Canadian Province Outpaces States in School Reform

There is one big difference and one big similarity between Canadian and U.S. public school systems and ideologies. The big difference goes back to Canada's Constitution Act of 1867 (Sec. 93). As part of the grand bargain of confederation, Ontario agreed to fund Catholic schools in its province and Quebec agreed to fund Protestant schools in its province. So, to that extent, Canada has a long history of public pluralism in education.

The big similarity between Canada and the United States shows up in the arguments made by those in Ontario who support public funding only for the traditional, government-run schools but not for evangelical, Jewish, Muslim, and other religious schools. Consider the following comments from Toronto's The Globe and Mail (May 11, 2001): 'Schools are where young people of different classes, nationalities, and faiths come together as Canadians.' 'If Ontario were to fully fund all religious schools, the province would soon have many more of them. . . . The result would be a balkanized school system and, in time, a balkanized society.' 'Today, at a time when Canada is absorbing more immigrants per capita than any other nation, the melting-pot function of the public school is even more important.'

The undisguised bias of these words is clear: religious schools can't help immigrants become Canadian; religious schooling divides rather than helps unite society; Canadians can't come together as Canadians except by putting their religious distinctives aside. Sound familiar? The same words flew off the lips of American congressmen and off the editorial pages of our major newspapers as recently as when President Bush proposed the slightest, most innocent voucher proposal for poor students trapped in publicly funded schools that failed them miserably for three straight years.

However, unlike the very small and very few local experiments in choice for an extremely small number of students in the U.S., Ontario's government decided in May that it would grant a tax credit to parents who pay private-school tuition. The credit starts out small, but by 2006, it will amount to 50 percent of tuition up to a maximum credit of $3,500. This is a province-wide law that holds for any tuition-paying parent.

Now, one might ask, how did this law come to pass? It did so because a large and influential coalition, led by the Ontario Alliance of Christian School Societies and the Canadian Jewish Congress cooperated in galvanizing a grassroots campaign that met with the sympathies of Ontario's finance minister Jim Flaherty, who in turn helped to convince Premier Mike Harris. Does that sound like balkanization to you? To the contrary, it is the very picture of multi-religious civic cooperation in a cause that will make for an even warmer, more open welcome to a diverse range of immigrants to Canada.

Before celebrating too effusively, however, we must take note that the movement in the direction of educational pluralism is not uniform across Canada. Not long ago, Quebec and Newfoundland took steps in the opposite direction. Not only did they refuse to fund a more diverse range of schools, they reversed the pattern established with the 1867 federation agreement and eliminated state funding for Catholic schools. From one editorial point of view, in The Globe and Mail, this represents true progress, because it is unfair for a provincial government to fund Catholic or Protestant schools but not other religious schools. John Ibbitson, however, also writing in The Globe and Mail (May 11), takes a different tack. Either 'no religious group should be financed or all should be,' he agrees. 'And perhaps all is better than none. Despite a century of supposed secularization, 21st-century Canadians, when given freedom of choice, often reject the humanist assumptions of the elites and embrace their old-time religion. Does the state then have a right to insist that only secular schools may receive tax dollars?'

No, the state does not have that right, so movement in the direction of genuine pluralism is the way to go. The half-tuition tax credit that Ontario is instituting still does not do justice to all citizens, any more than some of the partial funding schemes in Canada's western provinces do full justice to citizens there. Nevertheless, Ontario's move does expand public recognition and support of parental responsibility for the education of their children and of the diverse faiths by which families and communities live. To ignore that diversity and to assume that Canadian unity (or American unity) can be established and maintained on some non-religious basis is a serious mistake. Only full and equal funding for all children in schools of choice will do justice to Canadian citizens and give them reason to want to deepen the bond of civic trust they have with other citizens who receive the same treatment.

—The Editor