If At First You Don't Succeed....Give Up?

I heard the minister of human resources on CBC radio just now say that the cuts to literacy programs are justified because these programs are ineffective. She said something like "Since 1994, one million more canadians have literacy challenges- this has got to stop."

What has got to stop? The increase in low-literacy adults, or trying to help them? If the latter, the cuts are justified. If the former, how cutting the programs helping them is going to "stop" it is unclear.

If the government believes that these programs don't provide value for money, that's one thing. But they're not offering any alternative ways of helping low-literacy adults. Unless they believe that helping low-literacy adults is inherently a waste of money, as implied earlier by Treasury Board Secretary John Baird, then it seems to me that the focus should be on offering programs that are more effective, not less. It is not as though people in the field are unaware of the limitations of these programs- they reach only a fraction of those who could benefit from them, for example. Also, there could be more training and professional development in the interest of quality control. But those things would take more money, not less. We in the literacy field would have to show that more money could actually result in more value for money. But if we did, would the government even listen? There's the rub.