The Literacy Skills of New Brunswick Francophones

Although the contribution of a certain number of immigrants admitted in the rest of the country serves to mitigate the effect of New Brunswick’s loss through migration, it is by no means adequate to offset the substantial number of francophone immigrants admitted to the province who left to go to other parts of the country. [...] The results of the Survey of Literacy Skills Used in Daily Activities (1989), the International Adult Literacy Survey (1994), the International Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (2003) and the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (2012) indicate that the gaps between francophones and anglophones that were initially observed have been eliminated in the vast majority [...] In addition to being the definition used by the Government of Canada for the purposes of implementation of the Official Languages Act, this criterion is widely used in the field of research on official-language minorities. [...] The series of profiles of official language minorities in Canada, published by Statistics Canada between 2010 and 2012 on the basis of the data from the 2006 Census and the Survey on the Vitality of Official-Language Minorities (SVOLM), attest to these gaps. [...] This difference cannot be attributed solely to the fact that the population is older; although the level of education in the north is considerably higher among young people, they still lag far behind their counterparts in the southeast and the rest of the province.