The year is 2024. Why am I still paying for Catholic Schools?
I'm a Jew in Ontario, and for some unhinged reason my taxes fund this.
It is truly a matter of absurdity that we’ve reached this point. The York Catholic District School Board soft-launching a ban on Pride flags is just another shameful act in Ontario’s long-running provincial embarrassment. How could anyone seriously claim this is an exception and not the rule, after countless stories exactly like this?
Last November, the Waterloo Catholic District School Board took books with LGBTQ characters off the shelves of school libraries. All of these books were perfectly age-appropriate, and indeed they were from a province-wide program specifically for encouraging kids to read books with diverse stories.
Further back in May, Trustee Natalia Benoit of the Niagara Catholic District School Board compares the Pride flag to the flag of Nazi Germany. As a bisexual Jew, it’s honestly impossible to put into words the sheer number of ways in which Ms. Benoit has offended not only my dignity, but in addition, my sanity.
Until January last year, Ontario’s Catholic school boards used the Fully Alive curriculum published by Pearson Canada, which said that only straight people should marry or have children, and that trans people should suppress their authentic selves. Is the replacement curriculum even slightly more respectful to queer kids?
Of course not! The replacement curriculum for Ontario Catholic boards, developed by the Institute for Catholic Education for Fall 2024, preaches the exact same queerphobic bile to impressionable young children as early as Grade 1.
No mental or physical health experts contribute to the curriculum, but the Assembly of Catholic Bishops of Ontario gets to pencil in anything they want. The ICE does not care to provide a defence, because they see nothing wrong with the anti-queer hatred they spew.
Undeniably, this pathetic tradition has become Ontario’s very own peculiar institution. Catholic schools are Ontario’s global embarrassment, a stain on our reputation even the United Nations has slammed us for.
The year is 2024 and we ostensibly live in a free society with equal rights for all Canadians. So, why in the ever-loving hell are we still funding this insanity with government money?
Apologetics for Ontario’s public funding Catholic school boards mainly break down into two categories. There are the moral arguments, claiming that somehow this discriminatory system is ethically sound, either beneficial or necessary or both.
After those arguments falter, there are the practical arguments, conceding that the system is discriminatory yet offering excuses for why it cannot be fixed. Let us tackle the moral and practical arguments in turn.
Frequently, supporters of the Catholic system state that even non-Catholic families choose their schools over secular public schools due to nebulous claims of being higher quality. Thus, they justify the discrimination by implying it provides a better upbringing.
First, this reasoning simply is not borne out by fact. Both Catholic and secular public schools in Ontario have been trending upwards on EQAO assessments. Second, considering the open hostility towards queer students, I suspect that those kids don’t find blatant bigotry conductive to their learning, or their general well-being.
Next, Catholic system advocates will claim that non-Catholics don’t have to fund the system, as Ontarians can choose whether their property taxes go to the secular or Catholic boards. This is an outright lie.
The Ministry of Education pools tax revenue to fund every board on a per-student basis. It does not matter whether you designate secular or Catholic on your property taxes, the Government of Ontario steals our money from general revenue to fund Catholic schools.
What is the moral justification for taking the money of Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddists, Hindus, Indigenous peoples, atheists, and anyone else with a different belief system, to fund a Catholic system openly hostile to our identities?
At the same time as we pay with our tax dollars for Catholics to have a separate school system, Jews have to pay the following tuition costs out of pocket if we want our own children to get the same. For the sake of perspective on these numbers, the cost of undergraduate tuition at the University of Toronto for Arts and Science programs is $6,100/year.
At Associated Hebrew Schools in Toronto, JK starts at $14,685/year and by Grade 8 ends at $18,950/year. At Bialik Hebrew Day School, annual tuition for all grades is $16,500 with a capital levy of $1,375. At Robbins Hebrew Academy, kindergarten is $17,700/year and Grades 1-8 are at $19,500/year.
At Leo Baeck Day School, the flat JK-Grade 8 rate is $16,910/year, with a capital levy of $6,500 payable either over five years, or discounted 25% if upfront. In addition, Leo Baeck requires your family to be paying for membership at a synagogue, and charges a $1,000 tax if you are unaffiliated or an atheist Jew.
And TanenbaumCHAT, the high school they all feed into, the largest private school in Canada? Their annual tuition is $22,725 per year, nearly four times the cost of Ontario’s most prestigious university.
So, while Mayor of Vaughan and former Ontario Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca was campaigning on supporting Catholic schools, he got to send his children to a Catholic school for free with my Jewish tax dollars, while using the money he saved to build a very nice and very illegal backyard pool.
Meanwhile, Jewish parents spent tens of thousands of dollars, as a result entering their fifties and sixties with very little saved for retirement. All so we can have the same privilege that Catholic families get for free. This is grotesque.
There is no moral justification for the existence of public funded Catholic schools. Let us now move on to the meritless arguments that resolving this injustice is somehow impractical.
The practical opposition claims it is politically costly to make such a change, based on John Tory’s unpopular proposal in 2007. This willfully ignores that John Tory proposed giving taxpayer funding to all religious schools, something offensive to modern secular sensibilities.
The public support for a secular school system is indeed why Ontario now has secular public boards, and not Protestant public boards as we did for the first hundred years of Canadian history. Those who support the Catholic public system do not even represent a clean majority of Catholics who live in Ontario.
When it comes to political calculations, there is the massive population of non-Catholics who the system hurts, and the pro-equality Catholics who recognize the injustice. Collectively, they clearly outweigh the limited subset of Catholics who choose to accept the benefits of an unjust system.
So, if the system is immoral, and if there is wide public support for dismantling the unjust system, the final argument that the apologists rely on is to say that it’s part of Canada’s Constitution, and constitutional amendments are too difficult, and that it’s not the right time, and there are other more important things to spend the effort on.
Well, more important to them perhaps. This issue is pretty important to me. Kathleen Wynne is a friend of mine, and she once told me something over half a decade ago that’s stuck with me. She said to me: “Jake, when they say not now, they really mean never.”
Even if it were a difficult task, and hold the phone on that for a moment, it’s still a task that needs to be done. To rectify this injustice, that has perpetuated since Confederation, is what honour and decency demand of us as human beings. Luckily it is a far more trivial task than opponents would suggest.
The requirement for constitutional amendments in Canada to be passed under the 7/50 Rule (seven of ten provincial legislatures representing more than fifty percent of the population) is only for Canada-wide amendments.
Under Section 43 of the Constitution Act, 1982, if an amendment will only apply to a single province, it only needs to be passed by that province’s legislature, as well as both the House of Commons and the Senate. Section 47 further states that if the Senate goes 180 days without passing the amendment, the House can vote again and bypass them.
Using a S. 43 amendment, any province can remove the requirement to fund Catholic schools that Section 93 of the Constitution Act, 1867 forces. This is not merely a hypothetical, it has already happened.
In Quebec, S. 93 was repealed with the approval of Parliament in 1997, and Newfoundland followed quickly by 1998. Ontario, Alberta, and Saskatchewan are the only three provinces still bound by S. 93, and we can resolve that at any time.
Ontario can use the exact same wording Quebec used to repeal and replace S. 93 with S. 93A, and lobby the Federal government of the day to either support it freely, or bargain for that approval through typical political horse-dealing. We would end up with two systems as Quebec does, one English secular and one French secular.
This would require nothing more than a majority vote at Queen’s Park and another majority vote on Parliament Hill. We see the injustice of this system, we see that it is easily resolved, and we see that other provinces already have. There are no more excuses left to offer.
The best time to stop funding Catholic schools in Ontario was decades ago. The second-best time is now. What the hell are we waiting for?