning)
Jeremy Clare
Lilaine Galway (South Island Learning Community)
Donald Hamilton
Helen Hughes (Councillor, City of Victoria)
Diane Kirby
Joanna Lord (Reading and Writing Centre, Malaspina University College)
Donna Miller
Vicki Noonan (Reading and Writing Centre, Malaspina University College)
Nora Randall (Reading and Writing Centre, Malaspina University College)
Claire Rettie (Executive Director, Victoria READ Society)
Doug Symington (South Island Learning Community)
Alegha van Hanuse (South Island Learning Community)

J. Nuraney (Chair): Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is John Nuraney. I am the Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Education.

I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the Education Committee's public hearing. We decided to hold our greater Victoria hearing in Langford. It is a real pleasure for us to be in your community and to hear directly from you about the important topic of adult education.

For your information, today's meeting is a public meeting which will be recorded and transcribed by Hansard Services. A copy of this transcript, along with the minutes of this meeting, will be printed and made available on the committees website at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt/education.

In addition to the meeting transcript, a live audio webcast of this meeting is also produced and available on the committees website to enable interested listeners to hear the proceedings as they occur. An archived copy of the audio broadcast will also be retained on the committees website.

Let me also, for the benefit of the presenters, read out the mandate that this committee has. The Select Standing Committee on Education was reissued the following terms of reference by the Legislative Assembly on February 20, 2006. The mandate reads that the committee be empowered to examine, inquire into and make recommendations with respect to finding effective strategies to address the specific challenge of adult literacy and, in particular, to conduct consultations to consider successful strategies from other jurisdictions on the promotion of adult literacy and specific strategies to improve literacy rates among aboriginal people, English-as-a-second-language adults, and seniors.

The committee is required to report back to the Legislative Assembly not later than November 30, 2006.

Today we have a number of people working with us. Wendy Collisson, Lisa Coburn and Martin Corley with Mike Leblond are here from Hansard Services. They record what is said during the hearing, and then Hansard produces the transcript of what people say, which is posted on the Internet.

We also have staff here from the Office of the Clerk of Committees. Kate Ryan-Lloyd to my left here is the Clerk Assistant in the Legislature and also serves as our Committee Clerk. And our researcher, Josie Schofield, is at the information desk.

We are also graced this morning by Craig James, the Clerk Assistant and the Clerk of Committees, who has honoured us with his visit this morning.

I would now like to invite the members of the committee to introduce themselves, starting from my left.

J. Horgan: John Horgan, MLA, Malahat–Juan de Fuca, Langford resident and ex officio member of the Education Committee.

D. Jarvis: Daniel Jarvis. I'm the Liberal member for North Vancouver–Seymour.

R. Aucoin: Thank you very much. I really appreciate the committee's interest in this topic, and I also appreciate your slotting me in at the last second. There was some confusion on my part about who was actually going to be presenting this morning, and I only found out last night it was me. So I really appreciate that.

You'll probably be very happy to know that my presentation will be quite short. I want to present to the committee a little bit about the work that we're doing within my own organization, which is the Canadian Council on Learning. I'll just begin by describing the council, because it's a relatively new organization and not that well known, particularly outside some national, federal circles.

The Canadian Council on Learning was begun two and a half years ago with a grant from HRSD Canada with the quite lofty mandate of examining the state of learning in Canada and reporting back to Canadians. That mandate includes all aspects of learning from what we call cradle to grave — from early childhood learning through to seniors and all stops in between.

The focus of it is really that reporting back to Canadians piece. We really mean reporting back to Canadians — reporting back to legislators and policy-makers such as yourselves through the spectrum to the person at the bus stop.

Some of the people that we work with work with populations who are — how shall I put this? — disadvantaged, who tend to fall under the radar. They quickly point out to me that when we report back to Canadians, in fact, we need to report back to Canadians who can't even make it to the bus stop. So we are really talking about the full spectrum of Canadians within the Canadian Council on Learning.

Literacy is very, very high on the radar for us. Recent national statistics through adult literacy surveys are showing that somewhere in the neighbourhood of

40 to 45 percent of Canadians are functionally illiterate, which is a real concern to us. Of course, we're all familiar with some of the recent cuts by the federal government, which are of even more concern to us because they very much seem to target the very populations that we are trying to help — populations that have literacy issues, women's populations, immigrant populations. This is a real concern to us, as it is to many other groups.

My role within the Canadian Council on Learning is that I'm the director of the Health and Learning Knowledge Centre, which is based at the University of Victoria. Our mandate, via extension, is to examine the state of health and learning in Canada and report back to Canadians with that same piece, which we call a knowledge-exchange piece — all Canadians, from Stephen Harper's government through to our government here through to the fellow at the bus stop through to the person that can't get at the bus stop. When I describe this mandate, a lot of people will look at me a little funny because they don't really see the obvious connections between health and learning, but if I give a couple of examples, I think it'll be very clear.

One example from government is quite obvious. If you look particularly at provincial governments, the two biggest expenditures are always health and education. So obviously, those are two very important aspects that we need to be looking at. But it's also very clear that health and learning are closely intertwined, so when we talk about literacy, literacy and health are very closely intertwined. I can give you two examples that explain that.

One is an example that everyone knows. If you send your children to school in the morning without a healthy breakfast, they're not going to learn as well. That's obvious. We've seen it time and time again. Those are, again, health and literacy issues.

The reverse example isn't always quite so obvious, so I'll give you a true example from someone here in British Columbia. This was a documented case. A young, single mother has a daughter who is one year old and develops an ear infection, goes to see her physician and is prescribed what I assume are antibiotics to deal with the ear infection. Of course, because the baby is only a year old, this medicine is in liquid form. The mother takes the medicine and the baby home, looks at the bottle, does not understand the instructions on the bottle and proceeds to pour the liquid into the baby's ear. The infection gets worse. Within an hour they have to go to the emergency room, and it winds up costing the Canadian taxpayer a lot more money because now you're involved in a hospital stay and an emergency room. So that's literacy affecting health, and we are very, very concerned about that.

What we're trying to do to make the situation better is we're actually funding projects on health and learning right across the country. In fact half of our projects are based here in British Columbia. It's exciting for our province that we've been given that privilege to fund these projects.

We just had our first national, face-to-face meeting last weekend, and as I went around and looked in depth at all the projects we're funding — and we're funding about a million dollars' worth of projects — every single project, without exception, had health literacy embedded in the project in a very conspicuous manner, which was very exciting for me to see. The focus of these projects isn't research. It's this knowledge-exchange piece: how do we inform Canadians about health and learning and about health literacy?

At the beginning of my comments I mentioned that illiteracy levels in Canada are expected to be around 40 to 45 percent. The same survey, which by the way, as a researcher I can tell you is one of the most solid surveys that I've ever seen in any field…. It's really, really well done. We recently got permission from Statistics Canada to draw the health literacy data out of that. That had never been done before. This survey has been done for 30 years. We had never drawn health literacy data out of that.

The health illiteracy rate in Canada is touted to be around 63 percent. I'll repeat that: 63 percent. That means that 63 percent of Canadians do not have the health literacy skills to be able to function in an industrialized society like Canada.

Of course, that ebbs and flows according to communities. Some communities are much worse. For example — we can't prove this, so I wouldn't necessarily want to go on record on this — we suspect for seniors the illiteracy rate is probably over 75 percent. Some of the other populations, like aboriginals and so on, you can probably extrapolate for yourselves what those numbers are. But they're frightening. We're trying to work on that, but basically that's the message that I wanted to bring to the committee. I think I will stop there and see if there are any questions.

D. Routley: Thank you, Mr. Aucoin. It's very informative and reassuring to hear the connection being made between health and literacy. If we take a lens of health and apply it to every aspect of society, we'd do very well, I think, in terms of social determinants of health. I think we should all make ourselves health critics and health ministers in that respect, regardless of where we find ourselves.

You mentioned the health connection in a very direct way with a person misunderstanding instructions on a medicine bottle. There is also a very clear connection between communities that have large gaps in income — poverty issues that play themselves out in social determinants of health around housing and education. If we close these gaps….

You also referred to the cost to the Canadian taxpayer. A previous presenter pointed out to us that a 1-percent gain in literacy rates equates to a 1.5-percent gain in GDP. With that I would agree with you.

We're also addressing adult literacy amongst aboriginal peoples. We also heard from a previous presenter that people who endure literacy challenges are six times greater to have suicide ideation. You seem to

be steering towards a connection between our health budget and literacy spending.

D. Routley: Okay. Is it your opinion, based on what you said, that if more attention were paid to literacy and more funding and more support to literacy programs, we would see a benefit to the health budget of the province?

R. Aucoin: I think there's absolutely no question about that. There is one problem with that. My mandate is sort of multi-dimensional, and I didn't mention the whole mandate. Another part of my mandate that I didn't mention is to examine the mechanism between health and learning, and this is where the research comes in. Unfortunately, for the committee, I don't have any answers on this one.

We know that health and learning are related, but we haven't worked out that exact mechanism yet. We don't know exactly how they're related. We can guess. I mean, I talk with researchers who say: "Oh, it's community. It's this. It's that. It's social determinants of health." They may all be right. They may all be wrong. We're just not sure yet. But I am sure that it's related, and we have seen examples that if you increase literacy levels, your health levels go up.

We talk about social determinants of health, and we also talk about things like social capital. In communities like Saskatchewan, for example, when we…. The Canadian Council on Learning released our Composite Learning Index in May, and we saw in communities, especially municipalities where the idea of social capital and literacy was very high, the health levels were very high. Is that a correlational relationship? Is it a causal relationship? We're not sure yet, but we know there is that relationship.

My answer to your question is: yes, I'm absolutely convinced of it. Can I prove it? Not yet. We'll check back in a year.

D. Routley: Could I ask you to give examples of jurisdictions where you can point to a benefit to the health system from increased literacy rates?

R. Aucoin: Saskatchewan, generally in fact, but specifically, Saskatoon is one of those jurisdictions. Some of the rural farming areas that still have their hospitals or clinics intact — of course, a lot of them were removed about ten years ago — tend to have high literacy rates as well, even within the agriculture communities, which aren't normally associated with high literacy rates.

It was quite interesting as well that the Yukon, in particular Whitehorse, had the highest literacy levels in Canada. That floored me, and it was kind of embarrassing because my deputy director actually lives in Whitehorse, so I should have known that — and I didn't. It turns out that in those very same communities the health rates are actually quite good as well.

Of course, Yukon is similar to British Columbia in the sense that as soon as you get outside Whitehorse, the literacy levels nosedive and so do the health levels. Is that related? I'm convinced it's related. There are probably other variables involved, like poverty, housing — broadly called social capital — those areas as well. As I said before, I apologize. We haven't teased all that out yet.

R. Lee: For the committee's benefit, what was the definition of health literacy?

R. Lee: Also, how do you improve health literacy? With the information out there on the Internet, sometimes it's easy to look up some of the information. We encountered some problems in health. Of course, for some communities there's an access problem to those kinds of information. Can you expand on those questions a little bit?

R. Aucoin: I'm just going to pull up something here. There we go. I'm cheating. As I said, we just had our first national face-to-face meeting of our knowledge centre last weekend, and we had a presentation by Irv Rootman, who's our health literacy guru. Fortunately, he used this computer to do his presentation, so I happen to have his definition here. I'll read it to you. There are many definitions for health literacy.

The question I was worried you were going to ask me is: what's the definition of health and learning? We don't actually have one yet. That's what we're working on.

