Shulamit (03.11.08)"

In Ontario, the last provincial election saw the Tory (Conservative) leader championing funding of religious schools. Since the Catholic Christian School Board is supported by provincial funds, the Tory leader (whose name, interestingly, is John Tory) argued that other religiously founded schools should also be so funded -- all schools having to meet existing government education quality criteria. In practice this was proposing that Jewish and Muslim schools be funded in the same way as Catholic Christian schools.

The Liberal leader, who won the election after an almost spectacular flameout by the Tories, which the polls identified as very largely attributable to the Tories' religious school funding stance, argued that the Catholic Schools were funded by the government because historically the Province was more than 50% Catholic, but that what was important was education quality, not religious founding. Since McGuinty himself is Catholic, he could be accused of being hypocritially partisan, but no one did, in part because his premiership is generally regarded as having been conducted with scrupulous ethics.

Living in a Muslim neighbourhood I did meet Muslims who quietly argued that funding Catholic schools was unfair. I could not disagree. However, I expressed my belief that, in this era in multi-cultural Ontario, no school should be specifically religious. I also pointed out that, to make that policy work financially, Protestant Christians, who have always been a minority in Ontario, had historically accepted that Catholic schools, the property of the Roman Catholic Church, should be given funds matching that of the public, non-sectarian schools; and in return the Protestant Christians got provincial educational standards accepted by the Catholic School Board.

This position seems to have been accepted by the local Muslims, whose children are clearly becoming integrated into the non-sectarian larger community, and whose parents include, to my knowledge, many Liberal Party supporters.