National Literacy Secretariat funding has helped develop the infrastructure for programming — materials, training, practitioners' conferences, learners' events, and the like. It has also been directed to building up what could be called the "literacy policy capacity" of organizations. This involves networking among programs and organizations. It also involves studies and reports which develop new knowledge or articulate and systematize the knowledge developing in practice. Such studies and reports are part of the practical work involved in building up a governmental commitment to, and a definition of governmental action for, literacy. National Literacy Secretariat funding has supported studies and reports from organizations of women, aboriginal people, trade unionists, seniors, people with intellectual disabilities, anti-poverty groups, lawyers, business people, and others.

People sometimes demand that the National Literacy Secretariat fund direct programming. The Secretariat is clear that its mandate as a "catalyst" is not to fund ongoing literacy education, and the consistent response is to divert demands to provincial governments. This response indicates that the federal government role in literacy remains substantially that defined in its withdrawal from program support in the early 1980s. Some critics observe that the formation of the National Literacy Secretariat has, at comparatively low cost, effectively deflected advocacy organizations' criticism of the failure of Employment and Immigration Canada to address literacy in any serious way.

Employment and Immigration Canada

For over a decade, as a matter of explicit policy, Employment and Immigration Canada (EIC, the successor to Canada Manpower, discussed above), has not supported training below the grade 7 level. The undereducated have been virtually the only group explicitly excluded from access to EIC-funded training programs, restricting their access not only to literacy training itself, but also to training for the many trades courses which require grade 10 or 12 for entry. However, EIC interest in literacy and basic skills has very gradually been renewed since the mid-1980s. In 1984, EIC established the Literacy Corps Program, to train volunteer tutors for youth; funding is now about $1 million a year. Grants from the Innovations program have occasionally supported literacy projects. A literacy component has also proven to be necessary in other training projects. Since 1984, literacy has occasionally been an element in Canadian Jobs Strategy projects, run by employers, or by private or non-profit training agencies. Literacy has sometimes been added to workplace training projects. Experience has shown that in many of these projects, workers begin a literacy learning process but do not have the opportunity to carry it as far as they need.