When Literacy Partners of Manitoba (LPM) requested proclaiming September as Literacy Month two years ago, the Province of Manitoba did it. The premier also named to his cabinet a Minister of Literacy in 2006. Over the past few years, provincial funding for literacy programs has increased. Now, three more moves, announced April 14, underscore what LPM Executive Director Lorri Apps calls the moves of a government that “has become very atuned to literacy needs and has recognized the issue of literacy in this province.” more

Those moves are:

• a boost of $1.1 million in adult learning and literacy to be spent in fiscal 2008-2009, increasing to $19.3 million the amount spent by the province since 1999;
• proclamation of Manitoba’s Adult Literacy Act, the first of its kind in Canada, which will come into effect on Jan. 1, 2009 and which formalizes in law the governance of the current adult literacy program and refines the criteria for funding, program standards and student outcomes; and
• start of public consultations with literacy organizations, other stakeholders and communities to develop a new adult literacy strategy.

LPM welcomes the consultation process for developing an adult literacy strategy, scheduled to end in June, and has shared with the Advanced Education and Literacy Department recommendations developed by its Literacy Strategy Committee. Apps says the Act will “help to protect funding for adult literacy.” While she applauds the further funding of $1.1 million in the next year available to adult learning centres, and provincially-funded, community-based adult literacy programs, for which there are 34 in Manitoba, she adds that more needs to be done.

When you consider there are 290,000 adult Manitobans with low literacy, and there were between 2,600 and 2,700 adults in literacy programs last year, we have a way to go.

Read the Act