Religious Schools Minefield Redux

Hate to say I told you so.

This is not a headline that John Tory’s Ontario Progressive Conservatives wanted to see anytime during the election-campaign-that-hasn’t-quite-officially-started-yet.

And following that minefield misstep, a round of sniper fire, some of it coming from Tory’s own side.

UPDATE: Sue Kelley says the Liberals might have rescued John Tory from further explosions over the coming days. If so, and if it was by design, it might have been a growing recognition that neither side can last very long in this particular field without setting off another mine. For example, there’s only so many times the Premier can successfully deflect questions about his and his family’s own educations in fully-funded faith-based schools.

Or the rescue might have been a boneheaded strategic error.

The election starts on Monday, by the way…

Harper and McGuinty: Strange Bedfellows?

In May of last year – several months after his election victory, following a number of well-publicized meetings with Quebec Premier Jean Charest, and amid much eyebrow-raising over his apparent snubbing of the government of Canada’s largest province – Prime Minister Stephen Harper finally met face-to-face with Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty.

Of course, the way he did it raised some eyebrows just a little bit higher.

Harper met McGuinty for less than an hour in a Toronto hotel room, allowed no media to witness even a handshake, made no public statement following the encounter, and immediately headed next door to a provincial Conservative fundraising dinner where he introduced Ontario PC leader John Tory as “the next premier of Ontario.”

If that wasn’t clear enough, he added: “Ontario needs John Tory because a strong Canada needs a strong Ontario and because John Tory is a nation builder.”

It was a notable moment. Canadian Prime Ministers seldom involve themselves in provincial politics in such a blatantly partisan way.

Also, as a student of Canadian history, Harper should have known he was backing the wrong horse.

The reason? More often than not, when they get to make an electoral choice, Ontarians like to see different parties in power on Parliament Hill and at Queen’s Park.

For about 85 per cent (52.5 years) of the 62 years since the Second World War (when Liberal Mackenzie King was Prime Minister and Progressive Conservative George Drew was Ontario Premier), different parties have been in power federally and provincially. If you take out the six-year-long anomaly when John Diefenbaker’s and Leslie Frost’s respective PC parties governed at the same time, that statistic climbs to 94 per cent.

The Liberal Pearson / Trudeau years in Ottawa coincided with the PC Robarts / Davis years in Ontario. Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney negotiated constitutional accords with Liberal Premier David Peterson and NDP Premier Bob Rae. And as Jean Chrétien painted Ontario Liberal red in consecutive federal elections, Mike Harris painted the same map Tory blue in consecutive provincial votes.

In 17 post-War Ontario elections, only twice have voters elected a Premier from the same party as the sitting Prime Minister.

The last time, of course, was the most recent provincial election, in 2003, when McGuinty took power in the dying days of Jean Chrétien’s watch.

The statistics for federal elections are almost as lopsided. Fourteen out of the past twenty Canada-wide votes have been won by a different party than the sitting Ontario Premier’s.

So, with a Conservative government in power in Ottawa at the moment, the historical odds would seem to be in the Liberals’ favor for the upcoming provincial vote.

And despite his public comments to the contrary, with a federal election likely in the near future, you’d imagine that Stephen Harper would take a little bit of satisfaction away from a Dalton McGuinty re-election.

The Religious Education Minefield

Want to liven up a boring dinner party?

Or maybe destroy it entirely?

Here’s what you can do:

Bring the conversation around to politics. Or religion. Or both, if you’re feeling particularly reckless.

The Ontario election campaign doesn’t officially begin until next week, but the election date was announced months ago. Unofficial campaigning has been ongoing ever since.

Until recently, the unofficial campaign was as boring as a bad dinner party.

Then along came… politics and religion: The former in the form of polls showing a tight race between Dalton McGuinty’s governing Liberals and John Tory’s opposition Progressive Conservatives, and the possibility of a minority government.

And the latter in the form of an issue that has the potential to dominate the campaign:

The Tories’ proposal to extend public funding to all faith-based schools.

On one level, this doesn’t seem as if it would be all that controversial. With the exception of the four Atlantic provinces, every province in the country – Ontario included – funds religious schools to some extent.

But Ontario is the only province that funds schools of only one religious group and no other.

In Ontario, about two-thirds of school-age children attend mainstream public schools. Among those who don’t, more than 90 per cent attend separate Roman Catholic schools, which are fully funded by the province. Other faith-based schools receive no provincial funding at all. Parents who wish to send their kids to these schools must pay substantial tuition fees.

The funding issue was a factor in the 2003 election campaign, when the Liberal Party promised to repeal the governing Conservatives’ Equity in Education Act, which provided a modest tax credit to parents who sent their kids to private schools. Because it was available to parents of any private-school students – not simply religious schools – McGuinty successfully and credibly painted this credit as a tax break for the rich, and retroactively canceled it shortly after he took power.

John Tory’s plan is different from the previous Conservative policy. It proposes to bring non-Catholic faith-based schools into the public system, and make those schools accountable to the Ministry of Education, rather than simply giving tax breaks to parents.

Putting aside the question of what is good or bad education policy (I will return to that question on this blog in the days ahead), the new Tory plan may prove more difficult for the Liberals to fight than the old one.

Why? Well, it’s a battleground that is full of political minefields: religion, multiculturalism, historical grievances and prejudices… one wrong step and you risk setting off an explosion you can’t control.

