Catholic schools in Canada

Previously, a combination of charitable contributions from the members of a particular religious body, supplemented with tuition fees paid by the parents of the students, had been the method of financing a school.

In fact, when the Fathers of Confederation came from New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Canada East, and Canada West to meet in Charlottetown and Quebec, they quickly concluded, in the words of one of the Fathers, Sir Charles Tupper, that "Without this guarantee for the rights of minorities being embodied in that new constitution, we should have been unable to obtain any Confederation whatever.

He believed it was part of the Government's mandate to be a social agency forming children in a uniform, common, Protestant culture, regardless of their individual family backgrounds.

[1] Yet, Catholic schools form the single largest system in Canada offering education with a religious component.

[7] In 1999, the United Nations Human Rights Committee determined that Canada was in violation of article 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, because Ontario's Ministry of Education discriminates against non-Catholics by continuing to publicly fund separate Catholic schools, but not those of any other religious groups.

Religion courses at the time, while dealing with Theology and Church history, were more pastoral in nature, especially in elementary schools.

The changes of 1998 re-organized school boards along linguistic lines – English and French – and reduced their number, among other things.

[12] As a part of the Scott Act, rural Catholic schools gained the same rights as those in urban areas.

The minister of Education did not need to be involved, and there were no mandatory minimums for class sizes, or proof of financial stability required.

Although the majority of Catholic students still joined labour forces after elementary, high school gave those who wanted it additional education for careers in business or theology.

In 1928, the case made it to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (the highest court in the British Empire) and they ruled in favour of the province.

They did not need to gain the same education as public school teachers because of the BNA Act, which stated that "nothing in any such [provincial] law [relative to education] shall prejudicially affect any right or privilege with respect to denominational schools which any class of persons have by law in the Province at the Union."

Over the next 20 years, the issue was debated back and forth with the decision on 2 November 1907 by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council to uphold that Catholic teachers needed certification.

Older Irish Catholics disliked them for this reason, but they were chosen because they were the most updated texts, and would be the most useful for students going to secondary and post-secondary institutions.

The Bishop of London, Ontario, Michael Francis Fallon, exemplifies the bilingual school tensions within the Catholic Church.

This was not only difficult because of the cultural divide, but also because teachers in these smaller counties were often not bilingual, and so teaching English and French was hard.

This was changed by Archbishop Neil McNeil, who argued that there was a constitutional right to grants and government funding for grades 11, 12, and 13 too.

After a terrible by-election in December 1936, Hepburn repealed the amendments because he was afraid of repercussions from the Protestant majority of the province.

With a larger Catholic population, the provincial government started to investigate public funding opportunities.

[38] In 1969, county and district school boards replaced the local ones, which made distributing public funds far easier and more efficient.

[38] In the 1971 provincial election, Conservative Premier William Davis did not support funding, while the Liberal and New Democratic candidates did.

It was written by the Ontario Elementary Catholic Teachers' Association, which put pressure on Davis to make a final decision.

The Bill went through a judicial ruling to ensure that it was consistent with the Constitution of Canada and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The prairies were a popular settlement area for new immigrants because it offered copious amounts of land and job opportunities as farmers.

[52] Within a twenty-year period (1900 to 1920), the development of immigrant Catholic churches across Canada grew at a severely fast rate.

The bilingual school conflict between Ontarian English and French Catholics occurred primarily in Ottawa.

[54] Tensions rose in 1868, when Archbishop John Joseph Lynch from Toronto argued that the Anglo Franco-Catholic problem in Ottawa was caused by the location.

[56] Taschereau explained that when the divide was created, most Catholics in Ottawa were French, and so it was compartmentalized to the Ecclesiastical Province of Quebec.

Conservative Premier James Whitney enacted this recommendation in his policy statement: "... instruction in English shall commence at once upon a child entering school, the use of French as the language of instruction and of communication to vary according to local conditions upon the report of the supervising inspector, but in no case to continues beyond the end of the first form."

School prayer was removed and the growing diversity in urban Ontario was creating a more secular environment.