Religion and the Public Funding of Privately-managed Schools in Canada

• In Event: Policymaking at the Subnational Level

Abstract

Ever since the creation of the first public education systems in Western Europe, fights over the governance of education have been bitter and salient (Ansell and Lindvall 2013, 505). In particular, political actors have fought about the place of the private sector in education, and whether state funds should be used to support private schools. Governments in advanced democracies offered widely different answers to that question (OECD 2017, 11).
Interestingly, the public funding of private schools does not only vary across countries but also within countries. In Canada, five provinces have opted to fund private education and five provinces have not. The two most populous provinces of the country, Ontario and Québec, are on different sides of the divide. For each student, Québec’s privately-managed schools receive 60% of the average cost of a student in the public sector (Gouvernement du Québec 2019). In Ontario, the state offers no direct aid to private schools (Government of Ontario 2018).
This paper seeks to explain why Ontario and Québec made these policy choices. To do so, process tracing was used to map the causal path between the explanatory factors and the outcome for each case. The evidence used in the paper was collected using documentary analysis.
The main argument defended by the paper is that these policy outcomes are the result of the different balance of power between Catholicism and Protestantism in Ontario and Québec. In Ontario, where Protestantism was the dominant religion, the state quickly established itself as the authority in matters of education. In 1846, the Act for the Establishment and the Maintenance of Common Schools in Upper Canada created the role of the instruction superintendent, instituted school examinations, and introduced property taxes to fund the new schools (Government of the province of Canada 1846). Subsequent legislation also contributed further to the centralization of education. In 1871, the role of the superintendent was replaced by the Education Minister. In the same year, the grammar schools and academies were integrated into the public sector as high schools, and direct state aid to private schools was terminated (Manzer 2003, 92).
In Québec, where Catholicism was the dominant religion, the authority of state over education was contested. The Ministry of Instruction, created in 1867, was abolished in 1875 because of the pressure placed on the government by the church (Audet 1968). Education was placed under the authority of the Council of Public Instruction, which was separated into a Protestant and a Catholic committee, which were responsible for local denominational school districts. The development of public secondary education was slow, particularly for Catholic schools. The private collèges classiques continued to be the main secondary school option until the early 1960s (Manzer 2003, 92). In 1962, the Government of Québec launched the Parent Commission, which recommended the creation of the Ministry of Education, and the introduction of public secondary schools (Commission Parent 1963). However, the government also decided to guarantee the funding of the large private education sector through the Private Education Act in 1968 (Bezeau 1979).
This paper contributes to our knowledge of education politics in advanced democracies. It also highlights the influence of the Catholic and Protestant churches in shaping education systems in Canada.

Works cited

Government of the Province of Canada. 1846. Act for the Establishment and the Maintenance of Common Schools in Upper Canada.

Ansell, Ben and Johannes Lindvall. 2013. “The Political Origins of Primary Education Systems: Ideology, Institutions, and Interdenominational Conflict in an Era of Nation-Building,” American Political Science Review 107 (3): 505-522.

Audet, Louis-Philippe. 1968. « Le premier ministère de l’Instruction publique au Québec », Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 22 (2) : 171-222.

Bezeau, Lawrence M. 1979. “The Public Finance of Private Education in the Province of Québec,” Canadian Journal of Education 4 (2): 23-42.

Commission Parent. 1963. Commission royale d’enquête sur l’enseignement dans la province de Québec. Québec : Gouvernement du Québec.

Gouvernement de l’Ontario, Ministère de l’Éducation. 2018. Écoles privées élémentaires et secondaires. Online. http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/fre/general/elemsec/privsch/index.html

Gouvernement du Québec, éducation et enseignement supérieur. 2019. Écoles privées. Online. http://www.education.gouv.qc.ca/parents-et-tuteurs/ecoles-privees/ (consulted on January 15, 2019).

Manzer, Ronald A. 2003. Educational Regimes and Anglo-American Democracy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

OECD. 2017. School Choice and School Vouchers: An OECD Perspective. Online. http://www.oecd.org/education/School-choice-and-school-vouchers-an-OECD-perspective.pdf (consulted on January 15, 2019).

Author

• Anne Lachance, Queen's University