CHAPTER FIVE


Community-Based Education and Training

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you will be able to:

      Identify four forms of community-based education and training.

      Explain how government policy affects community-based education and training.

      Evaluate community education in terms of access to, control of, and benefit from training.

Joy Chukwura, a 37-year-old single mom and Nigerian refugee living in Vancouver, cleans hotel rooms to earn a living. She arrived in Canada nearly 10 years ago, unable to speak English or read and write in any language. Over several years, she took night classes at Vancouver Community College to bring her English proficiency up from a grade zero level to grade 4. In time, Chukwura hoped to earn a high school diploma and move into a better job.

BC fully funded adult basic education, high school, and language courses, beginning in 2008. The $8 million cost was deemed too high in 2012, and the provincial Liberal government reduced the number of courses it would pay for.1 In 2014, the federal Conservative government reduced funding for English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction and adult basic education. The federal government also reduced funding for Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC). One consequence of these changes is that Chukwura was forced to pay $1,000 for three months of night classes—a cost she simply could not afford.

“If they ask us not to go to school because we are not able to pay the money, then how are we going to do more things in the future?” asks Chukwura.2 While adults seeking to upgrade their education could apply for grants in BC, the income threshold of $30,000 for a two-person family excluded many potential students (including Chukwura) from accessing funding. Grants were also available for only three years, which was often too little time for students to significantly benefit from the training. Enrollment dropped by 35 per cent in the wake of these cuts. The election of a New Democratic government in 2017 saw these cuts reversed, but whether capacity to deliver such programs can be recovered after years of staff layoffs and facility closures is unclear.3

Decreasing state support for literacy training has pushed many Canadians to seek help from the not-for-profit sector. Not-for-profit organizations already offer much of Canada’s literacy education but have been beset by funding reductions. The near-universal requirement for literacy in employment means such programs are key to the reproduction of labour power for workers who do not follow a traditional pathway through the education system. This is particularly the case for Indigenous peoples, who often drop out of school.4

In addition to literacy work, community groups also provide immigrant settlement services and public legal education to Canadians. These programs contribute to social reproduction by allowing workers to interact with our complex society and, in some cases, aiding them in attaching to the labour market. Trade unions also provide education and training, for both their members and the broader public. While much union training is aimed at improving the contract negotiation and administration skills of activists, unions also offer issue-based education and, in some cases, vocational training.

While community-based education and training can have labour-market benefits, community education also helps workers develop skills that they can use to seek political, social, and economic reform. There is a long tradition of such emancipatory adult education in Canada. Helping Canadians to identify their interests (as distinct from the interests of the state and employers) has the potential to cause significant social disruption. The potential social instability that can (and has) come from community-based education may partly explain why state funding of community education and training is low, uneven, and often tightly controlled. Similar reasoning may explain employers’ lack of financial support for community training. Employers may also see community education as a way to externalize training costs.

Literacy Education

Literacy is “the ability to understand, evaluate, use, and engage with written texts.”5 Being literate allows us to participate in society, secure employment, and develop our KSAs. Individual literacy will vary from someone who is unable to decode basic words and sentences to someone who can comprehend, interpret, and evaluate complex texts. Since literacy skills are used in specific contexts (e.g., following written instructions, filling out a form), it is important to acknowledge that our functional literacy (our ability to complete day-to-day tasks requiring literacy) may differ from how we score on a literacy test. This difference is taken up below in Box 5.2.

As we saw in Chapter 2, literacy is one of the key goals of the K-12 educational system. Despite these efforts, many adult Canadians seek to improve their literacy later in life. Literacy education for adults is delivered through an amalgam of formal educational institutions and community groups in arrangements that vary among the provinces and territories. Adult basic education (sometimes referred to as high school completion or academic upgrading) is usually offered through provincially or territorially funded school boards and colleges. Governments may also directly fund community-based literacy programs, often targeted at specific groups, such as immigrants or Indigenous peoples. One example is Ontario’s Literacy and Basic Skills Program (outlined in Box 5.1), which targets unemployed Ontarians with low literacy and numeracy skills.