Health literacy. There are a couple of definitions that are used generally, that people are pretty comfortable with. The one that we use actually comes out of the United States from the Institute of Medicine, and we're quite comfortable with this one. It's "the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions." That's from the Institute of Medicine, 2004.

There is actually a British Columbia–specific definition of health literacy, which I don't think I have here, that is very similar to that, but they just tweak it a little bit to be more in the British Columbia context. We don't use that definition, because we're a national organization.

R. Lee: Oh, international. Okay. So they're using which definition, the B.C. one or…?

R. Aucoin: They're using the international one. But within that survey…. It's not a survey of health liter-

acy. It's the IALSS survey of adult literacy. So, in fact, they don't use a definition of health literacy at all. There are quite a number of questions — because the survey is very long; it takes about two hours for an individual to complete it — within that survey that are related to health literacy, using this definition.

What we've done is brought in the statisticians to pull those questions out and just examine the data from those questions. Statistically, because the survey is so large and the population is so large…. I think it goes across seven OECD countries. Because that sample size is so large, statistically you can do that, and you can still get a statistically significant result.

R. Fleming: I'm just trying to still understand where 40 percent of Canadians don't have numeracy and literacy skills that they should, but 63 percent, by the definition you just gave, aren't literate around their health issues. It seems to me that — and correct me if I'm wrong — your organization would be focused on the front-line care providers most of all who deal with their patients.

Do you have a special relationship with, say, pharmacists and those involved with dispensing medicine or maternity services in the system and those kinds of things?

R. Aucoin: We're working on it. It's tough. My knowledge centre is only six months old. The Canadian Council on Learning has been around for two and a half years, but my knowledge centre really got going in March.

For no real reason, most of our projects to this date have fallen into the area of health promotion. That isn't really on the medical side, which is what you're describing — the pharmacists and physicians and so on. I am in the process now of trying to fix that. I've found more money, and I'm hoping to start funding projects more on the medical side.

For example, just a couple of weeks ago Royal Roads University opened up a Centre for Health Leadership. What they are particularly interested in doing is working with the Canadian Medical Association, the physicians and the pharmacists and so on, on leadership issues.

I've convinced them to add health literacy as one of their topics, provided I can find funding for them. And I think I've done that. I'll know again in another week or two. Hopefully, starting in January, or April at the very latest, we will actually have a project looking at those things. But for the moment, the projects we've been funding….

We fund about 21 projects right across the country, and as I said, half of them are based here in British Columbia. We have mostly been focusing on demographics: for example, what are the early childhood issues in health and learning? That project is being headed up by Camosun College, for example. What are the school health and learning issues, for example? It has all been more the education side of it rather than the medical side of it. That's a gap we need to fill, so I'm working on that.

R. Fleming: So government and school board programs around health and diet and all those kinds of things are part of this effort.

R. Aucoin: Exactly. That's right. In fact, it has performed the majority of this effort.

We've also looked at, as I said, populations that kind of fall under the radar. We just finished a big conference in Vancouver looking at former sex workers — actually, former and current sex workers, as it turned out — homeless people — you know, all the standard populations that we always talk about when we talk about populations that fall under the radar.

It was very powerful, what came back. A lot of the issues that came back from those people in those communities were basically around policy decisions. So we're going to be taking those issues and trying to influence policy. That's where this whole knowledge exchange question comes: who are you trying to influence, and how are you going to influence them?

In that particular case, they're going to be looking at policy issues, as well, about the homeless and at policy issues and legal issues surrounding sex workers and former sex workers and so on.

When we deal with early childhood issues, though, of course those are not necessarily policy issues. That's dealing with schools. That's dealing with parents so that they're health-literate, so that their children are healthier. It's also dealing with communities.

Some of the other areas that we look at, by the way…. Health literacy is obviously a big one, but we also look at healthy communities of learning — how do you build healthy communities? — and capacity-building. We are trying to cover that whole spectrum.

I don't mean to apologize for this, but I am quite happy to admit that we haven't done a good job on that medical side. That's what I'm trying to fix now.

D. Jarvis: Mr. Aucoin, your 63-percent illiteracy on health issues does not surprise me. I would say that probably 98 percent of this room…. If they had a sore ear and went to a pharmacy, and he gave them a bottle of liquid, they wouldn't know whether to put it in the ear or swallow it or do what. But isn't there an onus on the pharmacists — rules and regulations for pharmacies — to describe specifically to every patient what that medicine is, whether it's a pill, or how they should use it and at what intervals and times?

A lot of the times I get prescriptions, and I feel like a fool, because they sit me down as though I'm five years of age and say: "Now, I want you to take this pill and swallow it." I'm being a little facetious when I say that. But are there not rules and regulations on the pharmacy end of it?

R. Aucoin: I know what you mean. I don't know if there are rules and regulations. There's certainly a

moral and a professional responsibility associated with that. I haven't spoken with a lot of pharmacists about this, but I've spoken with a few.

I also have a small baby at home, so I've experienced it firsthand. My experience with the physicians and the pharmacists is that they are so busy, and they're flying at a hundred miles an hour, that they don't always have time to do that sort of due diligence.

There's also a balance that they have to strike with their own clientele and their own customers that I'm sure everyone in this room has also experienced. You look at someone, especially with a pharmacist…. You're elevated. You're probably six feet above your client — right? I don't know why they have to stand on that platform, but they're always up on that platform looking down on you.

They have to strike a balance, because I know for a fact…. I've never asked them, but I know they're standing up there and going: I don't know this person's literacy level. I could treat this person at one extreme, as if they are a complete imbecile, and describe to them, "Okay, now open the bottle and take the pill out, and blah blah blah," or I could assume they are a very well-educated person and I don't have to explain anything to them because it's all written on the bottle — or somewhere in between.

Now, how do you make that decision? It's tough. I mean, it's experience for a lot of them. This goes through their head in a millisecond, but I know they struggle with that with every single client they have. I don't know if they have official policies surrounding that or not.

I'm not a shareholder of London Drugs or anything, but they do not set up an upper pedestal. They have chairs, and they have pharmacists who sit down — at least in North Vancouver, where I'm from — with every person who takes a drug.

R. Aucoin: Well, it's great that they do that. I've noticed that the London Drugs here does the same thing.

D. Jarvis: Would you not think it would be advisable to contact all the pharmaceutical associations and pharmacies?

R. Aucoin: We could certainly look into that. To be honest, it's not something I've considered doing.

R. Aucoin: I appreciate that. As I said to Mr. Fleming, within our knowledge centre I admit that we haven't done a good job on the medical side of things. In my defence, we've only been around since March, so we can't do everything all at once.

There's also a resource allocation to that. If I'm going to do that — for example, work with the pharmacy associations and that sort of thing — there's a resource allocation. I have to play that against some of my other projects as well. Like I said, we fund $1 million worth of projects, which for me is a tremendous amount of money, but it's incredible how fast it goes when you're funding 21 projects nationally.

I do appreciate that. I'm glad you raised that issue. I just will extend that. We do talk a lot, especially in our face-to-face meeting that we had last weekend, about not just making sure the Canadian public was health-literate, but making sure that the medical personnel were — obviously they're health-literate — aware of the health literacy issues. That's very high on my radar right now.

J. Nuraney (Chair): One last question from Doug — a very short one, with a very short reply.

D. Routley: I think we need to underline something that you said. That is that the pharmacist needs to make a judgment of the person's literacy rate right in front of them. Many previous speakers have talked about the shame people feel around literacy issues, so I point to Jacques Demers. What would a pharmacist assume if Jacques Demers walked up and went to receive some medicine? I think they would assume that Jacques Demers could read the instructions.

Now we all know that he wouldn't have been able to. So even with those kinds of judgments, obviously illiteracy can have dire outcomes.

R. Aucoin: Absolutely. When we had this conference last week in Vancouver with the sex workers and so on, one of the things that came out with almost every single population was that they talked about the roadblocks in front of them — housing, poverty. The list went on and on.

The roadblock that they were 100 percent of the time most embarrassed about was not poverty. It was not lack of housing. It was not the fact that they had been sex workers. It was not the fact that they had drug addictions to cocaine and so on. It was that they couldn't read and write. I've been in education for 20 years, and that floored me.

I thought that when you have that shopping list — cocaine addiction, and you're living on the streets — literacy would be pretty low on your list of things to worry about. But that was the one they found most embarrassing.

Just a very quick one from me, Robert. In terms of the health literacy that you are so very keen about and talking about, should there be an initiative of some sort with the pharmaceutical companies themselves for labelling and naming the products what we may perhaps want to call literacy-friendly so that people are able to quickly understand what this medication is about, rather than all those very complicated names that are put before us?

R. Aucoin: In fact, there is a move nationally now — and we're hoping to support it — to go beyond that

not just on the medicines but all of the medical materials or health-related materials that go out to people.

For example, when you go into your doctor's office…. I have a science and education background, and I walk into my physician's office and see the materials. I always read them, because I'm very interested in that. The language levels in those materials are really quite high. In most cases I would say that if you do not have an undergraduate degree, you're not going to understand most of what's in those materials. They're targeted at the general population.

My physician's clinic is actually in the middle of a first nations community, which traditionally has lower literacy rates, not to mention the fact that English isn't their first language. I read those documents that are targeted at these populations, and I'm just thinking that this is completely inappropriate. So yes, there is a huge gap there. There are organizations working on it. We're not one of them, but we are hoping to get involved in that very soon.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you very much, Robert, for taking the time and coming before us.

D. Miller: Good morning. I just want to express my appreciation to the committee for being so open and receptive to the ideas of lots of people. I've followed, briefly, on the Internet some of the presentations in other parts of the communities.

I've spent half of my adult life in the Kootenays, so I was very interested in the Columbia basin initiative. I have spent the last 20 years in Victoria. I was hired to create the continuing education program in Sooke school district, where you're residing right now. That goes through Port Renfrew. Initially, when I first started in '86, I got some funding from the Vancouver Foundation to initiate a volunteer tutor program. I then was involved in establishing Project Literacy Victoria with some other people.

Over the years we've done a number of different literacy initiatives — a number of them being kind of through the federal National Literacy Secretariat. One of them that was most challenging but for me created the most pride was the establishment of a program called READ 2000 — Resources in Education for the Adult Deaf.

In the first year it was a program from the National Literacy Secretariat in 1990 to train tutors to work with this population. The inspiration was an illiterate adult who…. There was no program anywhere in the province for him. We brought him in, and ultimately he married a young woman who was deaf as well.

He ended up graduating and becoming a custodian in our program. They have four children that are now in their teens. They went on to lead very productive lives, but he had no opportunity prior to that for any form of employment. His wife, through the READ 2000 program, has been able to start her own janitorial business. He still is a custodian in this district.

Other programs have been working with the aboriginal population and implementing programs where their art and culture and history are very much a part of the delivery of the graduation program. A couple of years ago we did a video with Honour the Past, Prepare for the Future, and the students learned video-making skills. I've brought Jeremy Clare with me today, who has been involved in the most recent project that has been completed, called the Irwin Park project. Before I introduce Jeremy and give him an opportunity to give his perspective, I want to just outline a bit more of my background so that you can understand where I'm coming from.

In 1995 I was seconded from the Ministry of Education to work with the joint committee of the Ministry of Advanced Education, colleges and school districts to create the common credentials for a graduation program. Ultimately, that was implemented just before the year 2000. Since then a number of adults have been able to go back to school and be given the foundation to gain employment or further education.

As part of that seven-month period, I was asked to contact all the colleges and school districts particularly to find out what literacy programs were being offered, because it was really hard to tell from the data if there were any literacy programs offered in the school districts. I found as few as seven across the whole province.

