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Can literacy be a defining national issue? My colleague, Ed Doherty, minister of post-secondary education, training and labour, and I spent two days with hundreds of people who believe it can — and must. The Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC) hosted a literacy summit this week, linking 3,500 participants in 10 cities across Canada.

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Minister of Education Kelly Lamrock

As the chair of CMEC it was my honour to close the national summit by talking about where we go from here. I'd like to share with you what my colleagues and I learned from Canadians.

We know that thousands of Canadians can't read well enough to perform tasks many take for granted — such as reading this newspaper, or a workplace training manual, or a simple bedtime story to their kids. In New Brunswick, there are around 300,000 adults who couldn't read well enough to learn a new skill if their job changed.

There is a moral element to this challenge. In a nation as prosperous as Canada, it is surely a moral failing that we have failed to provide the most basic opportunity to so many. Equally so, if we fail to answer the challenge of universal literacy we may risk the very prosperity that lets us solve the problem.

Every day, in cities around the world, businesses decide where jobs and investment go. The fate of our mills and factories no longer depends on which jurisdiction is the cheapest place to do business. The old recipes of tax cuts and deregulation mean little against low-wage emerging economies in China, India and other nations.

The new question that determines our fate is: "In which province can workers learn new skills, be trained with new technologies and make more advanced products?" A province where nearly half our residents have low literacy skills will not win on that question very often.

If we can't beat the global competition on price, we need to always be able to offer skills and productivity that they can't. And we should have no illusions — China and India are looking to add more skilled jobs to their low-wage repertoire.

China will graduate more engineers this year than Canada has students. India has more honours students than New Brunswick has kids. You could put every Canadian job in those two countries and they would still have a labour surplus.

Meanwhile, the world our kids will graduate into will be more demanding than ever. The average Canadian will have had 10 jobs by age 40. The 10 jobs most in demand in 2008 didn't even exist in 1998. I once heard it said that we are training our children for jobs that don't exist, using technology that hasn't been invented, to solve problems we haven't contemplated. Before they face this world, we had better make sure they can read.

If economic growth goes to the places that have skilled workers, we are only as strong as our weakest students. The economic fate of our top students will depend in no small part upon how well we teach all of their peers.

At the literacy summit, Ed and I issued a challenge to New Brunswick delegates. We know from testing which students cannot read well. If we simply say that there are hundreds of them, the challenge can seem so daunting. Yet if we simply pledge to teach each child, one by one, it seems within our grasp.

What if we simply said that each struggling child is an urgent case? If we said that each child deserves the resources and the volunteer hours it takes to help them read? If we didn't stop working until every child left Grade 5 able to read? In May, our government will assemble educational, business and NGO leaders to take up this challenge.

Former Premier McKenna said that full literacy needs to become a goal, as deficits were in the 1990s - not one of many demands, but a societal goal by which we judge all our policies. Our social, economic and taxation policies all need to support literacy.

Already, our government has taken steps to make full literacy a goal of our school system. We've made historic increases to the education budget, and we've also changed how we spend that money. We've created an Innovation Fund to encourage new teaching ideas in literacy, added evaluations to make schools more accountable, and made tough decisions to end the streaming that put in one class too many kids with struggles in literacy.

There is more to do — increase services for kids with special needs, make curriculum clearer and more literacy-focused, and start in early childhood on the transition to kindergarten.

However, universal literacy (like self-sufficiency) cannot be something our governments do for us. Government can set the goal, but only with the commitment and creativity of New Brunswickers can every parent know the joy, and opportunity, that comes with reading his or her child a bedtime story.