While the NDP Socialist caucus supports such a system, the rest of the party is sadly on the wrong side of this issue. The Ontario Greens, however, are the only party in Ontario in favour of this system. Is it any surprise than the NDP is bleeding voters to the Greens?
At least this issue is back on the radar. There are two choices here. One is to extend state funding to all religious schools, the other idea- and the more appropriate of the two- is to eliminate state funding for the Catholic board. Such a move eliminates segregation within the school system and is necessary to ensure that separation of church and state.
This issue is already causing havoc within the Liberal Party:
The issue surfaced at Queen's Park last week when backbench Liberal MPP Peter Fonseca introduced a motion opposing "any attempt to take public money and hand it over to private schools."
Fonseca says his motion was motivated in part by a desire to smoke out Tory on the issue.
If so, it backfired by roiling some of Fonseca's Liberal colleagues – especially those representing ridings with large numbers of children in Jewish, Muslim or Christian Fundamentalist schools. They have been trying to soften the Liberals' stand on funding of religious schools and saw Fonseca's motion as, in the words of one, "a sharp stick in the eye."
Embarrassingly for Fonseca, only half-a-dozen Liberal MPPs showed up for the vote on his motion, which was defeated.
One of the absent Liberals was Mario Racco, whose Thornhill riding is about 30 per cent Jewish. When asked by a Jewish constituent where he stood on the motion, Racco emailed back: "I do not understand why Peter Fonseca would introduce such a resolution, but it got the result it deserved."
The sooner that state funding for faith-based schooling is eliminated, the better. Then, and only then, can we have a school system capable of unifying youth and eliminating religious stereotyping and mistrust. The separation of church and state is a long-standing political tradition, and one that Ontarians must ensure comes to being in their province. It wasn't a problem for Quebec and Newfoundland...it's time that Ontario caught on.
1 comment:
In my view the best way to help communities understand each other is to have them mingle through the school system. A lot of small communities with two schools end up losing both because the Catholic school demands busing to a school in another town - losing such societal anchors only accelerates the demise of such communities.
(As a Catholic myself) I think Catholic school funding should be frozen at current levels so that pupils in the system continue but new pupils be directed to a general school - the important thing being that no funding is cut so that integrated schools receive more funding to expand in a coherent way.
Post a Comment