During that process of dialogue with both systems, I was able to visit and view a number of programs. I learned that the reticence of students to go into institutions that they have had unhappy experiences in really impacts the ability to have that critical mass to deliver programs. Jeremy started in our literacy program, and we didn't have enough students to justify hiring a teacher. He was in it for a while and was floating around and then came back into the system. He'll tell you what has made a difference for him.

There has been a lot of money raised through the volunteer sector to make the connection with learners or people who have struggles with literacy, but volunteers don't have the expertise to deal with some of the complex issues where people can't read and write. There are reasons why people can't read and write. It's not an easy process, so I think there needs to be the acknowledgment there. There should be a holistic program with the expertise of people to deliver the program.

One of the most significant opportunities I had in my career was in 2001 when I was chosen to lead a group study exchange to Finland through Rotary International. It was a four-week trip. I led some young professionals over there. We visited schools and a range of learning organizations and professional delivery of different organizations in northern Finland. It was an experience that kind of correlated with some of the problems we have in British Columbia with the distance and delivery of things on line.

I was able to meet educators, view programs and learn a great deal and came away very impressed with

how such a small country of six million people has such a high literacy rate — 96 percent of the population are literate — and how many students go to university and complete a post-graduate degree. Everyone I met values education and sees it to be the key to prosperity and economic activity.

Every student from kindergarten to post-secondary gets a free lunch in Finland while they are attending school, so the connection between health and literacy is a key connection. If you have food in your stomach, your mind works a lot more clearly.

Another aspect of the delivery of programs in Finland was that in elementary school, students have a wide range of options to optimize learning — woodworking, music, drama, a variety of applied skills and languages. By the time they reach middle school, they have a sense of their own aptitude, passion and capabilities, and they can make informed choices.

With different budget cuts, that hasn't always been the case in British Columbia. From what I've learned over these years of being involved in adult education, I feel that learning needs to be an enjoyable experience. Learners need to demonstrate success, and there needs to be a mentor, a cheerleader, for learning so that the learner is encouraged to continue. And they need to be comprehensive, including decision-making, nutrition knowledge, cooking, budgeting, etc. I think it's important for aboriginal programs to include their history, art, language and culture in the academic program to bring meaning to it.

Because of the nature of the breadth of our province, I think it would be helpful if some on-line opportunities were given so that it's visually appealing to remote areas. To get that critical mass of students to come to a program — the stigma that was already mentioned just to enrol in a literacy program — it should be tied to applied skills and a variety of delivery options.

This is where READ 2000 was really helpful. Only 1 percent of the population is profoundly deaf, so the READ 2000 program…. The tutors were trained, and the expertise of someone specializing in deaf education went to the student where the student was enrolled — whether it was UVic, Camosun, North Island College or Malaspina University College. The expertise went to the students, so it wasn't one core group of illiterate adults enrolled in some program.

The literacy program should be part of a broader scheme of integrated employment training and skills development, in my belief. This would alleviate the stigma.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Sorry, I don't want to interrupt, but two minutes to wrap up and then some questions.

D. Miller: I think it's important to tap into the community resources. In the past I think the delivery has been rather erratic. So it's important to capitalize on the literacy resources in the community.

I want to turn it over to Jeremy. The last project I was involved with — I retired two years ago in 2004…. I applied to the National Literacy Secretariat for a partnership with the University of Victoria, the city of Langford, the West Shore and Colwood Rotary to improve a park down the road. It was Humpback campsite, but it's now Irwin Park. The idea was to create a video for public relations on literacy issues. The students would tell their stories of what some of the barriers were. I have some copies here for those of you who are interested, and I also have copies of the manual for deficit learning.

I think it's important to listen to Jeremy because of his perspective on what that project meant to him. He's had literacy challenges, but he's an amazing photographer, and he's really very committed to involvement in this project.

I've been a student at the WestShore annex building for a couple of years now. It's been helping quite a bit. My reading has improved. The Irwin Park project has had a good effect on me. It's been fun working out in the park. It's been fun enough that everybody comes in the rain and snow, and we still work out there.

Through Irwin Park I've been able to speak out in groups more. I have mostly avoided it. Well, I'm here now. I've done this a couple of times.

The Irwin Park project — there have been lots of neat things around there. It's a little place, but there's a lot to learn from it. It would be nice to see projects like this continued.

It would be nice to see more continue on at Irwin Park. I've been working on trying to get a water wheel built there. There are two ponds, and there is about a 20-foot drop. We could build a water wheel, and it would be nice on its own, but we could also use it to generate a little power to make money to help the park go further. It's also a good educational opportunity for alternative energies to get people thinking more about it.

It could be a lot like the Swan Lake project. It could be known throughout the communities, and it could be an attraction for this community and a benefit to the school. Other schools could possibly participate in it. It could be a good project.

D. Routley: Thanks, Jeremy, for that. It's a good idea. Swan Lake has been a big resource for the university and the school districts as well — a huge educational opportunity. There's no doubt.

The question I have is to Donna Miller around the idea of the volunteer sector. There's lots of money being raised, but these people who are volunteering are not experts. It's been pointed out in other meetings that they are perhaps best seen as augmenting the expert help that can be delivered, but not replacing it. That

was pointed out in Prince Rupert by Beth Davies, who told us: "Don't amateurize. Use the expertise to create hubs that can support volunteers, but don't amateurize it."

We've also had it pointed out that B.C. is the lowest funder of any province of community-based literacy programs. Do you see basic core funding issues of community-based programs as the challenge that would enable volunteers to give the service they can give?

D. Miller: Yeah. For instance, Rotary has a really strong interest in literacy. The whole mandate of Rotary is leadership in the community. I think if you target some partnerships with other community-based organizations to provide the lead…. But don't forget that it is a complex process and people spend years going to university to learn how to overcome dyslexia. Particularly with the profoundly deaf, literacy is a challenge.

The problem of the ongoing funding. For instance, because of my passion for literacy, I spent 200 hours of my volunteer time writing the proposal for this most recent project. There is no way that anybody in the system would have that kind of time to devote to that.

The whole issue of core funding and how it is administered. I'm not suggesting giving it to the school districts or to the colleges. But I really like the Columbia basin model. It's a partnership. You have the buy-in, and then it's the community's. Everybody buys into it in that way.

If I was queen of the world, I would say: don't necessarily give it to established bureaucracies, because they're not flexible enough to have the creativity. This is why I'm so saddened by the loss of the National Literacy Secretariat, because it didn't have that kind of restriction. It had an external review committee from all over the province that looked at these proposals. But the problem is the ongoing writing of the proposals. You can't do it.

D. Routley: We have the already established and already made investment, publicly, in school districts. We've heard from some people from those institutions, who've suggested flexible outreach models based on those institutions but reaching out into the community. This current government has established literacy as a golden goal.

D. Routley: Yes. To bring meaning to those words, I would certainly like to see that kind of funding. Do you think those outreach attempts could be well utilized in rural areas? We have a big divide between urban and rural service.

D. Miller: Oh, I think so, because I spent a lot of time in the early '80s developing a rural education program in Nelson. Sometimes the school is the centre of those rural communities. They're very into community-building. I think it would be a wonderful model, but part of the mandate should be that these are real partnerships, that it's not just lip service to partnerships, but to really honour the fact that the community has a strong say in the direction in which it goes.

R. Lee: In your presentation you mentioned that literacy programs should not be isolated and should be part of a broader scheme of integrated employment training and skills development. Do you have any specific suggestions on how to bring people to those programs?

D. Miller: I think of some of the passion that Jeremy brings to it, for example. They got chainsaw use. They got WHMIS certificates. Even if it was a really lousy day, they came in the afternoon — sometimes to this room — to get the first aid and all those other employment certificates, which surprised me.

If you can tap into the individual's interest in aptitude and passion, then you'll have more success rather than just focusing on book learning. It's more applied focus, and then they have something on their resumé at the end of it that they can demonstrate to an employer.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Jeremy, just a quick question to you: what really motivated you to improve your reading skills?

J. Clare: Part of it was that it was sort of the right time for me. Then there were good teachers. I put in the time to practise reading. I have improved a lot, and I still have more to go — mostly speed. But I'm getting better at all the other stuff too — the math.

J. Clare: I didn't really talk about it much. It's only been the last few years that…. I wrote down here in my thing. I didn't really read all of it.

Before when I was reading I would read about seven pages, and there would be about a dozen words that would mess me up all over the place. The comprehension wasn't good. Now I've worked up to ten or 20 pages a night, and there are maybe five words that I have trouble with.

This school has helped me quite a bit. My computer skills have increased. I wasn't any good on a computer. Now you can put a program in front of me, and I can figure it out. If my reading wasn't as good as it's improved, I probably wouldn't be able to do that.

D. Miller: I said what really inspired you to, and he said the research on the water wheel. It was over the Internet, and he wanted to find out how to do it.

Also, they had a blog where they inputted their thoughts and feelings about the Irwin Park project, so that helped improve the literacy too.

I'll leave these videos. I hope you will take the time to look at it because I think it will help you to understand what some learners' issues are.

Our next presenter is Councillor Helen Hughes from the city of Victoria. Welcome, Helen.

H. Hughes: I'm very pleased to be here. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. Actually, I'm talking on behalf of everyone in Victoria and the surrounding areas.

In May of 2005 Victoria was named as a global learning city. I think this was something that gave a great impetus to our whole city to become involved in the literacy world. There are a lot of human resources in our area to try to remove the barriers to learning and promote literacy.

One of the things that the improved literacy does, as you know, is increase the economic, social and cultural well-being of all individuals. You've heard that, I'm sure, in all the areas that you've been hearing.

One of the estimations is that 30 percent of those students in school do not graduate from grade 12. That to me is a very sad kind of statistic. As these youth go on into midlife, there becomes a very difficult future for them.

We believe — and I'm talking about we as a city — that all three levels of government should work together on this to try to increase the literacy and the numeracy within our city. Also, there should be a continuum of opportunities for people of all ages to become literate and to have lifelong learning.

In January of this year there was a woman from Hume, Australia, whose name is Vanessa Little, who came to Victoria, and she inspired us to go ahead, to have a Lifelong Learning Festival. There's a brochure attached that you have. We decided as a group…. We had about ten people on our committee. Martin Sager and Martha Anslow were the co-chairs, and the city supported this. But one of the things that gave us the opportunity to go ahead was seed funding from the provincial government.

This came about at nearly the end of March — about the 28th of March — when there were, I guess, a few dollars left over at the end of the year. We had a grant that was given by the ministry, and this is what allowed us to go ahead with this. And I think that's a very important thing to remember — that there are volunteers out there, but they do need to have a volunteer coordinator or a person who has the opportunity to lead us to make something happen.

This was the result. We had it at the end of September — actually the 30th of September. Then during the following week there were places open that were learning opportunities for people.

One of the things that I think is very important is for all people to learn what to do with their spare time, their leisure time. This is what I understand from youth who are no longer engaged in actual learning in the schools — that they don't know how to use their leisure time. So one of the things that we tried to emphasize at the learning festival was the opportunities that people of all ages had in order to use their leisure time in a better way.

We had over 40 groups that came forward. They had either a stage presence with learning involved with it, or we had those that were in a booth, where they had their opportunity to show people how they could learn too.

One of the things that Victoria is very much hoping for, and it must happen, is that there be a learning common. This would mean that there would be a number of sectors in the learning communities that would be together under one roof or in close proximity to each other. This would give the opportunity for those who are learning, those who want to learn and those who have little opportunity to learn…. Often those are older people who have maybe not continued in their education per se, but who realize, eventually, that what they need is to have the opportunity to learn.

