With only a year and a half till the next election, NWT MLAs face daunting issues: a struggling economy, illicit drugs, addictions and crumbling housing, to name a few.
One Yellowknife MLA says literacy could be a contributing factor to some of the NWT’s most pressing concerns, but there isn’t a lot of data tracking it.
“We have got overwhelming problems and we’ve got to find threads we can pull on that can lead to transformational change,” Yellowknife North MLA Shauna Morgan said in the legislature on Wednesday.
“I believe literacy is a key thread that we’ve been ignoring.”
Morgan set out how she believes that manifests itself.
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“There’s so much shame and embarrassment around illiteracy,” she said. “People are good at hiding it so they’re going to avoid trying for a driver’s licence or trying that trades entrance exam, avoid filling out applications, avoid applying for jobs.
“They’re stuck, bored. They’re likely to turn to crime, addictions. Their housing will be at risk.”
In the legislature, Morgan referenced a 2003 Statistics Canada survey which she said found almost half of NWT youth aged 16 to 25 could neither read nor write well enough to “fully participate in society.”
“Seventy percent of Indigenous adults and 30 percent of non-Indigenous adults were found to not be functionally literate,” said Morgan.
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Answering questions in the legislature, education minister Caitlin Cleveland said that while StatsCan conducted a similar literacy survey in recent years, the NWT was not included, meaning there is no modern data with which to directly compare those findings.
However, Cleveland noted the NWT is in the process of transitioning to British Columbia’s school curriculum, which she said will include more consistent literacy and numeracy testing in grades 4, 7, 10 and 12.
“Because of the change in regulations that affords for more information-sharing to the department, we’ll be in a much better position to track that data,” said Cleveland.
