Catholic system is here to stay

TORONTO - Ontario Education Minister Kathleen Wynne put a positive spin on the bitter debate over confessional education during the fall election campaign in a speech to Catholic teachers at their annual union meeting in Toronto March 9.

In the end voters rejected Conservative proposals to expand public education to include Jewish, Muslim and Christian schools and affirmed the existing publicly funded system in Ontario which covers secular and Catholic school boards, she said.

“It’s the most inclusive system in the world,” Wynne told about 600 delegates to the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association annual general meeting. “We have to model that pluralistic system for the world.”

The election “reinforced public support for the current publicly funded system,” she told The Catholic Register. No amount of public debate over whether it’s fair to fund Catholic schools but not Jewish and Muslim schools would cause a Liberal government to re-examine current funding for Catholic schools as the only publicly funded separate system, she said.

“It’s the system that we inherited,” said Wynne.