There are a number of reasons why governments use not-for-profit agencies to deliver this programming. Such agencies may have better connections to and more legitimacy with the group targeted by the program than the government does. This can aid in program design and uptake. Such agencies can also often deliver programming at a lower cost than is possible through direct government funding. Government employees are more likely to be unionized and have permanent jobs, while the not-for-profit sector is known for precarious staff employment conditions (often driven by short-term and low levels of government funding). This dynamic reveals that governments may use community education to meet the demands of production and social reproduction at the lowest possible cost. In doing so, they externalize some of the cost of training onto the very workers who are delivering it.

There is no coherent government policy guiding literacy programming, although there are clear trends if you follow the funding.7 In examining literacy funding, it is important to recognize that there is no legal obligation for governments to fund literacy work. The federal government originally began funding literacy work in the early 1960s in the hope of alleviating unemployment by increasing workers’ skills. The structure of the program also administratively converted a number of unemployed into “trainees,” thereby reducing the apparently level of unemployment. Limited success in converting literacy training into employment saw a decline in federal interest in the 1970s, and responsibility slowly shifted to the provinces (who are mandated to deliver education). Renewed federal interest in the mid-1980s resulted in federal funding of literacy work.8

The 2013 introduction of the Canada Job Fund Agreements eliminated some federal funding for community literacy work. Subsequently, in 2014, the federal Conservative government eliminated funding for the Canadian Literacy and Learning Network (CLLN) and a number of provincial literacy associations that same year. The result was that, by 2016, six of Canada’s 15 literacy coalitions (which provided literacy training and coordination) had ceased operations.9 The National Adult Literacy Database—which provided new readers, libraries, and grassroots organizations with high-quality literacy materials—was also closed.10

According to a spokesperson for then-Minister of Employment and Social Development Jason Kenney, “Our government is committed to ensuring that federal funding for literacy is no longer spent on administration and countless research papers, but instead is invested in projects that result in Canadians receiving the literacy skills they need to obtain jobs.”11 In effect, state-funded literacy education contracted and became more closely aligned with providing job-ready workers for employers. This broadly mirrors the trajectory of the other federal labour-market training policies we reviewed in Chapter 3.

Literacy and Basic Skills

Literacy is one component of basic skills. The other components include numeracy and the ability to learn. As noted in Chapter 4, these basic skills are the foundation of workplace skills that include generic technical skills, problem-solving skills, and interpersonal skills. Workers can carry both basic and workplace skills with them from job to job. Firm- and job-specific skills are built on top of basic and workplace skills and are not generally portable. This relationship is outlined in figure 5.1.

The federal government has adopted an essential skills model. This model asserts there are nine essential skills that “provide a foundation for learning all other skills and enable people to better prepare for, get and keep a job, and adapt and succeed at work.”12 This approach directly links skills and skill development with employment outcomes, again a pattern consistent with the federal training policies reviewed in Chapter 3. In addition to literacy skills (reading, writing, and document use), Canada’s essential skills include numeracy, oral communications, thinking, digital skills, working with others, and the skills associated with continuous learning. Each skill can be performed at one of five levels (basic to advanced), and the federal government has developed skill profiles of over 350 occupations.

Figure 5.1  Skills pyramid. Adapted from Ontario Premier’s Council, People and Skills in the New Global Economy.

The belief underlying Canada’s essential skills model is that individuals can acquire generic, decontextualized skills. Constructing skills as discrete, observable, and individual performances or behaviours ignores the fact that skilled tasks are often jointly performed between two or more workers in specific work contexts, each drawing on multiple abilities that are used in unobservable ways. This suggests that efforts to develop generic skills outside of a specific context may fail to adequately engage with the difference between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge (see Chapter 4). A second line of critique of essential skills is that the skills tend to have a bias towards white-collar jobs in the so-called knowledge economy (which are a significant minority of all jobs).13

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) surveyed the skills of adults (aged 16 to 65) in 24 countries and regions in 2011–12. It found literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving skills were positively associated with access to basic services, employment and income levels, and opportunities to secure better jobs and additional training and education. Workers with lower levels of literacy also reported poorer health, a lower sense of political efficacy, less community involvement, and lower levels of trust in others.14 It is important to note that association (i.e., two things happening at the same time or in proximity to one another) does not necessarily mean there is causation (i.e., one thing causing another). Further, causation is not necessarily a one-way dynamic (e.g., A causes B). Complex phenomena may involve a feedback loop (A causes B, which intensifies A, which causes more of B) that we sometimes call virtuous and vicious cycles.

