Since Progressive Conservative leader John Tory announced this summer that his party would support the expansion of public funding to non-Catholic religious schools, Ontario has been gripped by heated debate.
Tory’s flawed “solution” to the faith schools debate should be opposed by Ontarians on three grounds: on principle, on consequence and on economic basis. In the first, the PC leader’s disregard for secularism in favour of shameless populism is appalling. Equality can only be achieved by governmental indifference to religion, which in addition to not favouring one religion over another, includes not marginalizing the non-religious. This aside, while promising to fund “all” religious schools may sound reasonable, I question whether Ontarians would wish to see public funds diverted to Scientology or Satanist schools. Tory’s seeming inability to comprehend secularism appears to have blinded him even from the irony in proposing to have former premier Bill Davis (the man responsible for exaggerating the problem by extending full funding to Catholic secondary schools) implement the policy.
In terms of social utility, the segregation of our children according to religious faith can only have detrimental effects by breeding inter-communal alienation and mistrust. Tory may claim to want to bring the approximately 53,000 private school students “into the fold,” when in reality his plan will only serve to send more kids out. And all this in the name of a bastardized version of that quintessentially Canadian sentiment, multiculturalism. To top it off, the plan will deprive an already strained public education system of much needed funds.
Not surprisingly, premier Dalton McGuinty has positioned himself in opposition to the PC plan, ostensibly on these grounds. While hypocrisy is hardly new to politics, McGuinty’s stance on the issue of funding faith schools is steeped in it. Yet his defense of the status quo ignores the already discriminatory dual system that exists: the continued funding of Catholic school boards by taxpayer dollars. This practice has been twice condemned by the United Nations as a breach of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (in 1999 and 2005). Public funds continue to allow Catholic schools to discriminate against non-Catholic teachers, including those who are homosexual. The bureaucratic redundancy of the dual systems also continues to drain hundreds of millions of dollars from education. The stalwart argument supporting this hypocrisy is that the funding is a constitutional guarantee of the BNA Act, when in fact Section 93 permits its elimination as demonstrated in Manitoba and Quebec, both of which eliminated funding to Catholic schools years ago.
The only solution to this mess is the creation of a single, secular public system. To this end, a number of secularist and religious groups (including the Hindu Conference of Canada and the Muslim Canadian Congress) formed the non-partisan, umbrella organization known as the One School System Network (OSSN) on May 26 of this year. This group respresents the roughly 60 per cent of Ontarians who desire a secular public school model. But apparently this popular sentiment makes no difference to the Conservatives and Liberals, both of whom seem hell-bent on compelling Ontarians to choose between an archaic system of discrimination and the further balkanization of our society.
Schreiber Pereira is Vice President Advocacy of the Freethought Association of Canada and a member of the One School System Network.