And for the Liberals, the risk is compounded by the fact that the battle takes place right on the turf of part of their traditional base – what some politicians have inelegantly called “the ethnic vote”.

For example, when Dalton McGuinty said the Tory proposal would put the “social cohesion” of Ontario at risk, Reuven Bulka, the prominent Ottawa rabbi and talk-show host – who happens to be the Premier’s friend and neighbor – accused McGuinty of “taking the road of divisiveness”.

The debate also risks dividing the Liberal caucus – as the Toronto Star’s Ian Urquhart described a few months back – and putting several of the Liberals’ own seats at risk.

Finally, the more the Liberals attack the Tory proposal, the more they will face questions about their own position supporting the status quo – funding one religion’s schools to the exclusion of others (a position they share with the NDP).

By attacking a proposal to fund non-Catholic faith-based schools, while defending the funding of Catholic schools, the Premier has already exposed himself to charges of hypocrisy and cynicism.

In the meantime, a growing number of public school boards have voted in favor of motions to eliminate Catholic school boards entirely, a position supported by the provincial Green Party, and probably a growing number of citizens in an increasingly secular age.

The Conservatives, too, need to walk carefully through this minefield. As my colleague Sue Kelley points out in her blog, Tory’s proposal risks alienating the party’s rural base, some of whom are still not happy with Bill Davis’s surprise decision to extend full funding to Catholic schools two decades ago. Some Conservatives may end up sitting on their hands during this campaign.

In fact, one prominent conservative activist, who will be doing just that, told me that “John Tory didn’t learn from Bill Davis’s mistakes” on the faith-based funding issue.

This could be one lively dinner party. With lots of broken plates at the end.

For a comprehensive overview of this issue, have a listen to a podcast of a show I produced a few months back.

Separate School Funding

If I wanted to change the law governing school funding in Ontario, the first thing I would do is find out when Dalton McGuinty does his gardening.

The Premier occasionally must pick vegetables, mow the lawn and rake leaves, no?

Or maybe he’s otherwise occupied with the endless issues that occupy the leader of Ontario.

On September 11, 2005, for example, there was no time for mucking about in the yard.

That day, after months of passionate debate over the proposed introduction of sharia law in Ontario, the Premier announced the province’s decision.

McGuinty not only ruled out the use of sharia – or Islamic law – in arbitrating family-law disputes in Ontario, but also proclaimed an end to all religious arbitration in this province.

For 14 years, arbitrations conducted by Jewish and Christian religious courts – over subjects such as divorces and financial disagreements – were legally binding in Ontario. The Premier’s decision put an end to that arrangement.

Some said the government violated that most basic rule of public policy: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. These courts had operated for years without complaint. Others said it was a bold decision on the Premier’s part, a strong defense of the separation of church (or mosque, or synagogue) and state.

One thing about the decision is certain: It was internally consistent. It’s hard to justify denying religious arbitration to one group while maintaining it for others.

But that consistency threw into sharp relief the discrepancies of another policy – one that’s had a practical effect on the lives of more Ontarians over a much longer period of time: The public funding of Roman Catholic primary and secondary education to the exclusion of all other religions and cultures.

While Ontario parents can send their children to Catholic schools that are fully funded by the government, parents who send their kids to equivalent schools of other denominations and religions must spend thousands of dollars a year out of their own pockets.

Of course, the special status of Ontario’s Catholic schools is a result of nothing less than the creation of our country, forged in compromise that included a guarantee of religious education for the Catholic minority in Upper Canada and the Protestant one in Lower Canada.

Some argue the spirit of that 19th century constitutional compromise was about safeguarding minority – not simply Catholic – rights. Others say it is an anachronism and that no group should still get public funds for religious education. But neither argument has had much success in changing the status quo on education funding, although in an election year, the issue is once again bubbling up at Queen’s Park.

A decade ago, Arieh Waldman, a Torontonian whose kids were Jewish day school students, took the issue all the way to the United Nations Human Rights Committee. In its non-binding 1999 decision, the UN committee ruled that while Ontario wasn’t obliged to fund religious schools at all, it couldn’t pick and choose among religions.

A few years later, the Conservative government introduced the Equity in Education Act, which gave tax breaks to parents of private-school students.

Those tax breaks didn’t last long. Because they were available to parents of any private-school students – not simply religious schools – it was politically easy, and maybe partially accurate, for opponents to paint them as tax breaks for the rich.

When McGuinty’s Liberals took power in 2003, one of their first acts was to kill the Equity in Education Act. Since then, they have shown no inclination to propose an alternative to the status quo.

Which brings us back to Dalton McGuinty’s gardening habits.

Throughout the ‘70s and early ‘80s, activists pressed the Ontario government to extend full funding of Catholic education beyond grade ten. Premier Bill Davis refused until 1984, shortly before his retirement, when he unexpectedly reversed course on the issue.

Years later, Davis explained his sudden turnaround as “a matter of conscience” He said his mind changed when a group of Brampton Catholic students approached him as he worked on his front lawn. He couldn’t give them a good-conscience explanation why they had to pay tuition in their late high school years, while public-school students did not.

So here’s what I would do if I wanted to get a new hearing from the government on this issue:

a) Find out when Dalton McGuinty does his gardening.

b) Send off my kids for a friendly chat.