The 2011–12 OECD Survey of Adult Skills sorted respondents into five categories based upon their successful completion of a series of literacy-related tasks. Respondents were presented with several tasks at each level to determine their ability to work at that level. Examples of the tasks respondents had to complete at each level included the following:

• Level 1: Respondents were required to read a short newspaper article and answer a brief question requiring fact-finding and a simple inference.
• Level 2: Respondents were required to navigate a basic website and find contact information under the “Contact Us” page.
• Level 3: Respondents were required to look through a bibliography and identify the author of a specific book.
• Level 4: Respondents were required to search a bibliography and identify a book that made arguments for and against a proposition, based on the book’s title.15

Figure 5.2 presents Canada’s results, which were about average when compared to other OECD countries. Interestingly, Canada had higher-than-average percentages of its population at the highest and lowest levels of literacy. Literacy is highest among those aged 25 to 34 and among workers in managerial or professional occupations. 16

Figure 5.2  Literacy level in Canada, 2011–12. (Data from Statistics Canada, “Skills in Canada.”)

Off-reserve First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples typically have lower literacy rates than non-Indigenous Canadians, with particularly pronounced differences in the Territories. One-third of off-reserve First Nations people had literacy scores at Level 3 or higher, versus 50 per cent of Métis and 57 per cent of non-Indigenous Canadians.17 These differences likely reflect opportunities to learn and apply literacy as well as the colonial legacy in Canada’s education and employment systems that were discussed in Chapter 3.

One of the challenges in discussing literacy education is the measure used. The percentage of Canadians that have attained each level of literacy in figure 5.2 look concrete and present a compelling case for funding additional literacy education. Yet, as we see in Box 5.2, many practitioners raise profound critiques of such measures and the purposes to which they are put.

Government funding decisions have a profound impact on access to literacy education. As the opening vignette suggests, some Canadians who wish to access literacy education cannot afford literacy classes (which are increasingly being offered on a cost-recovery basis). Further, the least literate may require lengthy instruction that takes them far beyond the support offered by governments in the form of bursaries or other funding. That said, as shown by Ontario’s Literacy and Basic Skills program, some governments have made an effort to provide greater access to literacy training.

The Literacy and Basic Skills program is clearly linked to enhancing participant’s employability. As we saw in Chapter 2, this trend to linking education and training to employment outcomes is also evident in the formal PSE system. An important impact of this trend is that not-for-profit organizations that continue to offer literacy education must often frame funding applications in ways that explicitly address labour-market outcomes (even if the link is weak or participants will struggle to achieve such outcomes). Box 5.3 considers the historic commitment of the adult educators to literacy as a path to social justice—a tradition that is being eroded by this focus on literacy for employability.

Individuals are key beneficiaries of literacy education in terms of greater literacy and access to jobs, but these benefits may be spread less evenly than they previously have been. This employability framing of literacy emboldens employer-friendly groups (such as the Conference Board of Canada) to advocate for focusing literacy efforts on the “nearly employable” at the expense of those Canadians who will require greater investments to improve their literacy. This return-on-investment approach makes sense when training is viewed primarily as a way of maintaining the production process.

Employers benefit from a greater proportion of workers achieving Level 3 literacy because this increases the pool of potential workers with this skill. As we saw in Chapter 1, an increase in the numbers of workers tends to drive down wages and allows employers to make previously “good” white-collar jobs more precarious. Greater literacy also benefits governments by providing workers greater access to (often poorer) jobs. Literacy training also legitimizes capitalist social formation because it creates pathways (however ephemeral) to employability. This shifts responsibility for unemployment and underemployment onto workers and away from employers and the state. To the degree that literacy allows workers to hold even poor jobs, literacy education also reduces pressure on state-funded income support systems.

Immigrant Settlement Services

In 2015, more than 270,000 persons were granted permanent-resident status in Canada. Almost 63 per cent of these immigrants are economic immigrants (i.e., being granted residency based upon their potential contribution to Canada). Roughly 24 per cent of immigrants arrived through the family-reunification stream, and 13 per cent were granted permission to enter the country on humanitarian grounds (including as refugees).24 These immigrants are in addition to the migrant workers granted permission to work temporarily in Canada.

