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Recent News:
- Phillip Blancher, Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry counties call to merge school systems, Toronto Star, The Morrisburg Leader, 2021-11-17.
- News Release, SDG calls for significant changes to education in rural Ontario, 2021-11-15.
- Peter Chow, Time To Merge The Ontario School Systems, Sault Online, 2019-12-29.
- Brian Lilley, Merge Ontario's Catholic and public school systems: Poll, Toronto Sun, 2019-12-08.
- Marcus Gee, Let's end publicly funded Catholic schools, Globe & Mail, 2019-11-01.
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 Catholic Ontarians and those of other faiths or no faith. 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 (in 1997), Newfoundland and Labrador (in 1998), and Manitoba (in 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 ($379 billion net debt, 41.7% net debt to GDP ratio, $13.2 billion/year interest on debt, 2020-21 budget plan) has 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 likely to face even greater funding pressures going forward. It is wrong to preserve funding for a non-essential like Catholic schools while allowing the quality of our truly essential services to suffer further decline. It is wrong to preserve non-fundamental denominational school "rights" when the corollary of doing so is to show contempt for the fundamental equality rights of the non-privileged majority. 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 Catholic Ontarians and those of other faiths or no faith. 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 (in 1997), Newfoundland and Labrador (in 1998), and Manitoba (in 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 ($379 billion net debt, 41.7% net debt to GDP ratio, $13.2 billion/year interest on debt, 2020-21 budget plan) has 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 likely to face even greater funding pressures going forward. It is wrong to preserve funding for a non-essential like Catholic schools while allowing the quality of our truly essential services to suffer further decline. It is wrong to preserve non-fundamental denominational school "rights" when the corollary of doing so is to show contempt for the fundamental equality rights of the non-privileged majority. We hope that you agree.
The time for change is now.
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How has the public funding of Catholic schools in Ontario negatively affected you? You might be surprised by the implications for you and for all other Ontarians. Visit this page to find out more and then tell us your story.
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