Jerry Lee Miller on the Canada Literacy Act

In the 1980s, the Learner Action Committee of the Movement for Canadian Literacy actively lobbied to pass a Canada Literacy Act.

Years of research, development and lobbying by the Learner Action Group of Canada resulted in the Canada Literacy Act, which was to be read as a Private Member’s Bill in 1996. The bill was never read in parliament.

The Canada Literacy Act would have created an environment of equality in the government and in the community for all people regardless of their level of literacy skills. Under the act, the government of Canada would

• consider literacy to be a human right and a political right;
• recognize that an individual’s lack of literacy skills or education is not a personal failure, but a social failure;
• enshrine equal access to information, to all forms of knowledge, and to creativity and intellectual activity for all; and
• acknowledge that people learn in many different ways throughout their lives and that lifelong education, formal and informal, should be available for every person in Canada.

In this interview, Jerry Lee Miller, a member of the Learner Action Committee, reflects on what the Canada Literacy Act could have meant.

Video Clip 1: Jerry speaks about the Canada Literacy Act and Star Trek	Video Clip 2: Jerry speaks about how a Literacy Act would make things better	Video Clip 3: Jerry speaks about how learners made history	Video Clip 4: Jerry speaks about why a national learner voice is important
Audio Clip 1: Jerry speaks about the Canada Literacy Act and Star Trek	Audio Clip 2: Jerry speaks about how a Literacy Act would make things better	Audio Clip 2: Jerry speaks about how learners made history	Audio Clip 2: Jerry speaks about why a national learner voice is important

If you want to use these clips, please check with Jerry Lee -- contact us and we will put you in touch.

The Canada Literacy Act passes. Now, how I imagined it would be? Well, let’s look to Star Trek. On Star Trek everybody has a great education, nobody reads friggin’ book except for Picard, and he does it because it’s a hobby. When I take apart Star Trek and the things that I like in it—is how it operates as a community, everybody is educated to their maximum level, people are provided with lots of information—it appears that way anyway. There is a structure that’s interested in trying to elevate people to the best that they can possibly be.

Now that is what I imagined the Act was going to do. It would involve everybody. Everybody would be involved with it. People would see that this one is one that they can fix, that we would spend the next ten years working diligently towards trying to make Canada as literate as it possibly can be. And it would fundamentally change everything. You’d be able to rent a car easily, regardless of who you are. Your lawyer would be making sure that you could understand every nuance of your leasing agreement for your new apartment. People would be helping people, directing them on the streets without a second thought about whether they could read or write or understand the signs. You’d be able to walk into any office anywhere and they would be more than happy to provide you with information. We would be raising a generation of students, university and college students, who would be more than happy to share with you all that they had learned in their four or five or ten years of university.

None of these things happened. They didn’t happen and the Act didn’t pass but I still have hope. But it was supposed to be an Act that anybody and everybody could see their part in it. And it would bring us all closer together.

The Act would’ve brought clear language into the foreground. Right now, it’s still kind of a misty area because people think that simple language is clear language when it isn’t. Clear language means clear—crystal clear—crystal clear, understandable language. The Act would have helped to promote, push that to the foreground. People who were learning how to read would have entry level materials available for them through government organizations. People who already had a handle on the reading and writing would be put in a position where they would be mandated, or persondated, into sharing and being patient in providing the information that they know or helping people to access the information more readily.

The responsibility would be everyone’s. People would be looking for people who couldn’t read and write and looking to assist them, that’s what the Act would have done. It would have made environments, wherever people worked, where they would have to be more sensitive to the possibility that there might be people who can’t access reading and writing and make it their responsibility to help those people. And responsibility didn’t mean throwing tons of money at it. It meant the Act was operating more on what you can do, you know, what you can do for other people, not what the government can do. It was to take it out of the hands of the government—make them responsible, but take it out of their hands—and put it into the hands of Canadians as individuals, as groups, as organizations, as corporations, put it into their hands to solve the problem.

Jerry Lee Miller has participated in the literacy movement, in community-based and school board literacy programs as a learner, a facilitator, an activist, an outreach worker, an illustrator and artist, a researcher and project coordinator. You could see one of his most excellent projects, The Joy of Homework, at www.nald.ca/schalp/homework/index.html but they have taken it down now :-(

Jerry Lee Miller has been drawing since the age of five and is a graduate of the The Art Centre @ Central Technical School in Toronto. More about Jerry Lee at www.union-art.com/mill.html.