In achieving a range of programming, and avoiding an uneven development of the literacy field, questions arise concerning the definition of funding streams and formulas, in which it is determined what kinds of programs will be eligible for governmental support, and in what proportions. For the literacy community to take a leading role on these questions, its organizations need positions on the most constructive balance between community, institutional and workplace programs, and the forms of funding that will enable all to be strong.

Finally, work for literacy policy, or for freeing the anchors of illiteracy, now unavoidably involves articulating the knowledge gained in literacy practice to a larger political and economic discussion about education and training, and indeed about the kind of society we want in Canada. Although policy interest in literacy picked up as the Canadian economy was coming out of a recession, and now we are deep in another, the discussion of government commitment to literacy and specific plans for literacy will continue. It will involve questions of literacy as a human right, labour force literacy as an element in economic competitiveness, the priority of literacy in claims for public resources in a time of government restraint, and the political force that organizations supporting literacy can bring to bear. Advocacy organizations and practitioners will need conscious strategies to engage in this discussion.

Literacy has been put on the agenda through a conjunction between powerful economic interests in labour force qualification, and community interests in individual and community well-being and strength. Paradoxically, the realities to which the literacy movement has drawn attention for at least 15 years are now also topics of discussion by labour market managers, business and labour leaders, and pundits of all stripes. But the terms of discussion are not often those which the literacy movement itself would have chosen. The literacy community is willy-nilly entered into a larger discussion.

In one vision of a future for Canada, it should be a joint goal of capital and labour, even a societal goal, to make Canada economically competitive internationally, not by producing mass market commodities with a low-wage labour force, but by producing high quality or high value-added commodities with a highly skilled high-wage work force. This vision has generated very broad questions concerning how our culture and society can be developed to sustain competitive economic institutions. The literacy discussion is intertwined with discussion of national standards for education, and the national testing that would support them; drop out rates and ways to reduce them; adult vocational training in general, and the roles and responsibilities of business, unions, federal and provincial governments, and educational institutions. As regards literacy policy, it is being said that Canadians, at least those in the active labour force, should have the skills necessary to work flexibly and to be involved in continuous training and retraining.