As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, Canada has long used immigration to fill skill and labour shortages. While most immigrants have a working knowledge of English or French (or both), approximately 23 per cent of new permanent residents (mostly refugees and spouses and dependents of economic immigrants) know neither language. For these immigrants, English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as an Additional Language (EAL) instruction is an important component of settlement. Immigrants (even those with high degrees of fluency) may require other forms of settlement services.

Immigrant settlement services include information about accessing health, education, housing, and transportation resources; help in interacting with the state (e.g., assistance filling out forms); and document translation and job-search assistance. The federal government funds a network of immigrant-serving agencies (often not-for-profit organizations) to provide these kinds of support. Provincial and territorial governments may also fund immigrant settlement services. And informal (although sometimes highly organized) community-specific services may also exist in locations where large communities of a specific culture or religion exist. The level of settlement services available in any given location is highly variable. Immigrants in large, urban centres generally have greater access to such programming than do immigrants in rural and northern locations.

Historically, immigrants had relatively little difficulty finding manual labour. The disappearance of many of such jobs means that newcomers to Canada today often face difficulty in attaching to the labour market.25 While immigrants face a number of barriers to securing employment, an important issue related to labour-market training is foreign credential recognition. Credential recognition entails having educational qualifications above the high-school level that have been achieved in another country evaluated and granted a Canadian equivalency. Credential recognition is performed by many different organizations for different purposes (e.g., PSE institutions, provincial or territorial credential evaluation services, employers, and professional regulatory bodies) and can affect immigrants’ access to education and jobs.

An interesting tension in Canada’s immigration system is that the federal government selects workers on the basis of their educational and occupational characteristics, yet many immigrants find themselves unable to work in their profession upon arrival. As we saw in Chapter 4, entry to some occupations is restricted in the public interest (for instance, nursing, law, medicine, and engineering). In these regulated occupations, professional regulatory organizations (PROs) set certain criteria (including educational qualifications) that must be met before a worker is allowed to practise their profession. Immigrants may need to recertify in their profession, and this process can include having credentials evaluated, taking examinations, and obtaining Canadian experience.

There is significant evidence that immigrants struggle to have foreign credentials and work experience recognized in Canada. One effect of this dynamic is that it channels immigrants into jobs shunned by Canadian workers.26 There is also evidence that workers whose ethnicity is readily visible (based on their skin colour or accent) have greater difficulty securing employment (particularly in their pre-immigration occupation). This difficulty, in turn, can further impede their efforts to secure the right to practise in their pre-immigration profession. Together, these preferences (by employers, educators, and regulators) comprise systemic racism.27 Systemic racism exists when policies and practices embedded in institutions result in differential treatment of specific groups. It is important to be mindful that there are programs designed to enable immigrants to utilize their credentials, such as the program described in Box 5.4.

Settlement services and credential recognition reveal that we can find conflicting interests between stakeholder groups and also within them. For example, the federal government selects immigrants based upon their ability to contribute to the economy and funds settlement services in order to socially and economically integrate new immigrants into Canadian society. Yet, highly skilled immigrants face discrimination that keeps them from employment in their profession. The key player keeping these immigrants out of the profession is PROs, which are creatures of statute created by provincial and territorial governments. Here we see different levels of government potentially working at cross purposes. The need (in Box 5.4) for one Government of Alberta department to help immigrants navigate a process overseen by another department suggests that, even at a single level, governments are not monolithic actors.

One factor contributing to PROs’ reluctance to license some immigrants is concern about flooding the(ir) labour market. While limiting the ability of immigrants to practise is often couched as protecting the public interest (and sometimes the public interest is genuinely protected), keeping immigrants out of regulated occupations is also an instance of powerful (Canadian) workers limiting the job prospects of less powerful (immigrant) workers and thereby keeping the wages of the powerful higher than they otherwise would be.30 Provincial and territorial governments happily allow PROs significant latitude in regulating their own profession because it insulates legislators from problems (such as allegations of systemic racism) and keeps powerful groups of workers happy (and reliant upon the government).

Most employers benefit from this arrangement because it makes available to them highly qualified workers forced to accept underemployment. Underemployed skilled workers can comprise a highly productive and profitable workforce. This arrangement does mean that those employers who truly need access to the skills that professionals have need to compete for credentialed workers via higher wages and/or seek out temporary migrant workers. The ability of immigrants to enter Canada and receive settlement services masks the systemic racism they face once here, thereby making immigrants’ difficulty in the labour market appear to be the fault of immigrants themselves.

