 TORONTO - Ontario Catholics stand in danger of seeing their education rights whipsawed in the debate over funding non-Catholic religious schools, according to parents, teachers and trustees.
“The discussion out there is not only about funding faith-based schools, like Jewish and Muslim schools. It’s now become, ‘Why are we funding Catholic schools at all?’ We are very concerned about that,” said Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association president Elaine MacNeil.
“The debate is becoming very divisive. It’s heating up. When you bring religion into it, it tends to get very nasty,” said Brian Evoy, president of the Ontario Association of Parents in Catholic Education .
“People need to be cognizant of their rights,” said Bonaventure Fagan, president of the Canadian Catholic School Trustees’ Association . “Understand that those rights are something they must treasure.”
Trustees in the French Catholic system have seen how minority rights were stripped via referendum in Newfoundland, and the Association franco-ontarienne des conseils scolaires catholiques is prepared to argue that neither language nor religious rights should be subject to a popularity contest, said association president Robert Tremblay.
Though public school trustees rejected a motion in favour of consolidating Catholic and public school boards at the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association annual general meeting in June, groups such as One School System and Civil Rights in Public Education have continued campaigning for amalgamation of the four separate school systems (English Catholic, French Catholic, English public and French public). The Green Party of Ontario is officially in favour of eliminating Catholic school boards.
It’s difficult to know whether Catholics should ally themselves with the Conservative Party proposal to extend public funding to other faith-based schools, said MacNeil.
“The difficulty for us, right from the get-go, is there’s very little detail in it,” the union president said. “It’s difficult to respond to a what-if or maybe situation.”
MacNeil would rather see an education debate about ways of improving the existing system instead of a three-year commission to look at extending public funding.
“This is creating huge turmoil, and will create huge turmoil in the system,” she said.
“We understand where parents from other faiths are coming from when they say they want their own school system,” said Evoy. “As parents in Catholic education, we’re sort of caught in a Catch-22, as we get it from both sides. One is saying get rid of our system, and the funding-all-faiths side sees the success of our system.”
But Evoy believes that the first responsibility of the government should be to improve the existing publicly funded schools.
“Where is the money going to come for all this? The two systems have finally come up to par, so to speak. They’re probably not up to where as parents we would like to see them, but there is more funding,” Evoy said.
The $400-million promise to fund faith-based schools flies in the face of other Conservative promises to cut taxes, according to Evoy.
“The money has to come from somewhere. We don’t see it coming,” he said.
Evoy also has doubts about plans to appoint former Ontario premier Bill Davis to head a commission which will recommend how to extend funding to non-Catholic faith-based schools.
“Why are you calling Bill Davis in? Bill Davis is from the ’60s. No disrespect to the gentleman, but he doesn’t know what’s going on in the educational system today.”
Newfoundlander Fagan was in the middle of multiple lawsuits and the referendum which ultimately ended in a constitutional amendment to eliminate faith-based schools in that province in 1998. Newfoundland and Labrador Catholics didn’t think they would lose their constitutional education rights, he said.
“We had every right to be confident that our agreement was solid,” Fagan said.
As president of the Canadian Catholic School Trustees’ Association, Fagan is now promoting Toonies for Tuition, a $115,000 funding drive to subsidize private school tuitions in Newfoundland, Manitoba and British Columbia.
In June the program had raised $9,000, with a final collection scheduled for the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.
While Catholic trustees across the country are sympathetic with the arguments other faith communities are making for full funding, they’re more worried about protecting their own education rights, Fagan said.
“We support people in faith-based schools in their desire to seek funding. How that takes place depends on the local situation. We have always supported that,” he said.
“Except with the proviso that we are fiercely protective of our own constitutional right to funding.”
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