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Anglophone literacy programming in Québec is wholly organized through
16 anglophone school boards. Most work in conjunction with Laubach Literacy
Councils, of which there are ten in the province. The school boards
and Councils come together in the province-wide Québec Literacy
Working Group, which provides services such as professional development,
support in program planning and evaluation, and public awareness. For
its part, the QLWG seeks from the government more extensive consultation,
adaptation of materials from the Ministry of Education to the anglophone
context, and adjustments to the program funding mechanism that take
into account the anglophone practice of delivering instruction through
volunteer tutors, often to geographically dispersed populations.89
Ontario
A variety of programs were created in Ontario from the mid-1970s,
operated by school boards, community colleges, libraries, community
organizations, correctional institutions, and Laubach Literacy of Canada.
Funding came from the Ministry of Colleges and Universities, the Ministry
of Education, the Ministry of Skills Development, the Ministry of Citizenship
and Culture, usually for English as a Second Language (ESL) programs
taking up literacy work, and various EIC grants (Canada Works and Volunteer
Initiatives Program).90 Most programs had some connection
to school boards. Nevertheless, in 1983-4, fewer than half of school
boards, usually in densely populated areas, and usually "resource-poor," 91
offered literacy programming. This uneven development, which produced
a literacy programming situation that was "marginal" and "fragmented," 92
was recurrently reviewed and deplored in the mid-1980s by both practitioners
and policy-makers. Because federal funding had been cut, and there was
limited provincial funding and co-ordination, expertise and conceptual
development in literacy was mostly located in community programs. This
meant that there was both a strong activist sense of the character of
the literacy movement, and an understanding of literacy in its political
and social context.
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