| Written by Michael Swan, The Catholic Register,
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 TORONTO - An open letter from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association to Ontario Education Minister Kathleen Wynne has called for the a constitutional amendment to defund Catholic schools, and linked religiously based education with anti-Semitism, the incarceration of Japanese-Canadians in concentration camps during the Second World War and sexual and physical abuse at residential schools in Northern Canada.
“The time is ripe to reassess the merits of Catholic school funding,” said CCLA general counsel Alan Borovoy in a letter to Wynne. “The circumstances in today’s Ontario differ quite substantially from those obtained in pre-Confederation Upper Canada. In today’s multi-religious, multicultural and heterogeneous Ontario there is simply no justification — if ever there was one — for conferring special benefits on the Catholic community.”
Eliminating Catholic school funding and denying funding to other faith-based schools will ensure social cohesion and prevent Canada from ever returning to the days when , “Within living memory, this country jailed thousands of innocent Japanese Canadians, denied many aboriginal people the right to vote, restricted immigration from developing countries and turned back Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany. There is no reason to believe such behaviour could never again be possible,” Borovoy argues.
Ontario Catholic School Trustees' Association president Bernard Murray called Borovoy’s argument an “assault.”
Rooted in our history, publicly funded Catholic schools are embedded in the social structure and life of our province,” said the OCSTA in a Sept. 24 release.
“I think they’re trying to inflame a situation that is already sensitive enough,” said Toronto Catholic District School Board chair Oliver Carroll.
Catholic and Jewish schools may well preach tolerance, but who is to say what is taught at other schools, said Borovoy.
“I don’t want to be casting aspersions by any implication, but there would be some of the others (faith-based schools) — and I don’t mean all of the others — where you may not have such messages of tolerance. So we’ve been led to believe by the media,” Borovoy told The Catholic Register.
Common public schooling, based on civic values, is the only sure antidote against fear, suspicion and hate directed at minorities, said Borovoy. In public schools children learn to live with diversity because they share the classroom, the baseball diamond and the gymnasium, he said.
“That setting is substantially better for society than could happen if the public schools lost the vast number of their students to religious schools and you wound up with a religiously balkanized school system,” said Borovoy.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association argument is ideological rather than legal, said constitutional lawyer Peter Lauwers.
“It’s clearly a political argument,” said Lauwers, who has argued on behalf of Catholic education before the Supreme Court of Canada. “There are some points of law in it, but they’re simply points you would expect him to raise as he goes by. There’s nothing in it that’s particularly legal.”
The CCLA opposed the extension of funding through the end of high school in 1984, and Borovoy has always championed an anti-religious view of education, including banning prayer and religious instruction from public schools, said Lauwers.
“Borovoy believes that religion has no place in education, and that’s his ideological position. It’s one that many parents obviously don’t agree with,” he said.
“The idea that somehow or other Catholics divide the society just doesn’t stand up when you take a look at it,” said Carroll.
When Borovoy’s views get a national hearing on the front pages and on all the major television news programs, it’s time for Catholics to sharpen their arguments in favour of faith-based education, said Carroll.
“We’re letting down the whole system by not being out there, letting people know what goes on in the Catholic schools, and how good they are, and the contribution they make,” he said.
Carroll accused his own board of focusing too much on the internal discussion within the Catholic community and failing to make the case for Catholic education to the rest of the province.
“There’s almost an interia built in, and I’m speaking about Toronto Catholic, built into the system that says, ‘Well, what was is good, and so that’s enough to carry us into the future.’ The idea of talking to ourselves just is not going to carry the day when it’s over and done with,” Carroll said.
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