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Latest News
- 8 May 2012 Publicly funded Catholic schools -- A good idea in 2012?
- 6 May 2012 Catholic Education Week 2012 -- More equal than others since 1841
- 29 Feb 2012 Ontario’s Drummond Commission: Conducted in good faith?
- 16 Feb 2012 News Release: Constitutional Cop-Out: Constitution No Obstacle to Amalgamation of Ontario's Public and Catholic School Systems (PDF, Word)
- The Agenda with Steve Paikin: Episode on Catholic school funding, 7 Feb 2012 (see the interview and debate).
- Toronto woman files suit against Ontario to scale back Catholic school funding, Jan 2012
- Recent letters
About Us
OneSchoolSystem.org is a non-governmental human rights organization and education advocacy group seeking the amalgamation of Ontario, Canada's public and Catholic school systems into a single, secular school system for each official language.
The Ontario government currently funds four overlapping school systems: English public, English Catholic, French public, and French Catholic. Not only is this wasteful and inefficient, but the exclusivity of funding for Catholic religious schools gives rise to significant inequities between citizens of different faiths. Ontario's truly public school systems are open to all students and teachers without discrimination, while the publicly funded Catholic systems often deny admission to non-Catholic students and are essentially closed to non-Catholic teachers. We seek to eliminate religious discrimination in admissions and employment in all of Ontario's publicly funded schools while simultaneously ensuring better stewardship of the financial resources committed to the education of our children. A move to a single school system for each official language would achieve both aims.
Ontario's present day school system had its roots in the 19th century, when Ontarians could generally be classified as either Catholic or Protestant and segregation was seen as an convenient means to address the often acrimonious Anglo-Irish, French-English, and Catholic-Protestant divisions that marked the society of the day. Constitutional provisions notwithstanding, religiously segregated school systems like Ontario's have now been eliminated in Quebec (1997), Newfoundland and Labrador (1998), and Manitoba (1890).
Ontario is now the only province that funds the religious schools of the Catholic faith exclusively, a situation that led the United Nations Human Rights Committee to censure Canada for religious discrimination in 1999 and again in 2005.
We believe that now, in the 21st century, it is no longer necessary to segregate Ontario school children by faith. More importantly, the cost and consequences of that segregation are of a scope and scale that the province is no longer able to bear.
The immensity of the Ontario government's debt and deficits have brought us to the eve of what is expected to be an era of unprecedented austerity in government spending. Our truly essential programs, already inadequately funded in some cases, are expected to face even greater funding pressures as the province grapples with a rapidly deteriorating fiscal situation. It would be wrong to preserve funding for a non-essential like Catholic schools while allowing the quality of our truly essential services to suffer further decline. We hope that you agree.
The time for change is now.
The Ontario government currently funds four overlapping school systems: English public, English Catholic, French public, and French Catholic. Not only is this wasteful and inefficient, but the exclusivity of funding for Catholic religious schools gives rise to significant inequities between citizens of different faiths. Ontario's truly public school systems are open to all students and teachers without discrimination, while the publicly funded Catholic systems often deny admission to non-Catholic students and are essentially closed to non-Catholic teachers. We seek to eliminate religious discrimination in admissions and employment in all of Ontario's publicly funded schools while simultaneously ensuring better stewardship of the financial resources committed to the education of our children. A move to a single school system for each official language would achieve both aims.
Ontario's present day school system had its roots in the 19th century, when Ontarians could generally be classified as either Catholic or Protestant and segregation was seen as an convenient means to address the often acrimonious Anglo-Irish, French-English, and Catholic-Protestant divisions that marked the society of the day. Constitutional provisions notwithstanding, religiously segregated school systems like Ontario's have now been eliminated in Quebec (1997), Newfoundland and Labrador (1998), and Manitoba (1890).
Ontario is now the only province that funds the religious schools of the Catholic faith exclusively, a situation that led the United Nations Human Rights Committee to censure Canada for religious discrimination in 1999 and again in 2005.
We believe that now, in the 21st century, it is no longer necessary to segregate Ontario school children by faith. More importantly, the cost and consequences of that segregation are of a scope and scale that the province is no longer able to bear.
The immensity of the Ontario government's debt and deficits have brought us to the eve of what is expected to be an era of unprecedented austerity in government spending. Our truly essential programs, already inadequately funded in some cases, are expected to face even greater funding pressures as the province grapples with a rapidly deteriorating fiscal situation. It would be wrong to preserve funding for a non-essential like Catholic schools while allowing the quality of our truly essential services to suffer further decline. We hope that you agree.
The time for change is now.