Public Legal Education

Canadian society is complex. Workers often have to navigate a variety of processes and institutions in order to address basic home-and-hearth issues, such as marriage and divorce as well as landlord-and-tenant disputes and other contractual matters. Workers may also need to act in their own interests in the realm of employment and labour law. The legal complexity of society generally benefits the powerful, who are more likely to have personal knowledge of such rules and systems (by way of their education and employment) and the resources necessary to hire competent advisors.

The term “legal education” most often refers to training provided to lawyers (or future lawyers) and other professional employees in order to develop and maintain their knowledge of the law. Public legal education (PLE) focuses on assisting individuals to develop legal knowledge and skills to manage and/or improve their lives. There are many forms of PLE. For example, a blog or poster about the degree to which individuals have to co-operate with police carding (i.e., a demand for identification unrelated to any specific crime) expands readers’ awareness of their rights. By contrast, a study group or conference may both develop participants’ skills and knowledge and generate new knowledge.

Public legal education is delivered by a number of groups, including non-profit agencies, governments and the courts, unions, the K-12 and PSE systems, and individual law firms and lawyers. For example, the Public Legal Education Association of Saskatchewan (PLEA) provides general legal information (but not legal advice) about the laws of Canada and Saskatchewan and also provides law-related resources used in K-12 courses.31 Other not-for-profits have more specific foci. The Aspen Foundation for Labour Education provides instructional resources for teachers, addressing work and social justice issues tailored to fit in with Alberta’s K-12 curriculum.32 The Alberta Workers’ Health Centre provides theatre-based public legal education to junior and senior high school students (see Box 5.5).

Access to PLE is largely determined by the funding made available. Key funders of legal education include provincial and territorial law foundations, justice departments (either directly or through the redirection of fines), and trade unions. While the Internet has expanded the reach of PLE, most organizations offering it are based in large urban centres. This pattern in PLE replicates that of the availability of legal services and institutions, which are often difficult for rural and northern residents (including many Indigenous persons) to access.34 The result is that northern and rural residents typically have a more difficult time managing the legal aspects of their lives than those in urban areas.

Even in urban areas, differences in individual financial resources may result in differential access to public legal education. The growth of online information still requires that individuals have some way to access that information (e.g., a smartphone or other Internet connection). While public libraries normally offer free Internet access, access to libraries (with limited locations and hours) can itself pose a barrier.

Individual workers are the primary beneficiaries of PLE. The main benefits include a greater ability to make informed decisions and take actions at lower cost as they navigate the complex legal landscape of contemporary society. The state also benefits from PLE, because greater worker skill facilitates social reproduction (for example, in smoothing child-custody and financial-support arrangements following divorce). Making it easier for workers to enter into contracts benefits employers, as it facilitates workers acting as consumers.

Workers may also use what they learn in public legal education on the job. If workers use this information in carrying out their duties, this may benefit their employers. Workers may also employ their skills and knowledge in ways that are disruptive to the employer. For example, young workers who participated in the AWHCs Work Plays program (Box 5.5) may apply their new-found knowledge about the right to refuse unsafe work or to be free from sexual harassment in the workplace to improve their working conditions. Such efforts may entail greater costs to employers (assuming they decide to comply with their legal obligations). This cost may help to explain the limited participation of employers in public legal education.

Union Education

Since their inception, unions have offered education and training to their members.35 Presently, some union training is narrowly vocational (skills development and safety courses) while other forms of union-sponsored education has broader application, such as literacy classes. Still other union training efforts are more overtly political. Courses that develop members’ collective bargaining and grievance-handling skills (sometimes called steward training or “tools” courses) are both necessary for unions to operate and can help to alter the balance of power in a workplace. Providing members with an introduction to contemporary political and economic topics (e.g., international trade agreements and equity issues) may have a broader societal impact.

As noted in Chapter 4, some unions also negotiate specific training entitlements into their collective agreements. The form of such entitlements varies by industrial sector. Some training provisions may be related to job- or skill-ladders within operations. Other may be more open-ended “learning accounts” that employees can access to take training the workers want or job-protected leave allowing workers time off to undertake training. While these entitlements are undoubtedly of benefit to workers, a critical perspective on such entitlements is that they are evidence of the incorporation thesis.

