Depriving Parents of their Constitutional Rights
TORONTO – Last week, we published two articles on education, in Ontario. They were meant to be introductory to several Corriere is researching and writing focused on language, religion and Constitutional rights of parents. The public reaction was explosive, to say the least. Ministry officials and school boards concerned must not have expected anything of the kind. We are still in the middle of the World Cup soccer tournament.
What irony. The sport that unites the world is serving to stoke the embers of national (divisive and exclusive) identity. Soccer and its governing body, FIFA, have taken command of those National identities and the loyalties flowing from them. The big show is about “the sport”, but despite protestations to the contrary, “tribalism” determines who we are, for whom we cheer, or for whom we weep.
Such is human nature that our “adversaries” would never believe us if we stated differently. Twenty years ago, when I was still an MP in Canada’s House of Commons, the Prime Minister of the day, probably trying to quell ever-present sovereignty, separatist, secessionist movements resurfacing in Quebec, presented a Motion in the House to the effect that the “Quebecois” constituted a nation, from a cultural/linguistic sociological perspective, within Canada’s federation. If it had any positive effect, it was decidedly short term.
As goes the saying, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Kinder souls may disagree, but with that Motion, he unwittingly opened the doors to re-defining the historic Compromise (the BNA Act, 1867, reimagined as the Constitution Act, 1982) that became our Constitution, without a formal debate on the matter. The federal Bloc Quebecois and its provincial counterpart, the Parti Quebecois are both enjoying renewed vigour, going into a provincial election.
In Quebec, everything is interpreted though a language lens – not necessarily through a “national” interest lens. May God help those who disagree.
Other provinces, Alberta and British Columbia may appear more nuanced but are flexing their “autonomous muscles” on infrastructure, property improvement, local governance (Indigenous Rights), the concept of ownership, “national investments” and de facto powers of veto over federal authority in their geographical authority. Aboriginal nations are no less insistent.
Creation of Nation-States is fraught with risk – as is their maintenance. Without that Compromise on religion and language, the Canada [of 1867] as we have come to know it would have been absorbed by an aggressive foreign power to the South or destroyed by internal linguistic and religious tensions. Sound familiar?
Hence, under the BNA Act, the Constitutional Act, the Charter of Rights, Human Rights Code and the preamble to all [Ontario] Legislation, Elementary and Secondary Education is recognized as being in the singular purview of the provinces. These, in their turn, must guarantee the local rights of the Majesty’s Separate School (in Ontario, Catholic) subjects through their school board trustees.
Simply and bluntly put, Catholic school systems belong, as a constitutional right, to Catholic taxpayers, a right earned as a pre-condition for their support in the creation of Canada, in 1867 and what followed afterward. Not to teachers, not their Unions, not to any political associations, not to lobby groups. Not even to the provincial government.
Education and language may be curriculum issues of provincial public policy but operational matters respecting religion (tenets, rites and culture) must be informed via the trilogy of consultation Home, Parish and School.
Yet the government saw fit to cancel a fifty-year old elementary school program to “cut costs” – absent consultation with the above. It has now started to “walk back” the decision.
(Tomorrow, part II)
