In sum, governments in Canada are not serious about creating a literate society. There have been recent gains in the extent of programming, but even this expanded activity is limited in proportion to need. Mandates for literacy are seldom deeply entrenched. And there are not in policy discussion either clear goals, or a consensus on strategies for attaining them.

Historically in Canada, government and business have been ungenerous, across the board, regarding adult education and training.¹³⁸ And amidst concern over budget deficits, and particularly in the current recession, there is financial restraint on new commitments. All this suggests that there will be no vast or sudden expansion of program levels in the near future. And, indeed, these policy limitations are embedded within difficult broader discussions of policy (which the conclusion of this report will return to).

But there are more optimistic ways of viewing the current period, than by making an arithmetical juxtaposition of need and provision, or by making gloomy prognostications in relation to the current policy climate. The gains of the late 1980s and of International Literacy Year, in awareness and programming, are significant. Literacy has become an issue for politics and policy. Programming has expanded. Knowledge for and from literacy programming is being consolidated and expanded. The policy capacity of literacy advocacy organizations has been strengthened. These gains have created new possibilities and new questions in literacy work. Current activity can be considered as a phase of experimentation, in which efforts to do literacy programming are multiplied, and the results of these efforts documented. In this optimistic view, current activity may define the forms of literacy work that could later take hold on a larger scale.

In this view it is timely to raise a number of issues, open questions and recurrent tensions, that will be important in literacy work for the next decade. The remaining sections of this chapter address some of these questions. All the issues discussed concern broad matters of government policy, and some also concern policy and practice at a program or institutional level. The discussion emphasizes the ways that documentation of experience in literacy work, and research into the conditions of literacy work, and stronger literacy policies, might strengthen future developments.