Poor Cousin No More: Lessons for Adult Education in Canada from the Past and

More generally, ideological tensions were building between the department and the secretariat over the shift to “literacy and essential skills”, and the Chrétien Liberal govern- ment’s growing focus on the link between literacy and the economy and employment in the late 1990s. [...] 49 Elfert and Walker, “The Rise and Fall of Adult Literacy.” 13 Poor Cousin No More: Lessons for Adult Education in Canada from the Past and New Zealand Skills initiative, numerous proposals to map skills needs and training options, and the recent establishment of the Office of Skills for Success with its new skills framework. [...] The National Council of Adult Education, established in 1947, was abolished, and adult and community edu- cation experienced major cuts.69 It was only under Helen Clark’s Labour government in the first decade of the millennium — owing in large part to the released results of the International Adult Literacy Survey in the late 1990s, which advocates could capitalize on — that adult literacy and ski. [...] 72 The TEC is not technically a ministry and is headed by the Minister and Associate Minister of Education and thus connected to the Ministry of Education; however, my previous research (Walker, The Contexts of Adult Literacy Policy 2011) showed that, since the creation of the TEC, the Ministry of Education has taken much more of a backseat on anything pertaining to the education and learning of a. [...] This has led the media and numerous think tanks to the conclusion that 40 percent to 50 percent of Ca- nadians and New Zealanders lack the skills to fully participate in our modern knowledge-based society.98 In Canada, paradoxically, the choice of level 3 as the cut-off may have harmed the drive to bring literacy education into the mainstream.