We have a public library in Victoria that is very much outdated as far as IT goes. We have a library that is bursting at the seams. We do hope that we will have a library that will be the centre of learning and that it will lead to a lot of help for a lot of people.

I think it's important when you have a learning place that you have it so that it's accessible to everybody. I think it should be on a transit line. It should be almost free of charge but something that is supported by all three levels of government. I think that's one of the things that I hope that you will take to your final report — that literacy in most cases is the persons who do not have the financial opportunity to continue. It is one of the things that I think is really important — that they have that as something they can go to without having to try to get some money to do it, because most of the people who are wanting that access to literacy are having that difficulty financially.

We found that there were a lot of people who really found new opportunities to learn. We're trying to stress that lifelong learning is the really important part and that it was difficult to get people to think: now, what is lifelong learning? But I think through these kinds of opportunities…. It was free of charge for everybody. Then those who came with their resources and showed the ways that they could teach…. It was a great day. I think that little bit of seed money from the provincial government was the opportunity that made it happen.

R. Fleming: Thank you, Councillor Hughes. It's nice to see you this morning.

I just wanted to ask you a question about the learning commons that you presented — that vision for downtown Victoria. It seems to me that in addition to the cluster of the university, the college and a new

main branch of the library, I wonder if the group that you primarily work with has ever considered the Provincial Archives.

I was a researcher in my university days, and it's not the best basement suite, shall we say, that our city has to offer the research community. I think, obviously, that doesn't have a ton to do with literacy, but I think you're right in terms of that cluster around the learning commons. You do get value for people with all kinds of reading and writing interests and skills.

H. Hughes: Yes, definitely. The archives is probably one of the first things we thought of. That's another area of learning for a lot of people too. It's an interest for them.

R. Fleming: It might be a good way to direct the province's involvement in that.

R. Fleming: Also, there is this document, too, that I don't think people are highly aware of, the Victoria accord, which envisioned a caretaking role around the legislative precincts. There's a lot of public land there, and there are some very outdated buildings. I mean, it is downtown Victoria. There is that resource where the province of B.C. could be engaged too. I think they could bring things to the table through that. I would put that there for the city council and the coalition of interests that you represent today to consider as well.

H. Hughes: We feel that downtown is the place where there should be the core of the learning city, and certainly, the kinds of ideas that you have, have been pursued also.

As you know, it's difficult to find the land. It's also expensive these days. But we feel that there is support for the library, which would then be the hub of this learning common. It would probably have to go to a referendum, but we feel that the citizens of Victoria would be in favour of that kind of addition to the opportunities they have.

The library that we have now downtown…. Some of you may never have been there, but I invite you to go and see. You would find that it is full all the time. People are waiting to go onto the computers. There just isn't enough room there. We have a new librarian who is very much willing and waiting to do something about it, and I think that we will go together and….

One of the things that I think everybody would know is that the technology has changed so much since the library was formed in Victoria. We just haven't been able to keep up with the new things that are happening. We really feel that we would like to move ahead into the 21st century. We haven't yet.

D. Routley: Thank you very much, Councillor Hughes. I appreciate your presentation, and you've pointed to a theme that's been recurring around supports like transportation and housing — social determinants of health again. You suggested free-of-charge transportation to programs. In our community in Cowichan we, on the safety advisory committee, considered the idea of allowing free transportation for people who can verify that their income is below a certain level.

Of course, communities subsidize these rural transportation routes by a rate of over 90 percent, and one of the difficulties in expanding the routes is getting enough ridership. One of the difficulties in getting ridership is people having enough money to use the buses because often, squeezed in between Victoria and Nanaimo, we're kind of a service gap. So people with low incomes are pushed out into our more rural areas.

You pointed out that the programs lose students who mostly have financial barriers. It was pointed out in Prince Rupert also that many students are lost because, during an upsurge in economic activity, these students will get $8-an-hour jobs that keep them away from the programs because of their time requirements, transportation requirements — all of those. It was also pointed out that those same folks are the last people to benefit from an upsurge in the economy, and the first, perhaps, to be punted out the door if there's a downturn. Then they are that much less employable if we haven't invested in this.

I see a connection between those. Would you encourage us to look at those supportive elements — like transportation, housing opportunities and those sorts of issues — as impacting literacy investment?

H. Hughes: Very much so. The other thing with the library is that it is a free service. What we envisage by having an expanded role in the system…. Now we don't have the space to do it. Also in the learning commons, we envisage the opportunity for people who are the $8-dollar-an-hour employees — they would be able to come and have upgrades so that they could move up in their profession, whatever it is. In that way they could become higher-waged and also feel better about themselves.

I think when people become…. As we heard just previously, if you have somewhere that you have a goal in life, you wish to become better skilled in one way or another, this gives you a good feeling about yourself. This is where the library can be extremely valuable in assisting those who are at the entry level. They can become more skilled in their choice of occupation.

R. Lee: In some communities, they have brought the library into the community, the mobile library. Are they needed? Sometimes there are not many libraries in the city. They're in different locations.

H. Hughes: There are three municipalities that are in another library system. We have ten with the Greater Victoria Public Library, and then there are three municipalities in another library system. It's a very difficult thing.

R. Lee: But do you think a mobile library will help in reaching out to people?

H. Hughes: Oh, to go out to people? That would be wonderful, and there are a few of those, sort of, sub-branches, you might say. Unfortunately, it is a very expensive way to deliver your services. We just don't have the dollars to bring the people's library to them.

There's also the difficulty with all the IT now, the computer world that people are learning to come into in a lot of cases or to expand upon. It does make it difficult to take it mobile. We do have, as I say…. I think there are two where we take books to these two areas. They always want more services, but it's a very expensive way to deliver services.

As I say, we have ten municipalities that are a part of our library system. There's always a reluctance with the budget time. They don't like to have that extra dollar put on them. As you expand your library's system, even if it's the actual building kind of library, that requires more people who are employed, etc. There's always that reluctance on the part of other municipalities to pay for those extra services. I agree. It's great to go to the community, but unfortunately, there is that financial problem that comes with it.

J. Nuraney (Chair): On behalf of the committee, I thank you, Councillor, for taking the time.

D. Kirby: I'll do it as quickly as I can. First of all, I'd like to say [Sencoten spoken], which is good morning in Sencoten. I teach at the Saanich Adult Education Centre in west Saanich, which is on the Saanich peninsula, and work with first nations people — adults — from, I think right now, eight different bands on the south Island. I'm speaking on behalf of myself, not on behalf of my organization, because my experience goes beyond the Saanich Adult Ed Centre.

I'm so excited to see Donna Miller here today, because if it wasn't for her, I wouldn't have the passion for literacy. I actually started in a training program, an HRDC-funded program, that got me into literacy, into instructing curriculum design and volunteer management, and from there I worked at the adult literacy program with the Sooke school district for more than eight years.

From there I went to Project Literacy Victoria as well as doing contract training for Camosun and curriculum design for Vancouver Community College. With Project Literacy Victoria, I was on their board and was also their reading and parenting program coordinator. From there I did tutor-training design for the Saanich Indian school board and am now an instructor with them doing subjects from literacy to computer skills, including supporting social studies 9; English 10, 11, 12; language 10 and 11; as well as law and first nations studies.

But what I'm here for today is to actually tell you about who I am. I'm a trans-Canadian. My dad was in the Navy, and in 13 years of school, counting kindergarten, I went to 11 different schools in five different provinces and one territory.

First of all, the federal government doesn't do enough to oversee equity in education programs across the country. Then provincially, we see inequities in school systems from district to district. That's all I'm going to say about that right now, because it's one of my hot spots.

I know that literacy has come a long way, that we acknowledge the fact there are needs from everywhere from birth to death. It's phenomenal what we're seeing now. It's awesome that hockey players are selling newspapers, and it's amazing that money is coming in to fund programs that should be core-funded.

Most of my background's on my handout, and I've tried to keep things to point form. I'll go as quickly as I can.

These are things we need to do. It took me a while to get these positive, not negative. We need to acknowledge that adults need basic skills to survive and to support them receiving these skills without penalty. Don't take away their SA because they're in school. Don't take away their work opportunities because they're going back to school.

Create a federally and provincially integrated body that incorporates people already working in ministries, schools, community agencies and bands to support learning. Stop the one-off power positions of people who say the final yes and no over things.

Fund intergenerational early childhood education specific to individual groups and needs — first nations intergenerational, English-as-a-second-language intergenerational.

Stop making adults without grade 12 fit into a pedagogical K-to-12 system to achieve their Dogwoods. The adult Dogwood was one of the most amazing steps into acknowledging this. It doesn't go far enough in recognizing what people do know. Also, all the curriculum material right now is based on children's education, not adult education.

Stop block funding to schools that let under-19 students out of the system after September 30. Funding should be based on contact and support hours. Special needs screening should be ongoing throughout the

Support parental and caregiver involvement in education and reading at all levels of a child's life. Empowerment of the parent is crucial to their involvement at middle and high schools.

Develop effective programming to work with the residential school effect and its impact on multiple generations of first nations learners. Incorporate traditional and culturally acceptable people and subjects in all schools. Use people's first languages as a base for learning English.

Make learning disability screening free to all under Health Canada or provincial health systems. Acknowledge FASD — fetal alcohol spectrum disorder — as a brain injury, and allow adults with FASD to continue their education with special needs support in any program.

Fund literacy programming as the regular school system. The ability to access education specific to need is a right in Canada. It is education. Why is adult literacy lumped in with post-secondary education? Make it more mainstream.

Work with libraries to create forgiveness programs for those who are terrified to go into a library because they lost a book once. Make joining a library free for first nations people if they live on reserve. It's considered a separate country.

Adapt trades and other work-based education to allow low-literacy and non-traditional learners in. Most adults want to work, not be on social assistance. Allow literacy programs to run without having to worry about core funding.

Create basic education programs in the communities where they are needed. Recognize special teaching abilities within federal and provincial funding of schools — for example, requiring all teachers to be B.C. College of Teachers or the facility does not receive funding. This covers first nations language teachers.

Provide transportation and day care for basic education learners. On-site day care is a double-edged good thing when kids learn and see their parents learn. We have two day cares in the learning centre — an infant one and a three-to-five one in our centre.

There is a shortage of workers now, and this will only get worse. Create partnerships with businesses to support literacy acquisition with work skills. Talk to each other. Create equal systems in programming across the province and within each community. Help people. Don't punish them. Life happens. Allow programs to make adjustments for the real-life in-and-outs that face each and every child, teen and adult trying to learn.

Literacy initiatives are working in a number of ways, but they're missing a lot of the most needy of learners. We do need more books in schools and libraries. We do need more public awareness. But I would never take part in a spelling bee for literacy. I was humiliated as a child at spelling bees. I can't spell. I still have a hard time spelling. To use these as challenges, saying, "Well, we'll have a spelling bee; it's a big literacy event," is wonderful for those who raise money that way, but we have to be aware that it puts down a lot of people who do not have those abilities.

I do have a university degree, and I teach a lot of things. But I'm learning every day, and I do believe in lifelong learning. I think a holistic approach is the way to go. I want to thank you for your time.

D. Routley: Thank you very much, Ms. Kirby. It's very instructive, and I really appreciate it. I appreciate you referring to the long shadow of the residential school experience. It's still affecting so many generations' parenting capacities and capacities to interact in the white community.

D. Routley: I appreciate that. Also, as apprenticeship and skills training critic, I appreciate your ideas around adapting trades to let more people in. We also heard from other presenters about people who will not absorb this training and have already developed incredible coping skills in order to function at whatever level they're at. Adapting the culture would perhaps remove some of the shame around it as well. We heard about reading-friendly businesses where people will help people if they have reading issues.

