Ontario Government Dismisses Petition to Eliminate Separate School Funding

Throughout the latter half of 2023 and into 2024, CFIC (working with several other Ontario secular and humanist organizations) collected thousands of signatures asking for the province to cease funding Ontario’s discriminatory and archaic separate (Catholic) school system.

The petition was submitted on March 19, 2024. On May 14, 2024, Stephen Lecce, Minister of Education for Ontario, filed the province’s official response, reproduced here in its entirety.

Ontario does not have a single public school system.

In addition to the English-language and French-language public school systems in Ontario, the Province funds Catholic school systems for both languages. Denominational and minority language education rights are provided for in Canada’s Constitution.

Ontario respects the education rights of parents that are guaranteed by Canada’s Constitution.

Sincerely,

Hon. Stephen Lecce

Minister of Education

While technically accurate, the response ignores the concerns raised in the petition, including:

The discriminatory nature of funding a single denomination to the exclusion of all others;
Legally enshrined discriminatory hiring practices at one-third of publicly funded teaching positions;
Segregating Ontario’s Catholic children from everyone else in its public school systems;
The opportunity to save $1.5 billion annually; and
The ease by which Ontario could remove the constitutional requirement to fund separate schools, should it decide to do so.

CFIC will continue to work with its partners to draw attention to Ontario’s wasteful and harmful educational system. If you would like to help, please contact petitions@centreforinquiry.ca.

Comment (1)

If you read the British North America Act in context, the intention was to fund *two* denominations (or at least families of denominations). I point this out because I sometimes wonder whether there are what might be called “Protestant school irredentists” wanting to reclaim / reinvigorate the Protestant (the ones labeled “Public”, in Ontario) aspects of the rest of the school system. I am under no illusions that this is a big part of the puzzle – it clearly isn’t – but I do think sometimes it may play a role. I would be interested to hear about the state of such matters outside of the big areas. Friends from rural Ontario always tell me that us here in Ottawa (never mind in Toronto) often forget about the urban / rural divide on many areas of concern; maybe there is one here, for example.

One also can make a pretty clear constitutional case (disclaimer: I am not a lawyer) to my mind that what Quebec and Newfoundland did was anticonstitutional., even if by my lights *morally* justified. In Quebec, where I am originally from, giving the middle finger to the constitution is almost a custom. However, in Ontario I suspect secularization of the school boards might be challengable. And then it is very unclear what would happen – there are two competing claims, and it seems very much dependent on how “living” one takes the constitution, including the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which might conceivably have the resources to strike down the implicit and explicit sectarianism. I don’t know.

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Comment (1) on “Ontario Government Dismisses Petition to Eliminate Separate School Funding”

Keith+Douglas says:

June 2, 2024 at 9:38 am

If you read the British North America Act in context, the intention was to fund *two* denominations (or at least families of denominations). I point this out because I sometimes wonder whether there are what might be called “Protestant school irredentists” wanting to reclaim / reinvigorate the Protestant (the ones labeled “Public”, in Ontario) aspects of the rest of the school system. I am under no illusions that this is a big part of the puzzle – it clearly isn’t – but I do think sometimes it may play a role. I would be interested to hear about the state of such matters outside of the big areas. Friends from rural Ontario always tell me that us here in Ottawa (never mind in Toronto) often forget about the urban / rural divide on many areas of concern; maybe there is one here, for example.

One also can make a pretty clear constitutional case (disclaimer: I am not a lawyer) to my mind that what Quebec and Newfoundland did was anticonstitutional., even if by my lights *morally* justified. In Quebec, where I am originally from, giving the middle finger to the constitution is almost a custom. However, in Ontario I suspect secularization of the school boards might be challengable. And then it is very unclear what would happen – there are two competing claims, and it seems very much dependent on how “living” one takes the constitution, including the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which might conceivably have the resources to strike down the implicit and explicit sectarianism. I don’t know.