@saintjohnXXlll-Catholic parents will have to do what all the other religious parents had to do; pay for it themselves. Why do you think it’s fair that other parents have to subsidize your Catholic education while they have to pay out of pocket to send their children to religious school. Why do you think Catholics alone deserve free education when all other religions have to pay for education for their children? What is not clear about that?
This article supplies some information. It’s Canada, after all.
The roots of discord over religious schools
thestar.com/news/insight/2007/09/22/the_roots_of_discord_over_religious_schools.html
These are some excerpts from the article.
“… Irish beggars are to be met everywhere, and they are as ignorant and vicious as they are poor. They are lazy, improvident and unthankful; they fill our poorhouses and our prisons, and are as brutish in their superstition as Hindoos.” – Newspaper editor George Brown
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That reality was a grim one if you were Catholic in the Ontario of the 19th century, especially in York, as Toronto was then called.
Known as the “Belfast of North America,” the city was populated mainly by Northern Irish and Scottish Protestants, who were appalled by the arrival of thousands of Irish Catholics forced out of Southern Ireland during the Great Famine of 1845 to 1849.
The quote at the beginning of the article, from the Globe newspaper, was typical of the unrelenting bigotry against the impoverished “Papist” immigrants, their large families and peasant ways, their “Mick superstitions” and, perhaps worst of all, lack of loyalty to the British Crown.
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In 1841, the Act of Union had combined Ontario and Quebec into the United Province of Canada, with one legislative assembly. Half the members were French-speaking Catholics.
Due solely to their support, two acts were passed, in 1855 and 1863, creating the basis for today’s separate system.
They gave Ontario’s religious minority the right to direct their property taxes to the separate schools and guaranteed Catholic trustees the same powers as their public system counterparts.
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Section 93 of the BNA (subsequently known as the 1867 Constitution Act) would deal only with Ontario’s and Quebec’s religious minorities, and would be unrepealable. It gave them the constitutional right to separate school systems, though leaving it up to the provinces to work out the funding.
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In 1936, Liberal Premier Mitch Hepburn, feeling disposed to do something, as he put it, for “those who eat fish on Friday,” introduced a bill, similar to Quebec’s, compelling corporations and public utilities to direct 40 per cent of their taxes to separate schools.
In a December by-election in East Hastings that year, anti-Catholic protests cost the Liberals a seat. The following year, Hepburn repealed the bill.
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With Canada’s changing demographic face, a challenge was sooner or later inevitable. In 1996, a case before the Supreme Court argued that Catholic-only school funding contravened the 1982 Charter of Rights, which guarantees equal treatment for all, regardless of religion.
The court ruled against the application. It noted that the founders of the nation had used Section 93 of the 1867 Constitution act to make Confederation possible between two distinct groups, Protestants and Catholics.