I've been focusing with other questions on the social determinants of health — the transportation and day care issues. Quebec has the lowest skill trades shortage and the highest participation of women, and they credit their universal child care for that achievement.

I found it really interesting that you spoke about equity versus inequity. Currently in our K-to-12 system, we fund in an equal way. I would argue it's not equitable — equal in that a small school in a rural community gets 27 students times $7,500, or whatever the figure is today, versus a big school with lots of children.

This is maybe equal to each child, but not equitable to communities. Our small rural communities have incredible issues around providing services based on that equal, rather than equitable, funding model. I think it also extends to transportation issues.

Do you find that it's more difficult for you to extend services on your funding model to rural communities or smaller communities?

D. Kirby: Let me tell you a little bit about how our funding model works. The Saanich Indian school board is an independent school district, so it doesn't get funded under the same system as most schools in B.C. do. We get the majority of our funding from INAC, Indian and Northern Affairs. The system is sorely out of date. We do work with SIDES, which is South Island Distance Education, so we work together to make sure the materials fit within the British Columbia K-to-12 system for graduation. But the materials, of course, are still based on children's education.

Rural education is an issue where we are, out in the Saanich Peninsula. I live in Langford, so I have this wonderful drive down West Saanich Road every day, but it's a long drive. For a first nations woman with two children to have to go to Lansdowne campus of Camosun would be prohibitive to take ABE, which is adult basic education. It would be outrageous.

When we look at kids in the school system — and we're seeing a lot more dropping out of Stelly's school and ending up in a young adult program that we provide — the funding isn't the same. They retain the funding even if the student drops out after a certain date. I have issues with that, because the services aren't being provided.

D. Routley: You also recommended free disability screening. But that same funding now in the K-to-12 system has caused districts to lay off assessment professionals.

D. Kirby: Well, it folds them. They have to pay it. It's a health issue, not an education issue. I think we need to look at it federally that way.

I have students with FASD who were diagnosed as behaviour and emotional problems in school. They've now found as adults that they have fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, and there are very specific ways to help people learn to cope. They're having success as adults because of the way we work with them.

R. Lee: Thank you for the presentation and also for sharing your experience. I have a couple of questions. You mentioned joining the library free for first nations people if they live on a reserve. I always thought that joining a library is free.

D. Kirby: It's not. If you live in a different community…. Like Helen told us earlier, if you live in View Royal, it costs you over $200 to join the Greater Victoria Library, because you're part of the Vancouver Island Regional Library. It has happened to some first nations people that I've come in contact with. They were told that because they live on reserve, they're not eligible. They don't pay taxes into joining the Greater Victoria Library. They have to pay to be members.

R. Lee: Another question. You bring up a very good point, saying that the curriculum for, say, the K-to-12 system…. Adults who would like to take the adult program have to learn the materials actually intended for children. I believe there should be some changes, but I think more people bringing up this point would be helpful.

D. Kirby: No, it would be invaluable — especially if it were culturally sensitive as well.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, Diane. I think you have given us a lot of food for thought today. I think you have mostly written our report for us.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Our next presenters are Vicki Noonan, Nora Randall and Joanna Lord. They're all from the Reading and Writing Centre. Am I correct?

V. Noonan: Yes, you are. The Reading and Writing Centre is a storefront literacy-numeracy program operating in Duncan on the Cowichan campus of Malaspina University College. It's a base-funded fundamentals program.

It's a storefront right in downtown Duncan. It didn't used to be a storefront. It used to be housed in our college buildings, where it was pretty much invisible to anybody coming by. But now it's easy to see inside. It's easy to come into. It's easy to walk by a few times and not be too intimidated — like our two-building campus is, apparently. You wouldn't think so, but to somebody starting out at that level, apparently it is.

It's easy to make an immediate connection when you come inside — to a person, not a receptionist. Not that receptionists aren't people, but often the person you first come in contact with there is another student who will show you around and give you coffee and tell you how it works. The students who are there are late teens to, usually, not so many people in their 50s and 60s, but we've had that too. The majority is always first nations students, at that level.

The purpose is more than the instruction of reading and writing. By the way, we don't use one-to-one volunteer tutors at all. We have two paid instructors. There are several reasons for that. Maybe you want to know what our reasons are, maybe not, but we don't do that. Our purpose, as I said — more than just reading and writing — is to provide an entry point for adults with low literacy and numeracy skills to access basic education. Of course, it's also to provide a safe and supportive place for these students who want to further their education but whose lives are too chaotic to allow regular attendance. That's not to say it's a drop-in centre. It is not. It's structured.

We also maintain connections to a broad range of community agencies so that students can benefit from networking. We provide an opportunity for adults to increase their capacity by taking part in all kinds of things: classroom work, running the centre — yes, I did say running the centre — and by learning and practising leadership and citizenship skills.

What we do is try to offer holistic literacy and numeracy instruction. Our goal by doing that is not just the narrow band of improving reading, writing and numeracy. It's to try to help students broaden their experiential base — increase their mental, emotional, physical and spiritual capacity.

Adults with these low-level skills are often marginalized and don't have very much, or any, personal decision-making power in their lives. Their lives are usually restricted by poverty to an extent that we probably can't imagine. They're often bound by the regulations of the government agencies that they're in contact with.

At the centre, we deal with the resulting passivity by trying to provide opportunities for students to make lots and lots of decisions. So students make individual decisions, and they participate in group decisions. The result is a group of students who actively get an education instead of having an education kind of done to them.

The environment is structured so that it facilitates that kind of decision-making. We have two rooms. One is a structured classroom where actual teacher-to-student instruction takes place. We call that the inhale room. The other room is called the exhale room, where you can go to work on your own. It's student-led with instructor assistance. So that's our model.

N. Randall: In the students that attend the Reading and Writing Centre, there is always a percentage of students who, basically, acquire the academic skills that we teach at the centre, and then they move up the academic ladder. I'm not going to talk so much about them because I think probably you've heard about that or can figure that one out.

I want to talk about students who are at the centre who probably…. I don't know exactly what definition of literacy you're going by, but probably by most definitions of literacy they would continue to be called illiterate, but they actually have increased their ability to function in the community.

These are models of unmeasured success. I just wanted to give you kind of concrete things. We had a woman who couldn't keep a cleaning job because she couldn't read or write. She was supposed to pick up the stuff that people left behind in a motel room, put it in a sack, write the number of the room on it and take it to the front desk. She couldn't do that. She also couldn't say that she couldn't do that, so she just quit.

She came to the Reading and Writing Centre. We taught her to read and write, and we also taught her to kind of speak up. This was a process over years. She can now use the computer. She has an e-mail address, and she can send e-mails to her kids. During this time she left a number of abusive situations and now lives on her own. Also, she's now a regular volunteer in a community group. She's safe. She's literate in a certain sense, and she's contributing to the community. She's been at the centre 16 years. This is not an easy thing.

The thing is that she needs to kind of continue to come, first of all, because we have a whole setup that maintains the computers. Lots of low-literacy people who know how to use a computer and even might have one at home — if something goes wrong…. I know if something goes…. But I have the college to back me up, and they do too. Also, if she doesn't read on a regular basis, she loses the skills that she has.

The other one that is a success is…. There's a group of people at our centre who, while they didn't progress enough academically to move to the next academic level, they actually gained the confidence, and they kind of saw each other moving. They moved from our program into a program that trains people to be carpenters.

One of them took the flagging course and got a job flagging. So while they didn't move up academically, they moved up. Well, they've really improved their lives, because they've acquired skills that allowed them access to the job market. I don't know what measure…. Again, they would probably still be considered illiterate, but they're functioning, and they're contributing to society. They're on their way.

There's another student who…. We went on a field trip to the fetal alcohol spectrum disorder society, and they talked about the programs they had there. That student dropped out of school and started going to that society with his wife and their kids. That's a success, because he knew that they had a problem, and he kind of knew what it was, but he didn't know that there was any help for it. Through our centre, he found the people who could support him and his family.

There are other students who just need…. They're literate if they have the support. One of them is a student who brought a letter to school that he got from the welfare office. He was in a total state because he thought it said that they were going to cut his welfare cheque by $200, and he wouldn't be able to live in his apartment, and he was going to have to move out. Anyway, he brought the letter to school, and we went through it with him. In fact, it wasn't saying that.

Those are functions of a literacy centre that aren't going to be measured by a literacy threshold. They wouldn't be considered literate, but basically they've increased their capacity. They've improved their lives. They're contributing to the community, and they have a place that will help them maintain their skills.

The other thing I want to just address is how to improve literacy rates. The two biggest things that my students are up against when they come to school are poverty and violence. I just have to say that you have to raise the welfare rates.

Recently, two of my students went to a conference. They came back, and one of them said: "Wow. I ate three times a day. At home I only eat once." Well, I thought, I know when she eats, because at noontime she goes over to the local food bank for the free lunch.

We do English and math in the morning, which means that she hasn't eaten for almost 24 hours when we're doing…. We thought people would be freshest in the morning. What do we know?

Then, also, when students are standing at the board, and I ask them a question, and they can't…. One

of the first questions I ask is: did you eat this morning? One of the school supplies at our centre is peanut butter, and we get bread from the food bank, because they don't have money. And it's not because they spent it on something weird.

The other one that I wanted to say is that you have to maintain supports to programs that address violence in the community. The other thing is if you would call on the federal government to restore the literacy funding to the National Literacy Secretariat and to upgrade money to first nations.

So you think: where's all this money coming from? You're going to reduce your health costs, and you're going to reduce your criminal justice system costs.

I just wanted to close with what a literacy teacher needs to know. Besides how to deliver reading, writing and math and computer instruction, we need to know all the resources in the community to help students with the many things that are on their mind when they come to school and they can't think until they've done something. The other thing we have to know is that 90 percent of what we know about how the brain works has been learned in the last 25 years, and that's just filtering down to the classroom now.

When we're looking at somebody who can't answer a question, we have to be able to figure out: is it a language-processing problem? Did they not understand me because they can't hear or because they didn't get the question? Or do they not know the answer, and they're afraid to say? Can they hear it? Can they see it? Did they have breakfast? And the whole cognitive thing, like what's happening? Then we have to make distinctions about what they can learn or how they can learn and what they're not going to be able to learn so we should move on.

There's an incredible amount of reading on this subject matter. You need to reflect on what's going on in your classroom, and then you need to recuperate.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, Nora. We are running a bit behind here. Any questions?

R. Lee: Thank you for your presentation. This program is supported by Malaspina University College. Do you know how much resources they put in for this program — this centre?

V. Noonan: It's a base-funded program, so basically, the two instructors' salaries and whatever other support pieces are provided. I don't know the total of the budget, but it's a bone of contention in our campus because the rent for the actual place is not part of the base funding. So our money-making arm of our campus — the contract services arm — is always expected to come up with the rent for the centre.

We're always under threat that they won't be able to, and we will have to close it. They call it moving the centre back onto the campus, but in fact it would be closing it, because it doesn't work within the structure of a larger campus.

The literacy program and discrete college courses are not a very good fit when the measurement doesn't work for each — neither does the funding model really very well, to answer your question.

V. Noonan: Well, I don't see that changing. I'm not really sure, but what happens is: funding for the program is one thing, and funding for the students is another. That is where a real misfit happens because funding for students in ABE programs now is administered by the ABESAP program. You're probably all aware of what that is — ABE student assistance program.

