Il Sait Porter L’Étoile De David? Religious Schooling and the Constitution

Abstract:     
In the runnup to the 2007 Ontario election campaign, Progressive Conservative leader John Tory announced his support for public funding of faith-based schools. The policy was articulated in a number of ways, requiring either full association of those schools with existing public school boards or full accountability of those independently managed schools to the Ministry of Education. This policy platform has, in turn, resurrected one of the most venerable, and most contentious, issues in all of Ontario’s constitutional history - that of denominational schooling. No discussion of faith-based schools can omit the fact that Ontario’s educational environment contains a secular public system and a publicly funded Roman Catholic system, but no public funding for any other religious schools.

Keywords: constitution of Canada, denominational schools

Accepted Paper Series