Bus ads in Winnipeg decry Catholic school funding in Ontario
Ottawa dentist calls separate schools for one faith ‘human rights violation’
Advertisements sponsored by an Ottawa-area dentist objecting to public funding of Ontario’s separate school system are appearing on Winnipeg bus shelters.
“This is a human rights issue here in Ontario,” Richard Thain said Monday. “We all bear the same tax burden, but only people of one religious faith have their own school system. Let’s treat all the religious groups the same and not tax everyone.”
So why use bus shelters in Winnipeg to address an Ontario issue?
This summer, Thain approached advertising company Pattison Out- door with a view to having the advertisements timed to take advantage of the opening in September of the new Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg.
Pattison, however, refused to handle the work, saying it was concerned the ads might violate the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards.
Thain subsequently approached Outfront Media, formerly CBS Media, which, he said, had no difficulties in taking on the job.
Thain’s $10,000 ad campaign consists of several bus shelter ads — they began appearing last week — showing a young child with his arm raised and a finger pointing skyward, and accompanied by slogans such as “Shame on Canada!” and “End Human Rights Violations in Ontario and Alberta.”
One poster refers to a 1999 ruling by the United Nations Human Rights Commission that Ontario was discriminating against other religions by funding only Roman Catholic schools.
The ruling was directed at the federal government as a signatory to the UN’s international covenant on civil and political rights, but any response is constitutionally a provincial responsibility.
Thain is a member of a number of humanist-oriented groups that have long wanted to see Ontario with only one publicly-funded school system, preferably secular.
His advertising campaign, he says, is supported by some of these groups, including OneSchoolSystem.org and another called Civil Rights in Public Education.
The intent is to draw people’s attention to what he regards as discrimination in having to support a separate, religiously-oriented school system with taxpayer funding, he said.
“My purpose was to direct some attention to the issue of civil rights in public education.
“This is a human rights issue here in Ontario. The present system discriminates in favour of Catholics.”
Thain acknowledged that the Canadian Constitution, dating back to the post-Confederation era, provided for public funding of the Catholic school system.
“I know the history of the arrangement, but it (the Constitution) is not carved in stone,” he said, noting that in the past the Constitution didn’t recognize women as persons. “It can be changed.” In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled special treatment of Roman Catholics was protected by Canada’s Constitution Act of 1867, and that the Act takes precedence over the religious freedom guarantees in the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Asked why secular schools should be favoured with public funding over faith-based schools — is that not a form of discrimination, too? — Thain asserted that a secularist school system, as a “product of modernity,” teaches “universal principles” as distinct from religious dogma.
He disputed any suggestion that teaching post-Enlightenment “universal principles” — notions of freedom of expression and freedom of inquiry, for instance — is a form of secular indoctrination. “There should be no religious indoctrination in publicly-funded schools.”