Rates of limited literacy for Indian, Inuit and Métis groups are high, although difficult to specify because of incomplete census coverage. In one estimate, at least 45% of on-reserve Indians, and over 50% of the Inuit population, are functionally illiterate.⁵

Rates of limited literacy are about twice as high for francophones as for anglophones in Canada. Rates of attaining less than nine years of schooling are, in 1986, for adults with French only as mother tongue, 24%; for adults with English only as mother tongue, 11%. In the Statistics Canada survey, among adults with French only as mother tongue, 17% are at reading levels 1 and 2, but among adults with English only as mother tongue, 9%.

Limited literacy is also high among people with disabilities, who are twice as likely as the non-disabled to have fewer than nine years of schooling (37%, compared to 14%).⁶ Experience also shows that basic schooling has often been particularly unproductive for people with disabilities, who have not experienced teaching sensitive to their ways of learning.

Finally, literacy is limited among older people. In the Statistics Canada survey, 6% of those 16-24 were at levels 1 and 2, compared to 9% of those 35-44, and 36% of those 55-69.

Although it is not a topic that can be elaborated in these pages, it should be understood that high rates of limited literacy among linguistic and cultural minorities, and people with disabilities, and older people, are related to restricted opportunities, including educational opportunities, for members of those groups. It is increasingly understood that the education of minorities is deeply affected particularly when minorities are also subordinated by dominant groups — viewed as inferior and denied economic and cultural resources.⁷ Older people's schooling was often limited because they grew up in a largely rural society in which people often left school early to work, and because of Depression and war in the 1930s and 1940s.