As we saw in Chapter 4, the incorporation thesis asserts that union demands are shaped in ways that are acceptable (and sometimes useful) to employers. For example, unions know that they are unlikely to be successful seeking significant curtailment of managerial decision-making power in the workplace. Employers have historically been less likely to resist monetary demands by unions (e.g., higher pay and more benefits). This pattern pressures unions (which need to make gains to maintain member support) to monetize their member’s demands—converting demands for power into demands for money.36 The incorporation thesis manifests itself in labour-market training as union demands for employer-sponsored training (or training funds). This demand is largely a monetary one (employers don’t lose any meaningful managerial authority), and a better-trained workforce has the potential to benefit the employer. If workers have traded potential wage increases for better training provisions, employers will have succeeded in externalizing production costs onto the workers.

Securing additional training entitlements for workers does benefit workers. It is, however, important to be mindful that such entitlements often leave the specifics of the training to the employer. And, thinking back to the different kinds of skills that workers can develop, as shown in figure 5.1, employers are most likely to provide firm- and job-specific skill training. Such training is beneficial to employers, both because it is specific to the employers’ needs and because it is less portable than other kinds of training (thus reducing the risk that trained workers will be poached by other employers).

Unions may also provide education to the members. Box 5.6 details the educational offerings that the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) provides to its members. Unions (or groups of unions) may also offer labour schools, which are often intensive residential experiences designed to provide additional training to union activists. The hidden curriculum of much union training is simple but profoundly destabilizing: workers have the ability to seek accommodation of their interests by resisting employers’ demands (including through withholding their labour).

Research demonstrates that unionized Canadian workers are more likely to participate in formal training than non-unionized workers. This advantage is seen in aggregate measures (32 per cent versus 25 per cent) as well as job-related courses (24 per cent versus 18 per cent) and in employer-sponsored training (27 per cent versus 20 per cent). This “union effect” differs by gender, with unionized women having much larger gains in participation than men. As we saw in Chapter 1, workers with more formal education are more likely to participate in formal workplace training. Although unionized workers are, on average, more educated than non-unionized workers, the beneficial impact of union membership on training participation holds true at all levels of formal education. Unionized workers are also more likely to participate in informal learning with co-workers, both around job-tasks and workplace rights issues.38

A number of unions have developed partnerships with post-secondary institutions. These partnerships allow union members who have completed certain union education courses to receive academic credit for those courses. As we saw in Box 5.6, both Athabasca University and Brock University provide transfer credit to UFCW members who have completed union courses. Athabasca University also has a transfer arrangement with the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees to recognize the significant learning that goes on in union steward classes.

The amount of money spent by unions on providing training is normally determined by the union membership, either directly through a budget vote or indirectly through the election of union officers. What kind of training is offered tends to be a decision reserved to union officers and training staff. The most common kinds of training are steward or tools courses. These courses make a direct contribution to the operation of the union. Access to courses is controlled by unions by, for example, allocating training spots to union locals.

Conclusion

Community education is something of a grab bag, perhaps best reflecting how the conflicting interests in Canada’s training system play out in practice. Where governments directly fund community-based education (such as literacy training), there is a tendency for this training to be structured to meet the needs of production. Funding is increasingly targeted at the “nearly employable,” a trend that is consistent with other government labour-market training that we read about in Chapter 3. Funding also tends to be finite and linked to outcomes measured. Where possible, the cost of training is externalized onto community groups that, in turn, pass these costs onto their workers in the form of precarious employment. This funding structure reflects that, while training providers are stakeholders in the training system, they typically lack the power to significantly influence policy direction. They may, however, have greater influence in program design and delivery.

Literacy training also advances the state’s goal of social reproduction. The complexity of modern society requires most individuals to be functionally literate in order to access basic services and support themselves—all necessary aspects of the reproduction of labour power. For workers, literacy is also a necessary precondition for advancing their own interests in society and in the workplace—whether those interests be simply getting ahead in their jobs or seeking fundamental social, political, and economic reform. That literacy education is so often linked to simply getting ahead constrains (but does not preclude) the more emancipatory agenda that many adult educators have advanced over the years.

