In retrospect, it now appears that the crucial years for putting literacy on the agenda were 1986-88. The Speech from the Throne that announced federal government literacy activity was made in 1986, and a funding commitment announced in 1987. The Cedar Glen Declaration and the Southam media coverage appeared in 1987. International and national conferences were held, back-to-back, in 1987, sponsored by the International Council for Adult Education, and by the Movement for Canadian Literacy. Key provincial reports appeared in these years as well: Ontario announced a government plan for literacy in 1986; the Nova Scotia government called a literacy advisory committee in 1987; a British Columbia report on access to advanced education and job training proposed making literacy a priority in 1988. It was after these years that the number and variety of other organizations taking up the issue increased dramatically.

The public discourse through which literacy has come onto the public agenda has had mixed consequences. It has undoubtedly allowed literacy work to be extended and strengthened. Yet there are many difficult questions about how the public discourse about literacy shapes literacy work and how it affects people's lives. Consider just three. (1) Practitioners have often decried the tendency of media coverage and advertisements to depict people with low literacy skills as social outcasts and incompetents, unable to participate in work or in politics, living in a state of shame and terror. This distortion of "illiterates" in media coverage may do more harm than good. (In some awareness activities, it should be said, there is now conscious concern to design messages to elicit respect for the knowledge and determination of learners, rather than pity for their deficiencies). (2) It sometimes seems that the discussion of literacy and productivity is a way of blaming ordinary workers for economic difficulties, or blaming the schools, and not seeing economic troubles as the outcome of management decisions and government policies. (3) Literacy workers often have a profound practical understanding of the relations between illiteracy and poverty, and often understand literacy as a means of assertion against poverty. This understanding is very seldom carried forward into the media.

Such criticisms of the literacy discourse should be insistently raised. It is also clear that the combination of forces impelling the new discourse about literacy — advocacy organizations, media, and economic interests — has produced a new era of literacy activity. Although there has been no systematic tracking of levels of programming and funding, there have certainly been increases across the country. And, paradoxically, the new (economically inspired) interest in literacy has yielded additional support for programming and advocacy organizations that had already promoted literacy as a human right and an expression of social equity.

These forces and the gains they have produced suggest some coincidence of interests, between literacy work as an expression of social equity and democracy, and literacy as a means to economic productivity. Whether economic interests and interests in social equity remain aligned is one major question for the development of literacy work in the 1990s.