Council of Canadian Administrative Tribunals: Update on the Literacy Project
Linda Gehrke, Vice-Chair of the Canadian Workplace Safety and Insurance Appeals Tribunal discusses an initiative of the Council of Canadian Administrative Tribunals to develop material and resources to assist administrative tribunals in meeting the needs of clients who have low literacy levels.
Background
The Council of Canadian Administrative Tribunals is a national, non-profit organization. Its membership comes from diverse sources, including members, legal counsel, and staff of federal, provincial, and territorial administrative boards, commissions, and tribunals in Canada; and individuals, lawyers, academics, and other people who have an interest in administrative law and tribunals. The agencies involved include such bodies as criminal injury compensation boards, workers’ compensation boards, provincial ombudsmen, and human rights commissions. CCAT is an association of working partnerships. Agencies active in CCAT’s literacy project include human rights, landlord and tenant, workers’ compensation, and immigration tribunals; ombudsmen; Aboriginal band councils; and treaty commissions. CCAT was created in the mid-1980s, was incorporated as a non-profit organization and received Letters Patent in December 1986. CCAT has a board of directors composed of distinguished Canadians who come from all parts of Canada.
CCAT has been engaged over the past several years in developing materials and resources to assist administrative tribunals in meeting the needs of clients who have low literacy levels. More than 40 percent of adult residents of Canada have varying degrees of difficulty every day of their lives because of inadequate reading, writing, and numeracy skills. When we look just at prisoners, some 65 percent of inmates in federal correctional facilities have literacy problems. That figure can soar to well over 80 percent in parts of Canada where Aboriginal people, men and women with learning disabilities, and people trapped in cyclical poverty form a large proportion of the prison population. Of this number, only 5 percent will self-identify and only 2 percent will seek programs to help them with their literacy problems. Immigrants and some official language communities have higher than average percentages of people with weak literacy and essential skills.
Administrative tribunals affect the lives of more people in Canada than any other part of the justice system. Many residents of Canada are seen daily by various administrative bodies. Administrative tribunals are in a unique position to identify those persons with weak literacy skills and to refer them to suitable services. These residents of Canada would also benefit if their particular needs could be responded to sensitively by administrative tribunals, thus allowing fair access to justice.
Administrative bodies act daily to protect and improve the life of vulnerable residents of Canada and are designed to increase their social inclusion. The administrative agencies will use the new organizational connections, newly developed materials, and new approaches to improve this aspect of their mandate. This focus on social inclusion will also help CCAT in producing learning materials and processes that will be useful for literacy organizations.
Administrative tribunals were created as a speedy, informal, and inexpensive alternative to the courts, with specific knowledge in their particular legal area. Tribunals exist in areas such as economic policy, social benefits regulation, health, equal rights, labour relations, etc. They also include a number of self-governing professional associations and a wide range of statutory officers whose decisions affect people’s everyday lives in profound ways. These decision makers work at the frontline of our justice system. Indeed, they are often the only point of contact many people will ever have with the justice system. Like the courts, administrative tribunals are expected to be impartial and fair. As alternatives to the courts, they are also expected to be more accessible, less costly, and more able to reach decisions in a timely and efficient manner.
CCAT’s Literacy Project
The goal of CCAT’s literacy project is to work with administrative tribunals and literacy organizations to create a sustained capacity to increase the literacy and essential skills of vulnerable residents of Canada, especially our Aboriginal peoples, new immigrants, people with disabilities, and official language minority groups.
The government of Canada has provided two grants for CCAT’s ongoing literacy project. In its second phase, CCAT has developed an on-line distance learning course that is accessible through the internet. In its third and final phase, CCAT plans to synthesize what we have learned in the first two phases of the project, developing further materials and workshops and providing links between tribunals and agencies and literacy organizations.
In Phase One of CCAT’s literacy project, we integrated the work and research that had been carried out and supported by the National Literacy Secretariat (NLS). This included work of the Canadian Bar Association, National Judicial Council, John Howard Society, and Lawyers for Literacy Project. Each of these organizations helped to refine our materials. We also contacted the Canadian Judicial Council, a contact that led to the Chief Justice of Canada writing the foreword to our Phase One publication, Administrative Tribunals: Literacy and Access to Justice in Canada.
In Phase Two, the Council of Canadian Administrative Tribunals worked with Frontier College and Literacy BC. We carried out six regional and two national workshops. We published a second book on literacy and plain language in administrative justice and an extensive array of educational and practical literacy materials that are now available to literacy organizations and CCAT members on our website. The materials on CCAT’s website include a style guide for writing decisions; suggestions for implementing plain language at work; a guide for writing legal letters to tribunal participants; a decision-writing workshop; advice on how to create well-organized and easily readable websites; and information posters on literacy statistics across the country.
The guides entitled Plain-Language Guide for People with Low Literacy Skills / Guide en language simplifié pour les personnes faiblement alphabétisées have not yet been published in hard copy for lack of funds but will soon be available for downloading from the CCAT website. These guides are primarily for tribunal participants with low literacy and essential skills and others who want or need information presented simply and clearly.
As well, a glossary of administrative justice terms was published in May 2007 in the book Introduction to Administrative Justice and to Plain Language / Initiation à la justice administrative et au langage clair. The glossary contains all the major terms participants with low literacy skills need to know together with definitions in plain language. It reflects both the common and civil law systems.
Some commentators suggest that literacy efforts undertaken by administrative tribunals will help in crime prevention. The alienation and anger that go along with being unable to participate in the justice system can lead to a sense of being disenfranchised. Having low literacy skills may mean a person receives fewer benefits or fails to understand and respond appropriately to an order of a court or tribunal. This might compound the associated penalties.
Consultations undertaken by the former National Literacy Secretariat have identified a series of needs on literacy and access to justice.
The third phase of CCAT’s literacy project will synthesize developments to date among projects that deal with literacy and access to justice. It will consider how to change and adapt existing materials to make them effective in responding to various cultural and environmental challenges. It will identify gaps and create new materials in a culturally sensitive manner adapted to the Canadian reality. It will provide training to professionals in administrative tribunals on how to respond to and how to create materials that are of use to literacy organizations and residents of Canada with low literacy and essential skills in a culturally sensitive manner. It will show how to put in place training and mechanisms to identify and reach out to vulnerable residents of Canada and refer them to literacy services.
To access CCAT’s online resources in literacy and more details about the activities of the literacy project, the website address is www.ccat-ctac.org.