willing and able to apply certain "social work principles: maximum allowance for limiting factors in the "clients" history (e.g. alcoholism, family difficulties).15

According to the director of the program, who was also the head of Frontier College at that time, the results were encouraging and appear to suggest a way of providing adult educational opportunity for men usually considered social welfare "cases" instead rather than educational problems 16

As the 1960's progressed, the more multi--dimensional issue of poverty came to the fore in Canada as the economy, now expanding in the wake of increased demand for Canadian resources (mainly stimulated by the Viet Nam war), was obviously failing to provide "uplift" for various groups and regions in Canada. 17 At this time, numerous theoretical and empirical studies on the causes and cures of poverty were appearing in the U.S. as a result of the "War on Poverty"declared by President Johnson in 1964, and they were influencing18 opinion here. Most of them were based on, the new "human capital" theory which saw under education and lack of job training as the core factors in the genesis of poverty. They quite uniformly recommended massive public expenditures for education and training, which, it was suggested, would have payoffs both in terms of economic growth, and in19 terms of reduction of poverty.

An important intervention during this period was an article published in Macleans Magazine in 1965 on the subject of adult illiteracy. The author, Barbara Moon, called attention to the extent of the problem and explicitly argued that there exists a causal connection between illiteracy and economic hardship:

...the worst unemployment crisis since the Great Depression is demonstrating, with crude drama, what a few uneasy educators have been saying all along: that Canada suffers from under-education so widespread in the populace that it is clogging the economy and condemning Canada to the status of an also-ran among the industrial nations 20

The article sparked widespread attention and coverage in the media, and had an impact on discussions at a national conference on poverty which was convened in Ottawa later that year.21

Manpower

In 1967 the federal government initiated the Canada Manpower Training Program, largely as an instrument of manpower policy aimed at maintaining productivity through augmenting the mobility, training, and information of unemployed workers, but secondarily as a means of responding to poverty. The second objective was alluded to in the speech of the Minister of Manpower and Immigration inaugurating the Act which set up the program: