Government publications often so dense they're unintelligible

That's bad news for parents if there's a change to family allowance benefit is. But it's also bad news for politicians if voters can't understand propaganda explaining why the government wants to change a policy.

Most government publications can't be easily read or understood by the average Canadian.

The result, say literacy experts, is that many Canadians aren't warned about dangers such as workplace hazards and can't benefit from government programs they're entitled to.

York University education professor Gary Bunch tested more than 30 publications for "readability" using two standard formulas. The publications were selected at random from pamphlets and booklets issued to the public by Ontario, B.C., Newfoundland and the federal government.

Nearly half of the material required university-level education to read, although two thirds of Canadian adults never got beyond high school. A mere four publications rated as readable by someone with only Grade 8 education—the level of 3.7 million adults.

The results indicate little change since a 1970 task force condemned the "sheer unintelligibility" of most federal publications.

Official surveys in the late '70s and '80s also gave a failing grade to provincial health and safety publications.

"It's not maliciousness; it's ignorance," says Bunch.

"I'd guess that the people who write these don't even talk to a factory worker or someone who hasn't had a solid basic education." While some experts criticize readability formula as misleading, Bunch's findings are supported by the Southam Literacy Survey. One-quarter of all 2,398 adults interviewed said they need help reading publications from governments and business and four out of 10 functional illiterates volunteered they had difficulty.

Even among fully literate Canadians, more than one in five reported needing help with such written materials.

Income tax tables are the toughest. Seven out of 10 Canadians couldn't use the tax chart to pick the right amount of federal taxes to pay on taxable income of $13,990.

Little has been done in Canada to make government materials more readable—a sharp contrast to other western nations. The federal government has focused on research rather than reform.

For five years, the Legal Services Society in Vancouver has produced citizen's guides to the law that are easily read. But both the guides and the approach have been slow to catch on in Canada.

"It's a huge fight to try to get some people to understand that the world isn't filled with print junkies all with PhDs," says Carol Pfeifer, the society's director of public legal education.

A survey of how small claims courts are explained showed improvement in the readability of pamphlets, says Pfeifer. But too often the material was written from the viewpoint of the legal system rather than for the person who needed the information.

"The people who most often need the advice often can't understand the publications," agrees Bill Shallow, a Newfoundland government expert in adult education.

As U.S. President Jimmy Carter said in 1978, when he ordered American government regulations written in Plain English: "The federal government has become like a foreign country, complete with its own interests and its own language." These judgments are borne out by the York University survey that found many essential pieces of information are written well over the heads of the intended audience.

A federal pamphlet on how to apply for a Social Insurance Number, for instance, rated at a senior high school or university reading level. So did five pamphlets by the B.C. ministry of human resources explaining benefits and rights.

By contrast, the Ontario minister of justice tried to explain divorce and separation to children by writing at the Grade 8 or 9 level and another Ontario pamphlet aimed at babysitters managed Grade 7 prose. "A lot of care was taken with the writing of these. You can see the difference," says Bunch.