That's a misfit because in the ABESAP model of funding students, you're supposed to progress and in quite a lockstep sort of a way too. Maybe you should take a course twice. That may be okay, but to keep on being involved in the same course for 16 years is certainly not okay. I'm in the position now of having to write a letter to the Ministry of Advanced Education on behalf of a student to ask for repeated ABESAP funding, for a third time in the same course. It's not a very good fit, funding-wise, for students particularly.

The funding for students also provides for whatever college fees are charged and books, but not transportation and not day care and not supplies either — not a calculator, paper, pencils. The ministries that our students are also involved in — Ministry of Human Resources — don't pay for those things either because it's not about getting a job. It's about going to school. There seems to be a misfit between your two ministries in that regard. The focus is on work. School is all well and good as long as it's going to be for a job — and pretty soon too. But it's not that simple. It really isn't that simple.

Often we find that students are caught between the two ministries. It gets so frustrating and adds so much pressure to an already pressured and chaotic and small life, where there's just not enough of anything, that students quit because they just can't take the pressure. They just can't explain to their worker what the college or what ABESAP doesn't pay for. They just can't do it.

D. Routley: First of all, thank you to the folks for coming from Duncan, which is in the beautiful riding of Cowichan-Ladysmith.

It's true that when you do enter the centre and you're looking for Nora or Joanna, you're bound to run into three or four or five students before you get through to the back. It's never clear who's doing what, which is, I think, nice.

Two quick questions probably in five seconds. Vicki, you talked about the flexibility but not a drop-in centre, and then the flexibility of programs versus flexibility of funding, and the funding fit issue. I think

it's particularly important with first nations students because of the traditional schedule of ceremonial events and community events that take students in and out of these courses.

Can you make a recommendation how to achieve that flexibility of funding without being challenged by that push-back on people doing three or four courses over and over again?

V. Noonan: There'd be two ways, I think. First of all, literacy and numeracy at the fundamental level — and I think we all agree what fundamental means, mostly — should be free. At least that would help. Some of the fees that we charge students are not mandated by the provincial government. They're student society and activity fees. But if they were free, that would help a lot. Alternatively, if they couldn't be free, if ABESAP could fund fundamental-level students and not have a limit on how many times they do so, that would help a great deal too.

D. Routley: Nora, quickly, you pointed out the support for programs regarding violence and raising welfare rates and the effect it has on people. You also talked about cognition and science filtering down to the classroom now. We've heard about the need to test early in the K-to-12 system. One presenter said: "You learn to read from K-to-3 and read to learn from then on."

Many school districts, including our own when I was a school trustee, were forced to make decisions, and those were some of the positions that were cut earliest and most deeply. So would you recommend to this committee that a priority ought to be a recommendation for increased testing on cognitive levels in the K-to-12 system to identify problems?

N. Randall: Yeah, I would, because we have one student who actually went to UBC and got tested, and the thing that helped her is that she knew how she learned. They told her. So she said: "I just have to sit here, and I have to do it over and over and over again." That was a big help.

Mostly the people who come to the centre are undiagnosed, so you get everybody. You have to watch, and you have to figure out what's happening. Then you have to figure out what you think and why. You have to, kind of, try different things to see why, you know. So it's a really cumbersome process on the hoof to try to figure out why somebody's not getting something.

If somebody comes tested and says, "This is it, this is what happens to me, and this is how I learn," we're way ahead.

D. Routley: Mr. Chair, I have to apologize to the committee. I have to leave this meeting early, but thanks to the folks from my hometown for being the last people I heard from on this committee.

J. Nuraney (Chair): A very quick question from Dan, and a very short answer.

N. Randall: It was, but now the university is charging student activity fees. I can guarantee you that the cost of the administrative hassle of charging these fees to these students is way costlier than the amount of money that's collected.

V. Noonan: For the ten months, just under $100. It goes to the student government; it doesn't go to the institution. The student government made a decision to embrace, in its fee-collecting powers, all programs, whether they were on campuses or not. Until that happened, our students didn't have to pay anything.

Our next presenter is Claire Rettie. Claire, you have ten minutes and five minutes of questions.

Mr. Chairman, committee members, thank you for giving us the opportunity to speak to you. I am with the Victoria READ Society, which provides literacy services to children, youth and adults in the capital regional district. We've been around for about 30 years and have been working with adult learners for about the last 20 years.

You have a copy of my presentations, and since I have ten minutes, what I think I'm going to do is abbreviate it and then move specifically to the English language portion of the presentation. The first section outlines a systemic approach that we think needs to be looked at in terms of literacy across the province. The second section speaks directly to English-as-a-second-language learners and the offerings that are now available. So I'm going to touch briefly on the framework, and then I'm going to move right into the ESL piece.

The framework that we feel needs to be looked at, at a provincial level, is one where adult literacy is viewed as a continuum of learning so that it is part of the overall learning cycle and recognizes that each learner approaches their learning with individual abilities. So we are not looking at adult learners as a broad swath of people. These are individuals who have individual learning needs.

The other piece is that literacy is a community responsibility requiring integrated action, innovation and multisectoral support. Literacy does not exist in a silo as part of the broader community.

From our perspective, addressing literacy in a holistic and inclusive manner requires long-term sustainable investment in assessment — and I think we've heard a little bit about that, whether we call it assessment or testing or diagnostics — and in laddered and linked services so that at the community level we understand which practitioners are available to offer which type of services.

Accessible programs, which I think we've heard a little bit about today. Training and innovation for the practitioners, because adults learn best from practitioners who are taught to teach adults, as opposed to having K-to-4 teachers — who normally deal with literacy early in the system — teaching adults literacy. Community-based outreach.

You can read the details associated with that systemic approach at another time. I think I'll move directly to the fact that we deal with English language learners. If we remove residents who do not have English and French as their first language, we see in the IALS study for B.C. that our level-3 literacy statistics go up by 9 percent. I also note that there has been no significant improvement in literacy levels determined by the length of residency, so it doesn't seem to make a difference determined by the length of time you've been in Canada.

The other piece that we want to look at right now is that current workplace pressures — particularly in the CRD, with a 3.8 unemployment rate — mean that new Canadians with limited language skills are finding jobs. That means that their ability to attend English-language programs is limited because they are now, in fact, working and making money. What that has triggered for us are four issues: program access, program configuration, learning continuity and specific workplace needs.

I'd just like to look at the solutions. Again, I think, given the time, you can read my presentation and look at the benefits that are linked to that. When we look at access, we also need to look at retention. Solutions which address that incorporate encouraging multiple-program configurations. Right now we have an ELSA program, which is English language services for adults, linked to new Canadians. It's a fairly specific way of delivering programming. I think we need to look at the socioeconomic demands in individual communities and see if we can take that program and make it more flexible.

We need to integrate family and workplace literacy options into the ESL portfolio, because we can work on English language acquisition with adults who then go home and speak their first language in the home. We are not reinforcing the needs of those languages.

We need to support community-based partnerships that allow us to embed ESL and cultural learning into existing programs where people normally go in their day-to-day lives. We can then deliver language acquisition when they're doing something else with their families.

We need to be able to partner with community agencies to provide supported child care. Some of the people who cannot come to the programs in our communities cannot come because they can't find places for child care.

We need to partner with employers to provide integrated workplace and family literacy. Being able to work with specific employers — and again, this is particularly prevalent right now where we are losing our learners because they're working six days a week, sometimes eight to ten hours a day — and building relationships and English language into that day-to-day workplace is something that I think we need to look at.

In terms of program configuration — and I think we heard this from some of the earlier presenters — we need to develop learner-driven plans that are linked. We link ours to the Canadian benchmark assessment so we already have a way of assessing language levels. Again, every individual is different and has different ways of learning. We have learners who come, who are not literate in their first language, in with PhDs who are not literate in English. We need to build plans that are linked to the individual, because we are also seeing an increased mobility in terms of employment. If we can take those plans that are individually designed and move them into different employment locations, we are in fact not losing the capacity to grow that language acquisition.

We also need to create more flexible class configurations sensitive to the individual needs and the community capacity. Right now the ELSA program is pegged particularly to the lower mainland, where there are very high demands on English-language training. If your student is absent for 1.5 days out of that program, they are no longer considered in the program.

Each community has a different set of capacities. We have people who come to our program that we run in the evenings, where there are three evening sessions. They're working six days a week, so they might get to five out of six sessions in a two-week period. If they do that in one month, they are technically out of the program.

We need to begin to take that program and look at how we can configure it in a manner more sensitive to the demands that are being made. Otherwise, we lose our learners, which means that in the long run we have a cohort of largely skilled workers who have been employed who haven't accessed language. In three to five years, when the economy changes, they've been in Canada, but they're still at the same English-language level that we started with three years ago.

The other piece, I think, is that we need to look at learning continuity. Learners come to different communities, and we need to provide them with some clear understanding of what the options are based on their language needs. In the CRD we have ICA, READ, Camosun College, and we have some other organizations that offer language opportunities. We need to be able to help them make decisions around: if you are literate in your first language, if you are highly trained, where is the best place to go?

We don't provide that in an easily understandable manner, and we don't collaborate as much as I think we need to do. We're built on a system that's an RFP system, which encourages us to compete, and we should not be competing in this issue.

The final piece deals with workplace needs, and that deals with on-site ESL support linked to some kind of workplace assessment around literacy, linked to employment and employers' bottom line. What are the skills needed in that employment cohort? How can we link English language to that? And how can we do that collaboratively with employers? This is becoming an increasing demand.

The other piece is mentoring within sectors, which used to exist, where a shoemaker from Portugal is matched with a shoemaker here. You transfer the language skills, and it moves much faster into the mainstream. You're not transferring skills in terms of trade skills; you're transferring language skills.

The final piece is Canadian citizens' access to the ELSA program. It's not a program that's designed for Canadian citizens; it's a program that's designed for new immigrants. You don't, once you become a Canadian citizen, automatically become literate or have an easy affinity for the language. Did I make it within my one minute?

R. Fleming: Thank you for your presentation, Claire. I want to pick up on the piece about settlement services and some of the funding, I suppose, for programs like ELSA and others. I have heard from organizations in my constituency — the Inter-Cultural Association, the Victoria Immigrant and Refugee Centre Society. Some of the issues they presented to me were that in British Columbia we're sort of lowering the requirements or the achievement grade that we expect from immigrants who are looking to get into the workforce.

I know there is pressure, as you mentioned, to get into the workforce as quickly as possible. I'm wondering if you could comment on that.

I know that part of this problem is very definitely federal. B.C. gets something like 1/6 — or one-quarter, maybe, at best — of what Quebec and Ontario get for their settlement services. The federal government has never provided a good reason why it is the case that B.C. is treated that way. Maybe you could comment on that, because that has been the case for some time. There has been a change in government federally, and I'm just wondering if you know of people who have been working on getting that resolved for British Columbia.

C. Rettie: I think we're looking at two issues. I think that in terms of the people who are working with the federal government to have that resolved, I need to set that one aside. I've been at my organization for four months, so I'll leave that one over there.

In terms of acquiring funds for settlement services, the aspect of the Canadian benchmark language assessment, which is the one that pegs the different levels of capacity for the people who are inside the program, we are only able to offer up to level 3 on this Island. There is now discussion of offering levels 4 and 5, which are the more advanced levels, and which, if you look at against the IALSS, would equate to something like a knowledge worker.

There is a discussion as to why that opportunity isn't being offered on the lower Island. I don't think that discussion has been resolved. I certainly know that the ELSA Net, which is the umbrella organization dealing with some of this, has posed that question to the provincial government with respect to why we are not dealing with that level of acquisition on the Island and outside the lower mainland. I don't have an answer to that piece yet.

