Education Discrimination

Private schools in Canada, particularly those based on religious values and observances pride themselves on their commitment to teaching ethics and good moral values to the children under their tutelage based on the religions they represent. Students at these private religious schools are taught the normal provincially-approved curriculum along with a solid values-based understanding of the world around them and their obligations within that world as expressed by their religion.

Since public schools in Canada are secular in nature and teach the approved curriculum sans religion there is a general agreement among parents of young children that something important is lacking in the public school system which religious schools can supplement successfully. It's debatable, perhaps, whether or not children grounded in a certain religion's precepts, traditions and values come out better on the scale of good behaviours. After all, it's the values and ethical behaviour that children observe in their own familial surroundings that most impact on their future development.

On the other hand, people who support separate schools for their children's education in the belief that they provide a superior education, a more well-rounded version that includes basic education as well as religion-based precepts and models are wedded to the practise. Every taxpayer in Canada pays education taxes provincially, but these taxes support only secular, public schools - along with separate schools dedicated to the Catholic faith. That nod to one religion only as a provincially-sponsored right has its genesis in the two-founding-partners character of the country.

This funding for provincial Catholic schools is enshrined in the Constitution, dating back to the British North America Act, as an act of appeasement toward the French, Catholic minority in the country. Yet to fund, through taxpayer dollars, one religion while other separate school attendance is paid for out of parents' discretionary ability to pay on top of their already having paid for someone else's children to attend public schools is patently unfair.

There is a time when history, tradition and reality come to loggerheads with one another. When to defend this unfair practise by simply saying it's always been this way is an insufficient response to a real problem of discrimination in funding. If one religion continues to have funding received through general tax funds, then an enlightened democratic ideal of even-handedness requires that all religious schools which utilize the provincial curriculum also be funded.

While all children are embraced by the public school system supported through education taxes imposed on all residents, separate schools are not obliged to accept children other than Catholics even though these schools are funded by all taxpayers in Ontario. The United Nations Human Rights Committee even got into the picture in 1999, ruling that Ontario was guilty of discriminating against other faith groups by funding only Catholic schools.

There are two possible scenarios; to fold the separate schools into the public school system and administer them equally, removing special status based on religion for the Catholic school board, or to retain the status quo and extend funding to all religion-based private schools. It's only fair.