Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Friday, August 24, 2007

My, What a Hypocrite Is He!

It's getting on there, to election time and electioneering is going full swing. Our current premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty has already proven more than adequately that he is a flaming hypocrite. One of the major promises enshrined in his original platform for election was that there would be no increase in taxes when he became premier of this province. Yet he had the unmitigated gall to re-introduce a truly regressive tax - the re-institution of health care premiums.

Now he's at it again. Making promises. While John Tory claims that if elected he would finally assent to providing provincial funding to faith-based private schools - extending funding in complete fairness where now only Roman Catholic schools are funded from taxes, along with the public school system, old Dalton now claims that the funding of other religious schools would be divisive and unfair.

This from one whose own education, that of his siblings, his wife and his own children, took place in a religious setting, in a separate school system. He defends the ongoing funding of Catholic separate schools, but denies the contradiction in refusing to fund other religious-based separate schools. The monopoly to funding permitted Catholic schools is defended on the basis of its being enshrined in law.

McGuinty claims that for comprehensive social cohesion there's nothing quite like public schools where all children of all backgrounds and faiths can come together and learn together, equals among equals. Absent Catholic children whom provincial law has enshrined as a privileged group. He's a devout Catholic himself, after all. His wife teaches in the separate school system. So it's hands-off.

Yet laws can be changed. It's been done in several other provinces. And it's time that funding for Catholic schools out of general tax funds be eliminated. Either that, or be fair and fund all faith-based separate schools, with the proviso that they incorporate in their curriculum Ontario standards for education. In that way, McGuinty would prove himself to be premier of all the people.

On the other hand, to do complete justice to the equal schooling in a secular democratic society of all children from whatever their economic, social, ethnic and religious backgrounds for complete inclusivity and fairness, do away with taxpayer-funded private schools altogether.

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