R. Fleming: Just as a follow-up, I would guess, then, that currently for the structural engineer, say, who is driving a taxi in Victoria and can only get up to a level 3 in terms of the language, this isn't helping the situation a great deal.

C. Rettie: It doesn't help the situation, and what we have occasionally is highly skilled workers in a workplace where the employer has recognized that partnering is the solution. We then work with the employer to help that individual increase their level of literacy.

That works most effectively if we can engage the family as well, because we go back to…. We can work in the workplace with language acquisition, but if you go home and speak your first language and function for the next 12 hours of your day in that first language, that doesn't necessarily translate into progress in terms of language. We try and work collaboratively.

R. Fleming: I know that workplace ESL services would be very effective, and I know they're very difficult. For a person working six days a week, sometimes that would be between two and three jobs. Victoria has some large employers, but how do you get the concentration and the employers in the more small business sector to embrace that or pool together and work collaboratively?

C. Rettie: Again, I think we're looking at options for that. One of them is looking at the more formal organizations that represent different sectors — so the tourism industry — on a broad level and coming to some agreements at that level. Then you see that there is a champion that is leading that organization or leading that whole area and how we can then pilot that into some of the smaller workplaces and how that can be supported. We're having some dialogue around that.

There's no silver bullet on this one. It requires a significant investment in outreach and building relationships and then coming up with strategic solutions that would allow us to then address more than just one workplace.

R. Lee: Thank you for the presentation. There is about, I believe, $5 million for the Skills Connect program each year. Are you aware of that program? Do you have any comments on the effectiveness of that?

C. Rettie: That's not a program that READ has been part of, so I'm loath to make a comment on it at this point. Sorry.

R. Lee: You mentioned, about a CLB assessment, that only level 3 is awarded on the Island. For level 3, you also mentioned that it is sometimes not enough for the professional immigrants. Do you have any suggestions on how to help those professionals?

C. Rettie: I think they have just begun an RFP process for levels 4 and 5 on the mainland.

This is where we're having discussions, as is ELSA Net, on: why can we not be piloting that same kind of 4 and 5 level on the Island? We have a high percentage of skilled workers. We have professionals who choose to live here. We cannot service the needs they have in terms of moving their skills into the productive workplace. ELSA Net is discussing that at a different level.

D. Jarvis: Two quick questions. Up to 9 percent — did you say if that figure was aboriginal and new Canadians?

C. Rettie: No. If you remove the cohort that does not have English or French as a mother tongue out of the B.C. aspect of the IALS survey, it indicates that our level 3 literacy levels will go up by 9 percent.

D. Jarvis: The second question quickly was: are there any figures or correlation that if you had two illiterate parents, it would pass through to the children?

C. Rettie: I can't correlate that specifically to English-as-a-second-language learners. We do know that literacy overall is an intergenerational issue. So if you can't share your love of language and your abilities in language, we see that passed on. Because we've been around for 30 years, we have learners in our program who came to see us, and we're now seeing their grandchildren. It is clearly an intergenerational issue. Whether I would peg that to ESL…. I can't dredge up statistics that would do that.

J. Nuraney (Chair): I have a question. You talked about individually designed programs. Can you throw some light as to exactly what you mean? How would you assess it, and how would you then make sure that the programs are delivered?

C. Rettie: We currently deliver individualized programs for some of our adults and for the youth that come to our organization. They're based on some fairly standard assessments that we've come to an agreement on, which we will use inside the organization. That done, we then meet with the individual — and if it requires an extended family meeting, with the families — and determine what will be the best ways to approach that learner's next stage of learning.

We map it out — if it's learning how to decode symbols, if it's learning how to connect pictures with symbols, if it's really pronunciation and enunciation, if we're looking at sort of a non–English speaker. So that's clearly mapped out, and then we work that through with the teachers and the learners. While you have a class of maybe eight to 12, those individuals are at different levels, and there is some consideration about how they learn and what they're able to learn.

If we're looking at expanding that concept, you can take that plan hypothetically for the 16-year-old who doesn't understand math. They can transport that plan when they move to the lower mainland, and it can be picked up again, because other practitioners who've been trained and who are professionals in their area will understand where this is going.

C. Rettie: In terms of assessments? Certainly, in ESL there's uniformity in terms of our assessments. Across the province we all use the Canadian language benchmark.

C. Rettie: The delivery varies by organization. That's one of the things that varies if we're looking at a systemic approach to literacy, because the practitioners come from different organizations. The training is incredibly diverse. The ability to do professional development is also limited, depending on which organization you work for. At a community level being able to free up dollars for professional development on an ongoing basis is fairly limited.

D. Hamilton: Thank you very much for putting this process together. You challenged me by your advertisement in the paper. So I'm here, and I'm here as myself. I am a professional librarian. I recently was the education librarian at the University of Victoria. When it came to determining who might sponsor me or who I might represent, it became quite clear that it was much easier for me to do that myself, simply because there are so many different bodies that I hope I represent here today.

I am here, basically, to sustain and support libraries. I've already heard this morning…. Helen Hughes made an eloquent appeal. She's on my library board as

well. The library board that I serve on is just one of 70 in the province, representing 235 public library branches across the whole province.

I just feel that somehow we have a common interest. The Premier has declared that literacy is a top priority for this province, and I do not believe that that is any different than the public library system. It is just a question of how we get there.

I've been struck by these people preceding me and about the detail of the actual delivery of specific programs to individuals. I'm not here to do that. I'm here to talk about the freedom that's represented by the libraries that serve us.

I wrote in my document, which is very short, that public libraries are in the community development business, and I believe that is what you're in. That's exactly the same. It's just that we have slightly different ways of getting there or major different ways of getting there. I've given you a quote from the document that was published in 2004, produced from the public library services branch of the Ministry of Education, called Libraries Without Walls. This is the strategic plan for libraries. You've probably already seen it in your glimpses of the province here.

I just wanted to bring to your attention some of the words in this document. "Promoting literacy and the enjoyment of reading; literacy; encouraging the love of lifelong learning; supporting local and provincial economy by providing information on jobs, skills and markets; reflecting the personalities of their communities; offering an array of services, including those for children and seniors, job seekers and retirees, new Canadians and individuals with special needs." And those could easily be those people who have not learned to read.

When I look at my library — and my library is just the Greater Victoria one — and I look at this community…. This is one of the communities that are served by the Greater Victoria Public Library. The closest library serving this community right here is the Juan de Fuca branch. It's — what? — four or five miles away. That's it. That's as close as it gets, yet this community has already declared that it would very much like to have a library here to serve its people, to meet a community need that they have perceived. They don't necessarily believe that they can afford to build such a branch.

Just to give you an example, the Ministry of Education, through the public library services branch, makes available $2 for my library to provide services for this public. It's $2 per person per year. If it was an association similar to…. View Royal used to have an association library. It still does, but it's actually part of the Greater Victoria Public Library now. That library received $3 per person per year.

The actual cost for this particular system is $36 to $38 per person per year. The funding difference is made up from what we sell, which is very little, and what we draw from our provincial tax revenues. So we're asking the citizens of Victoria, through taxation, to find $35, $36 a year per person to run a library system. It always struck me as being a public good, not just an individual municipal group good.

This is not equitable. We spend about $35 to $38 per person here. Vancouver probably spends $56. West Vancouver — I won't even mention the number. It all depends on where you live and how much the community embraces its libraries. Yet we embrace our libraries with gusto.

In 1889 we started the Victoria Public Library. It was started because a number of small working men's reading rooms started just to provide men with information that would allow them to grow.

Along comes Mr. Carnegie in 1900, the world's richest man at that point, after he sold all his steel mills. He decided he had to do something for the world, so he built 2,500 libraries. I think we received 11 in British Columbia. That was all premised on the notion of a community good, of meeting a need that the community saw.

Mr. Carnegie said, "We've got to have libraries that will support people who want to strive and succeed like I did. Then they need a place to go to learn on their own. It needs to be free, and it needs to be open. It needs to be accessible, and it needs to be grand," which is what we saw in the Carnegie libraries, at least at the time.

The one downtown in Victoria was built in 1904, and when you think of that building in relationship to this city at that time, it must have been very grand. Now, of course, we can't use it. It's far too small.

I just would like you to think about how little money it could take to assist all the libraries across this province in doing a better job in meeting one of its major objectives, which is to create a literate citizenry. You know what we're talking about? What would $5 do — $5 times 20 more million?

If that money was given to the libraries with the view that they were to embrace and help deliver literacy services across the board for natives and for immigrants…. If we had more money, if we had a grant come into the Greater Victoria Public Library just to buy materials for our immigrant population, we could then buy those materials that we cannot necessarily justify now in terms of the numbers involved.

It's a really hard problem to balance. Greater Victoria spends $11 million on services. Only about $1.8 million goes into resources. Bring up those resources. Double them. Wow, all of a sudden, we have more to offer everyone.

I have to put on my school library hat. I taught school librarians for years. I don't teach school librarians anymore, but school librarians are very seldom taught now, because there are very few school librarians. Or there are very few teacher-librarians. I'd just like to, without being negative and without being depressed….

I read the announcement the other day that it was discovered that 28.5 percent of 18-year-olds in Greater

Victoria did not complete high school in 2003. They tracked them through, and of that group, 28 percent did not complete grade 12. Those, to my mind, are the casualties of the system.

I'm not sure how many that would be. If we have 500,000 students in school right now and if we lose 10 percent, that's 50,000 a year. Could we lose 50,000 people? Could 50,000 people join the illiterate ranks, join the functionally illiterate group, join the people who are unable to really cope with this society and all the things that we expect of them in this information-rich place? It just terrifies me.

As a teacher-librarian, I am convinced that school libraries — properly managed and maintained and delivered school libraries — could make a difference to many of those children as they move through the school system. We all laughed about how the boys didn't make it, how the boys stopped reading. In grade 5 the boys stopped reading. It's a fact.

In a good school with a good school library program, that can be assessed. That can be watched. That can be massaged. Working with the teachers of those children, the right materials can be found and the right processes can be put into place to encourage those kids to move along and to acquire those skills.

It just terrifies me to think that we're going to lose them, because I think we are probably just about to lose our libraries in our schools. We don't talk about them very much. We passed the school libraries from ministry responsibility to each district. There are no standards. There are no expectations. There are no training programs. There's no definition.

I have my little waggish thing, if I have time here today, and I probably don't. What is this? It's a piece of paper. How big is it? You know that it's 8½ by 11 inches. It's just part of our culture.

What's a school library? What should it be? How big should it be? How should it be run? How much should be spent? Every community has a different definition. This is the definition that the Canadian Association for School Libraries came up with. They called it "achieving information literacy." The United Nations described information literacy as being "that ability to acquire information, massage information and use information" in an intellectually perfect way.

I'm just nervous that you're involved with literacy. I've been involved with literacy. I just hope that we can get those agendas together. I was struck that this is put out by the provincial library services branch. There is no such office for school libraries, yet there are over 1,000 school libraries in this province. There are no standards. There's no leadership. There's no direction.

I just hope that I've brought that to your attention and that you have some questions for me.

D. Jarvis: I'm sorry I missed the beginning of your report. I was out on a call.

I have a ten-year-old grandson that I realized this summer couldn't read. I went back through all his report cards and everything, and not a thing on his report cards to the parents to indicate that he wasn't…. Well, he could read basic, but he didn't understand half the things he read. Is there in our curriculum…? Do you know of anything that requires schools to look at literacy and report to the parents?

