Religious Schools Funding Debate Rages as Ontario Election Nears

With the Ontario election campaign going into high gear, one of the hottest topics across the province has been the issue of public funding for faith-based schools.

If elected, Conservative John Tory has promised to spend $400 million to fully fund Jewish, Hindu, Muslim and other religious schools provided they follow the provincial curriculum and comply with Ontario's educational regulations.

Currently, Catholic schools are the only religious schools to be publicly funded, which has been the case since about 15 years before Confederation in 1867.

The Liberals and the NDP support continuing on with the status quo, while the Green Party, which has been gaining momentum in the polls, wants funding for Catholic schools abolished and replaced with one public system for French and one for English.

Earlier this month, Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty—himself a product of the Catholic school system—angered faith-based groups when he said it was "regressive to contemplate segregating our children according to their faith."

McGuinty also said Tory's proposal would take much-needed money out of public education and could jeopardize social cohesion in multicultural in Ontario.

However, Don Hutchinson, General Legal Counsel for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC), believes funding non-Catholic religious schools would in fact encourage inclusiveness because the students would interact with students in the public system through science fairs and sports events, as well as during after-school play in their neighbourhoods.

"It is difficult to argue that funding of faith-based schools fosters segregation when there are millions of Ontarians who are graduates of publicly funded Catholic and other non-funded faith-based schools who are actively involved in the interaction of life in the province"

The EFC has consistently supported parents' "right to choose" regarding their children's education, says Hutchinson, and the organization has been presenting this position to the government for about 20 years.

The UNHCR declared in 1999 that funding Ontario's Catholic schools to the exclusion of all others is discriminatory and violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Committee also said that if the province chooses to fund religious schools, it should "make this funding available without discrimination."

Howard English, spokesperson for the Public Education Fairness Network, an organization composed of a number of religious groups, says the current system discriminates by leaving the 53,000 children who attend non-Catholic faith-based schools "out in the cold."

"It really is an untenable situation because Ontario is the only province in Canada that includes one faith in the public education system but excludes all others. We feel that's discriminatory."

What's also discriminatory, says English, is that parents who send their kids to non-Catholic faith-based schools are paying taxes to support the public system, yet are not benefiting from it. "That's part of the unfairness of the current system."

English says it would be an "injustice" to remove funding from the Catholic system and the network doesn't see that as the answer. However, public opinion is definitely leaning in that direction.

A recent Ipsos Reid poll found that three out of five Ontarians (62 per cent) opposed the extension of full funding to faith-based schools. Fifty three per cent of respondents said they would prefer to support a public school system only.

In a Strategic Counsel survey for the Globe and Mail of 850 Ontarians, 71 per cent said they oppose funding faith-based schools while 26 per cent supported it.

On Monday, those who support a single public school system got a boost when the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) issued a brief calling for a constitutional amendment in Ontario to bring an end to public funding for Catholic schools.

The CCLA said it is "unwise, inequitable and unjust" for Catholic schools to receive government funding, and suggested the best approach is a strengthened public school system, with religious schools being responsible for raising their own funding.

"While everyone is entitled to embrace whatever religious views they prefer, the state should not subsidize any of them," stated the brief.

Extending funding to other faith-based schools could trigger a migration of students away from the public system, in which case the public schools would "no longer be able to perform the integrative function they now do." This, says the CCLA, could result in a much less tolerant Ontario.

The recently-formed One School System Network (OSSN), a coalition of groups, said in a news release that the CCLA's call "represents a major step" in associating the current system—as well as Tory's proposal to extend funding to other religious schools—with a civil rights problem.

OSSN said the CCLA's action is consistent with a 1997 Supreme Court judgement and subsequent statements by the Chief Justice that on the basis of civil rights violations alone, the funding of Catholic schools could be eliminated.

Brian Kerman, coordinator with OSSN, says he's amazed that while various polls show that as many as 75 per cent of Ontarians are against public money being used to fund any faith-based schools, neither a single MPP nor the NDP have stepped forward to support them.

However, on Tuesday Conservative MPP Bill Murdoch, a 17-year backbencher from Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, became the first PC candidate to abandon his party's promise to fund all faith-based schools. In a speech in his riding, Murdoch said he has listened to his constituents and is "convinced that the majority stand against faith-based funding."

Kerman says now that the CCLA has "given the stamp of approval," he expects many more groups, including Ontario's teachers unions, to join the organization in the coming months. OSSN plans to announce its own poll on Monday, along with a call for a referendum.

"Our organization has three objectives: to have people become aware of the issue and to give them the strength to stand and speak on it, to stop the proposal for extended funding in this election, and to achieve one school system in Ontario," says Kerman.

Ontario Green Party leader Frank de Jong says the Green Party took the position some years ago that funding for religious education in the province—which he calls "totally unconscionable and prejudicial to the status quo"—should be ended.

Renton Patterson, president of Civil Rights in Public Education, notes that after the Catholic school system went from partial funding to being fully funded in 1984, enrolment increased three-fold. Taking that into consideration, if full funding is extended to all religious schools, he estimates it would cost $1.5 billion rather than the $400 million proposed by Tory.

He points out that each time a student leaves the public system a loss of about $6,000 is incurred, placing a further drain on cash-strapped school boards.

"We're already experiencing a problem with declining enrolment—there just aren't as many kids around—and small schools are becoming smaller, and this would just make the problem that much worse," says Patterson.

Whatever the outcome of the election on December 10, this issue is unlikely to fade into the background any time soon. As English notes, "It's a very emotional issue with a lot of history attached to it. When you mix education and faith, then the topic becomes exceedingly emotional."

Additional reporting by Jeffrey Thompson