Many of the settlement services offered to new immigrants are also delivered through community education. In addition to language instruction, settlement services tend to focus on helping new immigrants socially acclimatize and attach to the labour market. A recurring challenge for highly skilled immigrants is that foreign educational credentials are often devalued. This can result in dramatic underemployment by immigrants. This dynamic highlights intragroup conflict among stakeholders. For example, the federal government selects economic immigrants based upon their education. But provincially and territorially governed educational institutions and professional regulatory organizations may refuse to recognize these same credentials.

The difficulties common in foreign credential recognition reflect that recognizing foreign credentials expands the pool of licensed professionals and is, thus, contrary to the economic interests of existing professionals (who benefit from the labour shortage). Provincial and territorial governments may be reluctant to intervene in such decisions because of the potential political backlash they might experience from highly regarded workers. The key point here is that stakeholder groups are not monolithic and that intragroup conflict must also be considered in any review of the Canadian training system.

The educational activities supported by unions are also characterized by mixed motives. Perhaps the most significant union intervention in the labour-market training system is securing training entitlements from individual employers to union members. These entitlements tend to be focused on developing workplace skills and are often associated with internal job- or skill-ladders. While these entitlements are undoubtedly of benefit to workers, a critical perspective on such entitlements is that they are evidence of the incorporation thesis, whereby workers’ interests tend to be converted into forms that (1) don’t fundamentally affect the power of employers, and (2) sometimes provide benefit to the employer as well as the workers. Unions also offer significant training around the negotiation and administration of collective agreements. Such training is necessary to maintain the operation of the unions themselves. Unions may also offer other forms of education and training, such as that which UFCW provides through its webCampus.

Notes

1    Hyslop, “NDP Government Restores Funding.”

2    Culbert and Sherlock, “BC’s Working Poor.”

3    Hyslop, “NDP Government Restores Funding.”

4    Taylor and Steinhauer, “Evolving Constraints and Life ‘Choices.’”

5    Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Survey of Adult Skills, 2.

6    Cathexis Consulting, “Evaluation of the Literacy and Basic Skills (LBs) Program.”

7    Smythe, “Ten Years of Adult Literacy Policy and Practice.”

8    Darville, Adult Literacy Work in Canada.

9    Atlantic Literacy Coalitions, “Submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee.”

10  Goar, “Mainstay of Canada’s Literacy Movement Topples.”

11  Pearson, “Literacy Organizations Say Federal Government Abandoning Them.”

12  Employment and Social Development Canada, “Understanding Essential Skills.”

13  Fenwick, “Control, Contradiction and Ambivalence.”

14  Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD Skills Outlook 2013.

15  Ibid.

16  Statistics Canada, Employment and Social Development Canada, and the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada, “Skills in Canada: First Results.”

17  Arriagada and Hango, “Literacy and Numeracy among Off-Reserve First Nations People and Metis.”

18  Darville, “Unfolding the Adult Literacy Regime.”

19  Conference Board of Canada, “Adult Literacy Rate.”

20  As cited in Smythe, “Ten Years of Adult Literacy Policy and Practice,” 9.

21  Conference Board of Canada, “Adult Literacy Rate.”

22  Morrison, Camps and Classrooms.

23  Coady, Masters of Their Own Destiny.

24  Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada, “Annual Report to Parliament.”

25  McBride, Working? Employment Policy in Canada.

26  Heibert, “Winning, Losing and Still Playing the Game.”

27  Guo, “Difference, Deficiency, and Devaluation.”

28  Bredin Centre for Learning, “Edmonton Center Offers.”

29  D. Green, Executive Director, Bredin Centre for Learning, personal communication with author, June 6, 2017.

30  Bauder, “‘Brain Abuse.’”

31  Public Legal Education Association of Saskatchewan, “About PLEA.”

32  Aspen Foundation for Labour Education, “About Us.”

33  J. Matsunaga-Turnbull and G. Puntil, personal communication with author, May 17, 2017.

34  Ally, Dewhurst, and Zariski, “Expanding Access to Legal Services.”

35  Taylor, Union Learning.

36  Hyman, The Political Economy of Industrial Relations.

37  UFCW webmaster, personal communication with author, May 12, 2017.

38  Livingstone and Raykov, “Union Influence.”