Home to three Catholic student clubs, one Catholic college and a number of faculty connected to this issue, the University of Toronto is no stranger to the questions posed by religious education. With public funding of denominational schools becoming a wedge issue in the provincial election campaign, debate on the matter has started to swirl on campus.

This past Friday, campus secular club the U of T Secular Alliance co-sponsored a public lecture with the Freethought Association of Canada and the Centre For Inquiry entitled “Catholic Public Schools: Constitutional Right or Archaic Privilege?” at St. George campus’s Medical Sciences Building.

The event focused on merging the current public school system with the separate Catholic school system to form a single school network, a cause championed by the One School System Network, which helped advertise the lecture.

Jan Johnstone, a public school trustee with the Bluewater District School Board, touted the benefits of a single school system while tallying, at length, the drawbacks of the current education system in Ontario as she saw it. Johnstone objected to the overlapping finances of the current system, which she called wasteful.

Currently, Ontario’s separate school system represents 46 Catholic school boards and one Protestant school board.

A staunch opponent of the Christian school boards, Johnstone said the idea of creating of even more publicly funded school boards for other religions was “crazy.”.

Many students and faculty at the lecture were concerned about the controversy over faith-based schools currently taking place in Ontario’s public forums, including last Thursday’s televised debate between Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty and challengers John Tory (PC) and Howard Hampton (NDP), where this issue was debated.

Also speaking at the event was Justin Trottier, president of the Freethought Association of Canada and director of Ontario’s Centre for Inquiry, both foundations devoted to advocating for a secular public sector.

Much of the current wave of dispute over this issue was raised by the Progressive Conservative party’s plan to publicly fund religious schools, with the aim of including all religious groups in the separate school system, not just Catholics and a small group of Protestants.

Trottier, a member of the Green party, was among the opponents of the PC plan at Friday’s lecture. The UTSA, FAC and CFI have stated that the public school system in Ontario is inclusive of all students, regardless of religion. They argued that public funding of religious schools would drain money from the education system, leaving the provincial government with the moral dilemma of deciding which religious denominations qualify for funding and which do not.

Johnstone noted that Quebec, Newfoundland and Manitoba have all recently switched from denomination school systems to a “one school system” model.