Working Families Coalition

The Tories have decided to challenge the legitimacy of the Working Families Coalition -- which they say is a front for the Ontario Liberal Party to get around the Elections act. (Globe and Mail story)

The coalition is fronted by a number of unions and liberal party staffers -- and amazingly he says tongue in cheek some of these very organizations got payouts in the latest round of Liberal pork barreling.

My take on this is if looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck -- it probably is a duck.

Guess the provincial Liberals learned a lot at the feet of their master Chretien.

This however will not be resolved during the course of this election -- the liberals are safe for now.

Funding for Religious Schools

I strongly believe in a secular school system, religion in my opinion has no place in publicly funded schools. That being said I am not a fool either, I recognize as we do fund the catholic schools, and that no party in their right mind is going to remove the funding for the catholic separate school boards that we in all eventuality will end up funding other religious schools.

Interestingly enough I saw a statistic a couple of days ago that 75% of Ontario residents believe in a secular education system. However we also know that 52% of Ontarians list their religion as Catholic -- from a political standpoint you can see why there is going to be no change.

The liberal governments stand on this issue is completely irrational -- and plays the majority against the minorities -- it is alright and non divisive for catholics to be educated in a separate system but not the Jews, Muslims, Hindi, etc would cause a general failure of society as a whole. Personally I think these are cheap political tactics aimed at an underlying mainstream of polite racism.

As i said if I ran the world, or Ontario at least, we would have a secular education system. However I don't and we will end up with a true Ontario compromise -- we will fund everyone -- to some extent at least. However this will not come as a result of this election.

As a friend of mine just reminded me -- when the Liberals came in they canceled the previous conservative governments tax credit for private schools and there was nary a whisper of dissent. The conservatives are very silly to make this a stump issue in this election -- lack of political acuity or just plain desperate.

Background:

Separate school

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A separate school is a publicly funded school which includes religious education in its curriculum, as opposed to a private school or public school.

In Canada these are usually Roman Catholic schools which are run parallel to the public school system which historically had been either Protestant or Roman Catholic, but which in recent years has become secular. The separate schools in Ontario, however, are fully denominational and not secular. In some communities, there is a Separate Protestant school district (board) alongside the public system (and possibly Separate Catholic), but this is generally the exception.

Protection of the Separate School system was a major issue of contention in the negotiations that led to Canadian confederation, due in large part to racial and religious tension between the (largely Francophone) Roman Catholic population in Canada and the Protestant majority. The issue was a subject of debate at the 1864 Quebec Conference and was finally resolved at the London Conference of 1866 with a guarantee to protect the separate school system in Quebec and Ontario.

In the Quebec education system there were separate Protestant and Catholic school systems until 1998 when the system was replaced with linguistically based secular school systems. Similarly, Newfoundland and Labrador had schools organised on a confessional basis with separate denominational schools for Catholics, Seventh-day Adventists, Salvationists, Pentecostals, and an integrated stream. This was abolished by referendum in 1997 and a single secular system was introduced to replace the previous streams.

The question of separate schools has been most controversial in Ontario and Manitoba. The ending of public support for separate schools in the latter province in the 1890s prompted a national crisis known as the Manitoba Schools Question, and led to Pope Leo XIII's papal encyclical Affari Vos.

In Ontario, funding for the Catholic separate school system was initially only guaranteed until grade nine under the British North America (BNA) Act. This funding was gradually extended until 1984 when the government of William Davis extended funding to include the last three (Grades 11-OAC) years of secondary school after having rejected that proposal fifteen years earlier. The historically Protestant system was eventually transformed into the present day public board, and school prayer was banned in the early 1980s.

A province-wide newspaper survey conducted between 1997 and 1999 in 45 dailies indicated that 79% of 7551 respondents in Ontario favoured a single public school system. But rumours that the Catholic Church had instructed its parishioners not to respond to the survey suggest that it may have produced inaccurate results. Regardless of whether the results were accurate or not, no widely supported movement to amend the Constitution Act, 1867 has developed.

In Ontario the only separate schools are Catholic (except for one elementary school in Penetanguishene, Ontario, the Burkevale Protestant Separate School, under the Penetanguishene Protestant Separate School Board, which has no other schools); other faith groups do not receive similar funding. This restriction has often been criticized as contrary to the spirit of official multiculturalism. The provincial policy has been ruled as discriminatory by the Supreme Court of Canada, and on November 5, 1999 the United Nations Human Rights Committee condemned Canada and Ontario for having violating the equality provisions (Article 26) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Committee restated its concerns on November 2, 2005, when it published its Concluding Observations regarding Canada's fifth periodic report under the Covenant. The Committee observed that Canada had failed to "adopt steps in order to eliminate discrimination on the basis of religion in the funding of schools in Ontario."

In Alberta in some areas that were originally populated by Franco-Albertan French Catholics before the province came into existence, the Catholic church controls the public schools and the separate schools are protestant. This applies to St. Albert and St. Paul.