Taxes paid by Hundreds of Thousands of Catholics Not Considered ‘Public tax Dollars’
TORONTO, April 18, 2002 (LSN.ca) – Earl Manners, President Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF), in a release denounced a Catholic school’s refusal to allow a student’s homosexual prom date. Commenting on the situation Manners, writes, “why should any institution that receives public tax dollars be allowed to ignore basic rights and protections afforded to all citizens of Ontario?”
Manners calls for an end to allowing Catholics to support Catholic education through their education taxes, a right guaranteed in the Constitution. Apparently, education taxes collected from hundreds of thousands of Catholic taxpayers are no longer considered ‘public tax dollars’ by Manners and company. This increasingly heard argument against Catholic education funding appears to infer that Catholics are a lesser class of citizen and that, despite their massive involvement in all aspects of Ontario life, they are not part of the ‘state’.
Manners praised two provinces for removing the constitutional educational funding protection. “Both Quebec and Newfoundland-Labrador have recently addressed this problem by removing archaic constitutional arrangements. They have separated church and state when it comes to public funding of education. However, in Ontario, separating church and state has become an exercise in how the church can separate public tax dollars from the coffers of the state.”
Manners calls for the new Ontario Premier Ernie Eves to “immediately” repeal the education tax credit that allows parents who pay for public education through their taxes to receive tax credits for only a portion of their burdensome independent school costs. He also suggests the Ontario government follow “the example of Quebec and Newfoundland-Labrador and create a public education system in Ontario that separates once and for all, church and state.”
See the full release by the OSSTF: https://www.newswire.ca/releases/April2002/18/c5566.html