Toronto Sun reporter Moira MacDonald interviewed me and other leaders of member groups of the One School System Network on our conference to defund tax-payer funded catholic schools in Ontario.  She reported on it in a Sunday column: “Catholic School Debate Too Spicy for Politicians”.  She quotes from me as follows:

Considering a provincial election is four months away, “we want to mobilize our supporters,” Justin Trottier, one of the conference organizers told me. “This is not a partisan activity … Ideally, we want to find supporters in all of the parties.”

The reporter agrees the current system with its Catholic public but separate schools open essentially only to Catholic teachers and students on the one hand and the secular public school system open to everyone without exception on the other, is fundamentally unfair. But she concludes this system works well. 

Unfortunately, that conclusion ignores the immense debt in our province certainly exacerbated by a doubling bureaucracy in education, the continued closing of both secular and catholic public schools, catholic schools shutting down libraries (while chapels stay open), catholic schools (subsidized by atheist tax payers) banning atheist literature, suspending students advocating for pro-choice at a sanctioned pro-life rally, bussing in students and allowing them to take time off school to attend an annual pro-life rally in Ottawa, prohibiting gay student clubs from forming under their chosen name of Gay-Straight Alliance, stopping a gay student from bringing his same sex partner to the prom, among examples of discrimination and waste that come immediately to mind.

If that’s what we consider a system that works, we are all in big trouble.