D. Hamilton: The schools definitely do have a program. Every school has a curriculum, and each child is plugged into that curriculum. But if a child is not successful in moving through, he is not necessarily stopped. We don't stop children anymore, so he could go on, and maybe that assessment would have to take place again. Theoretically, there's just a question of how long it takes before he falls through the cracks or manages.

D. Jarvis: Which I think is the biggest mistake in our education system — that we're pushing kids through. I won't bring up another subject, but it's really quite interesting.

D. Hamilton: From my point of view, if I was the teacher-librarian involved in that child's school and the teacher brought to my attention that Johnny didn't seem to enjoy reading, then it would be up to me to try and find some materials that could work for him or that he could be encouraged to use. I'm not saying that this is a simple solution. I'm just saying that I want to be able to have that option.

R. Fleming: Just on that topic, Don, one of the things this committee heard when it visited northern British Columbia was that in some of the districts up there, there is on occasion a one- or two-year wait for an assessment. This is after somebody is already identified as perhaps having learning disabilities — to determine exactly what those are.

In terms of people falling through the cracks and that 28 percent don't complete high school, it starts very young. That seems to be the information we're getting as a committee here. I think what we're hearing, too, is that there are no resources or investment at an earlier age to do the proper assessments of students. The power of a teacher to actually coordinate that isn't there.

D. Hamilton: And to have the proper materials. Let's just take a school that's about two miles from here, opened three years ago — a brand-new school. It opened with so few books that it couldn't circulate them. And they sit. You go into this school library. It's about this big. Well, it's a little bigger, and on one wall maybe a quarter of the wall has books on it. That's because there's no funding whatsoever from the provincial level for that material. It comes from the board. The board chooses where it will go, and perhaps they're tight in some other area.

I don't want to be critical. I just simply want to be positive. One solution might be to open an office for school library at the ministry so that it does become part of the loop. It becomes concerned and linked to

curriculum rather than just thought of as a kind of passive place instead of an active, proactive, engaged part of a child's learning.

R. Lee: Thank you for your presentation. We know that acquiring knowledge is important before you can…. Universities used to subscribe to quite a large information database through their connections in libraries. Do you think it's possible for, say, high school students, students or anybody else to access some of…? I did a search just two days ago, and somehow I hit a roadblock, because they said I had to be a member of that certain database in order to look into that article. Do you have any solutions on that?

D. Hamilton: Again, the question comes to expertise. There is money in some budgets for electronic resources to go into schools. In many cases they have already gone. The Premier announced $12 million extra going into resources for all libraries, including schools, and some of those resources are already in place. Many of the school districts, especially in larger centres, have those resources available on line. They're on line not only in the school but in the child's home, if they're connected.

R. Lee: I think my question is on the resources available in university libraries and not being as accessible for high schools or schools.

D. Hamilton: The things that are in the university library are often not accessible to schools simply because of cost. The cost is horrendous. Those materials at UVic, for instance, are just amazingly expensive — again, because the proprietary rights are held by the people who own the material. They don't want to give it away, and that's why they keep it away from the public. But we can buy certain services and put them into the schools — not many.

Now, I don't know if you noticed the information in the paper on Wednesday about the new "ask about" service, which is a system where you can sit down at your computer, punch in a question to a university library — anyone in the province can do this now — and ask a question, and a librarian will actually assist you in finding the answers.

D. Hamilton: We think that should apply to schools as well. The only catch there is that I think they're going to find that there'll be information that they can't necessarily link them to electronically. There will be more.

Our last presenters, I believe, are Alegha van Hanuse, Doug Symington and Lilaine Galway. We have ten minutes of presentation, five for questions.

A. van Hanuse: Good morning, Chair and committee members. Thank you for having us here today. I'm Alegha van Hanuse. I'm from the Oweekeno Nation in Rivers Inlet. This is Lilaine Galway — she's the director of special projects in Project Literacy Victoria — and Doug Symington, the other community animator who works with me within the South Island Learning Community.

It's my pleasure to discuss the South Island Learning Community with you this morning. I would just like to begin by giving thanks to the Coast Salish people for allowing us to continue to work and live within their territories. We work with approximately 12 first nations in the south Island region. As you may guess, all of them are diverse, and it's been a pleasure to work with them on this project.

The South Island Learning Community is a three-year project and partnership with Camosun College, the Songhees Nation and Project Literacy Victoria. It's from federal funding from the office of learning technologies.

Some of our project's team members include Ruth Derrick from Project Literacy Victoria, Martin Buck from Camosun College and Bonnie Albany from the Songhees Nation. Some of the organizations that we work with on a formal partnership level include PEERS, Blanshard Community Centre, Victoria Native Friendship Centre, Coastal Salish Employment Training Society, Victoria Free-Net Association, Disability Resource Centre and the Greater Victoria Public Library.

Our overall project vision statement is to work with the south Island learning community to create and test a model for building community capacity to enhance learning skills and development.

Our project. We've been blogging throughout our project so that other communities can look at our initiative and replicate it, if they would like, and see what the bumps have been — and our successes as well. I'll forward our website to you so you can have a look at that as well.

Our general project goals include building capacity to enhance learning skills and development, creating bridges between first nations and non-first nations learning communities, increasing social capital, promoting a culture of lifelong learning and increasing essential skills.

Within the first nations communities many of these are already going on. We've been identifying initiatives and working with them to increase their success within those.

Our specific project goals include universal library access for first nations people. I don't know if you're aware, but currently people living on reserve have to pay a non-resident fee of $150 to access the library. We've been working with the library to work through that.

We're also supporting the broadband initiative throughout the province. The broadband initiative includes hooking up 118 first nations communities so

that they have access to the Internet. That's also in conjunction with the telehealth initiative. This, we believe, will also increase educational opportunities for first nations people, allowing them to access on-line learning and to advocate for the continued funding of CAP sites.

As community animators, we don't do animation. What we do primarily is work with community members, build relationships and really determine what their literacy and educational needs are and see what technologies we can use to help them meet their goals. We have been assessing the educational needs of communities, advising on improving education and employment initiatives, assessing their technical readiness and providing training in terms of learning technologies.

Specifically, with the broadband initiative there has been money to put broadband in, but one of our major concerns is that in terms of sustainability will the first nations people be able to sustain a network? And do they have the trained people necessary to do that and to develop potential programs in response to assessed educational needs?

In terms of aboriginal literacy, I'd like to emphasize that it goes beyond numeracy and reading and comprehension to include cultural and language literacy, as well, and also the ability to navigate cross-culturally. Many of the first nations community members will enrol in school or perhaps attain a job. But retaining that job or staying in school is another matter, of course. So we've been working with people who are already working on the front lines within the communities to support students and employees so that they can succeed.

Components of relevant literacy programs. Basically, our program succeeds by word of mouth within communities. That presents some difficulty, but it's still the primary manner in which communities communicate with each other. A big role of the South Island Learning Community is to break down the silos. For example, the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations — although they are right next door to each other, their communication is not the greatest at times, so I'm working within that.

Holistic program delivery. Learners require — as all learners do but especially first nations learners — intensive supports in accessing education. A social worker is often needed and an addictions counsellor as well as teachers, and they all need to work together. I definitely have been witness to that at the Songhees Learning Centre, where I'm based.

Combined literacy programs for families. Extracting one individual from a family and providing them with service does not work for first nations families and communities. The entire family needs to be addressed in that.

What we're hearing from first nations communities. What I've been hearing is that they're enthusiastic to use technology and are using technology, especially the youth. The youth are on the Internet. Most first nations homes do have computers and access to the Internet. They're using it to communicate with each other and with families.

Many of them have their own blog sites. Even though they may lack significant literacy skills, they can set up their own blog site.

They use it to celebrate and preserve culture and language. I don't know if you're familiar with FirstVoices. It's a wonderful website, and I often use that to get first nations people interested in accessing the Internet and to facilitate communication between various communities.

The ultimate goal of this initiative is to be self-sustaining prior to the completion of our three-year project, of course. I'd also like to emphasize that our current goals are universal library access for all first nations people, whether they live on reserve or off. And the CAP sites are definitely a meeting point on all first nations communities that I've visited, and their continuation would be vital.

R. Lee: Thank you for the information in the presentation. We just heard that the cost per person per year for accessing public libraries in some areas is about $38. Do you know the rationale for charging $150 to first nations users?

A. van Hanuse: It's particularly troubling because this hasn't been the way…. This is a relatively new policy. The band manager at Songhees recalls being able to access the library when she was a teenager.

A. van Hanuse: Well, it was a while ago since she was in high school, but this isn't how it has always been. That's what I'm trying to say. The fact that they call it a non-resident fee is….

R. Fleming: Just on your final slide about being a self-sustaining organization after the three-year project funding. How's that going? Will you be able to make it in terms of keeping that presence in the community and keep working on the outreach that you've been doing and the partnerships you've made?

A. van Hanuse: Absolutely. In terms of funding, no one knows these days about that. In terms of working with the community, we've been welcomed completely. I want to emphasize that Doug and I work together very closely, and he's been very welcomed into the first nations communities. We're very enthusiastic about the possibilities.

R. Fleming: So before your project there wasn't a lot of going on reserve to deliver literacy programs. Is that the case? That's a big part of….

A. van Hanuse: No, there wasn't. There were some urban initiatives, such as the HIPPY program that works within the urban communities. It's been very disjointed, and the programs that are out there work in the silos that a few other people have brought up. Part of our work is to connect the dots within the first nations and the non–first nations communities.

So many people assume that just because something is going on within a first nations community, everyone knows about it, but it's that word of mouth. It doesn't necessarily work very well.

Before we conclude, there is one request that I would like to make to your group. As you know, we've got some very exciting times in front of us in terms of first nations people in years to come. For the benefit of this committee what I would like you to do, if you can, is to make some recommendations to this committee as to how we can address this literacy problem of the first nations people.

We've been hearing from each community organization on what they are doing, but what I would really like is somebody to articulate as to how best we can achieve our goals in trying to increase literacy in first nations people.

If you can spare some moments and time and put something on paper and send it to the committee, we would be very appreciative.

J. Horgan: I'm a former member of the committee, so I'm not technically allowed to ask a question.

I wanted to talk about…. I'm the representative from this area, and I know the work that you're doing. I'm not aware that you've been in Port Renfrew or that you have any relationships with the first nations of Port Renfrew. If you do, could you expand on that for the committee? That's as distant as you can get in this corner of the world.

A. van Hanuse: Yes, absolutely. I have connected with them, especially in terms of their early childhood development programming. I know they've had some success out there, as well, with that. They're very isolated, as you know, and very similar to another community that I work with, the Becher Bay community.

That's a great community just to highlight the diversity within the first nations communities on the south Island. So many people assume just because they're on the south Island they have access to many programs and services, but as you know, Port Renfrew is very isolated.

One of the things about being an on-line community is that they can access…. They're somewhat enthusiastic about using technology — Flickr and Skype they were open to — but in terms of actually coming on line, they haven't been that receptive.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the formal part of our public hearing, and I declare the meeting adjourned.

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1)	Canadian Council on Learning	Robert Aucoin
2)	Donna Miller Jeremy Clare
3)	City of Victoria	Helen Hughes
4)	Diane Kirby
5)	Malaspina University College, Reading and Writing Centre	Vicki Noonan Nora Randall Joanna Lord
6)	Victoria READ Society	Claire Rettie
7)	Donald Hamilton
8)	South Island Learning Community	Alegha van Hanuse Lilaine Galway Doug Symington

Other MLAs:	John Horgan (Malahat–Juan de Fuca NDP)
Clerks:	Craig James Kate Ryan-Lloyd

Committee Staff:	Josie Schofield (Committee Research Analyst)

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
EDUCATION