Woman challenges Catholic school funding

Lawyers for the Ontario government are asking a court to dismiss a Toronto woman’s challenge against Catholic school funding.

Arguing today in Ontario’s Superior Court, the lawyers say the case has already been decided, as the Supreme Court of Canada has heard four similar cases.

The woman is asking the court to order Ontario to stop funding Catholic schools because as a taxpayer who doesn’t share the church’s beliefs, she says it infringes her freedom of religion.

But the government is arguing the case should be dismissed both because the Supreme Court has already decided the issue and because the woman doesn’t have standing.

Reva Landau argues she does have standing because as a taxpayer, some of her money funds Catholic schools.

Ontario’s lawyers say there has to be a more direct link between a person challenging a law and the law itself, otherwise every taxpayer could challenge every law.

The Roman Catholic school system gets about one-third of Ontario’s $24-billion education budget, but only 23 per cent of electors direct their education taxes to separate schools.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is intervening in the challenge and is supporting Landau.

The idea for Landau’s constitutional challenge first came in 2007, when during that provincial election campaign then-Progressive Conservative leader John Tory proposed extending public funding to schools of other faiths.

“I disagree with that, as I said I’m a public schools supporter, but at least he was trying to be fair,” Landau, a retired non-practising lawyer, said Tuesday before the court case.

“He was trying to be egalitarian to at least a limited extent…The more I thought about it the more it just seemed unfair.”

Public funding of Catholic schools infringes the charter, Landau says, but first the court must find that the charter even applies to the funding formula.

A section of the constitution states that no law can affect the rights of denominational schools and that has been interpreted as making it immune from charter challenges, Landau argues.

It contradicts the charter and was never intended to confer privilege on Roman Catholic education, she says.

“The only way to reconcile this difference is to interpret (the section) as narrowly as possible so it guarantees the separate school system only those rights which clearly existed at the time of Confederation,” she wrote in her challenge.

The section was meant, in 1867, to protect rights of a Catholic minority in a largely Protestant schools system, the civil liberties group says.

Interpreting it today to shield separate school funding from charter scrutiny “only serves to erode those very principles,” the group wrote.

She is asking the Ontario Superior Court of Justice to order that the government stop funding Catholic high schools and only fund Catholic elementary schools to the extent they were funded in 1867 at the time of Confederation.

That would amount to being funded with “only property taxes from Catholics who declare themselves to be separate school supporters and who live within three miles of a separate school, and property taxes from wholly Catholic owned businesses,” Landau wrote in her challenge.

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