Provincial elections in English Canada rarely have any national implication.
But as Ontarians prepare to vote Oct. 10, their decisions on public funding of faith-based private schools in the province and the referendum on adopting a modified proportional representation for electing members to the legislature in the future might well reverberate across the country.
It is John Tory and his Progressive Conservative party’s policy to provide full public funding of faith-based private schools that has emerged as a hot, divisive issue and it might well decide the outcome of the upcoming election.
Ahead of Tory’s mid-summer announcement of his party’s education policy there was not much evidence of any demand being made openly by interested groups for faith-based private schools to receive public funding, and that such a demand needed to be adopted by a party hoping to form the next government in the province.
Those who have favoured such demand in the past were given a hearing on the matter going all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The SCC ruling of November 1996—on hearing appeal from the Court of Appeal for Ontario in the case known as Adler vs. Ontario—was the authoritative settling of any dispute or misgiving arising from the claim of interested parties that since the Roman Catholic schools in the province received public funding, fairness demanded that other faith-based schools be equally treated.
CONSTITUTIONAL
The SCC ruled that the “distinction made between the Roman Catholic schools and other religious schools is constitutionally mandated and cannot be the subject of a Charter attack.” The majority of justices also observed that not extending public funds to faith-based private schools Ontario was not in violation of the freedom clause of section 2(a), nor the equality clause of section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom.
Moreover, the SCC ruling declared that for parents “the cost of sending their children to private religious schools is a natural cost of the appellants’ religion and does not, therefore, constitute an infringement of their freedom of religion protected by s. 2(a) of the Charter.”
And yet John Tory has come back a decade later to push his policy on the basis of “fairness” when “fairness” cannot be an issue given the grounds of the SCC ruling, and claims of “fairness” cannot mask the deeply flawed nature of the policy itself with consequences for the society that many might well imagine but none would want to discuss in public.
The elephant in the room that gets deliberately ignored in media discussions of Tory’s policy is public funds that would be made available to Muslim schools supervised mostly by people of fundamentalist persuasion or those tilting towards religious extremism. It is instructive to note most mosques in North America, as elsewhere, are controlled and administered by Muslims variously connected with Saudi Arabia or some other Gulf country from where funds are readily acquired.
These Muslim faith-based schools will grow in numbers if Tory’s policy gets adopted, and children will be exposed to the sort of education soaked in bigotry that is a grave malady for the Arab-Muslim world.
Ours is post-9/11 world requiring of Ontarians, and Canadians, to ask themselves if they can afford to adopt public policies whose unintended consequences could bring much social unpleasantness and strife in the future.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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