Dalton McGuinty, GSAs and Catholic Schools - A rose by an ambiguous name

Over the past several days, Bill 13, the Accepting Schools Act, 2012 has been in committee hearings. This is the provincial government's anti-bullying legislation, meant to provide support groups in schools for various groups of students that have been victims of bullying, but, when it comes right down to it, is aimed to provide protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans students who have been blocked from forming support groups, particularly in the province's publicly-funded Catholic schools.

This saga has been ongoing for quite some time now, with a major flare-up last year in the summer prior to the provincial election, when the It Gets Better campaign was drawing tons of media attention to the issue of bullying queer youth. At the time, it seemed that the McGuinty government wanted to keep the issue off the front burner for the election campaign. With the election now behind them, the provincial Liberals have introduced this legislation.

This gets me to the crux of this post. Many gay organizations, foremost among them Queer Ontario and the Xtra! chain of newspapers, have been pushing very strongly for Bill 13 to explicitly include provisions that would mandate that support groups formed by students under the protection of this legislation would have an explicitly defined right to call their groups "Gay-Straight Alliances" or GSAs. Catholic groups, in particular trustees, have repeatedly stated that they won't permit this, citing directives from the Vatican, and have indicated that at best they would allow something called "Respecting Differences" groups. Queer organizations, with Xtra! reporter Drea Houston chief among them, have been pushing Education Minister Laurel Broten and Postsecondary Education minister Glen Murray (who had been the point person on this issue in the pre-election period) to be clear about whether these explicit protections would be incorporated into the legislation.

Now, one can debate back and forth as to whether the name of the group is a crucial issue. One can also make the case that insisting on the terminology might make it harder for groups to form that in practice would provide a supportive environment, regardless of what trustees might like (since it is remarkable what can happen under the guidance of a supportive teacher). I've had these discussions elsewhere. But what has been galling me is the cowardice and double-talk that has emanated from the government. Ministers Broten and Murray (the latter particularly on Twitter) have gone back and forth as to whether the bill, as currently worded, would require that schools accept groups named as GSAs - even in the face of trustees testifying before the committee that such names would be explicitly prohibited. They have also implied that they think that a group seeking to use such a name would have the protection of the Charter (as a free speech issue). And yet, they are not willing to take the step of explicitly incorporating the right to use this name in the legislation, claiming that this might violate Catholic school board rights under section 93 of the Constitution.

My problem with this stance is as follows. We don't currently know whether imposing GSAs (called such) on Catholic school boards would violate the Constitution. We do know that student groups want to use this name, and that Catholic trustees have vowed to stop this. So the question is: who ends up in the courtroom when this inevitable case comes before the courts, and who foots the bill for the extensive legal costs (because we're probably looking at a case that is Supreme Court-bound)? It seems pretty clear that the McGuinty government is trying to avoid being the "bad guy", imposing its will on the Catholic school boards, and would prefer that the rights issue be settled by a citizen group - with all the legal and political costs that entails. It's symptomatic, to my mind, of the lack of political leadership that we've seen in the post-Charter era on contentious social issues, where governments of all stripes try to avoid acting themselves and offload responsibility for defending or seeking rights onto citizens, and onto the courts to rule on them. It feeds into a conservative discourse of judge-made law, and it is something that progressives should be worried about. If our "supportive" governments refuse to show leadership on our behalf on issues they profess to believe in, then they are indirectly providing fuel for their conservative opponents who decry the increased power of the courts (and may yet start appointing judges more friendly to their interpretations).

I might feel differently about this issue if I thought that the provincial Liberals actually were not supportive of the GSA name. But I think that in this case, they are playing politics and trying to avoid a Catholic backlash at the ballot box. Which makes today's news that a majority of Ontarians support GSAs and oppose public funding of Catholic schools quite interesting indeed. A little food for thought for our confrontation-averse provincial government, perhaps?

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Ontario Election: GSAs, Greens and Catholic Schools

The issue of gay-straight alliances in Catholic schools in Ontario has heated up again, this time in the Toronto Catholic District School Board, which voted this week to place denominational rights above other rights in implementing the provincial equity policies - which were supposed to guarantee GSAs in Ontario high schools. Clearly, the individual schools in the board are interpreting this as carte blanche to ban anything which explictly has "gay" in the name, going so far as to threaten disciplinary action against students who are fighting for these support groups.

I am pleased to see that this issue is not only getting attention from the gay and alternative media. The Globe and Mail has been devoting significant coverage to this issue, including today's commentary piece from Aidan Johnson.

I'm going to be very curious to see how this issue plays out in the provincial election campaign. So far, the approach of the McGuinty government has been to support the creation of GSAs, using gay Toronto Centre MPP Glen Murray as the main spokesperson on this issue. (Although I find it curious and significant that Education minister Leona Dombrowsky is largely MIA on this issue). But there is clearly reluctance to putting the full weight of the government behind a strategy of compelling the Catholic boards to accept these support groups, especially with the Liberal government in danger of losing the election.

The option of seeking a constitutional amendment to eliminate public funding for the Catholic boards - as was done in Quebec and Newfoundland - does not appear to register on the radar for the current government. I'm not overly surprised by this, given the stew John Tory found himself in in the 2007 election with his promise of funding for other denominational schools. I'm not sure if the gay community and their supporters will be able to mobilize this as a major campaign issue, particularly given the fact that the only major party to endorse an end to public funding of Catholic schools in the 2007 election - the Greens - have retreated from this platform promise, and so there will be no standard bearer for this approach.

I imagine that the Liberals (and the NDP, for that matter), will make vague promises about resolving the issue in the courts, which should tie things up for at least a few more years.

More's the shame, as it will be gay and lesbian teens who suffer in the meantime. I'm not at all surprised by the hateful position of the Catholic schools (having been educated in the system myself), or by the hesitancy of the major parties when faced with a sizeable Catholic voting block. But it does betray their cynical political calculations and lack of willingness to passionately advocate for one of our most vulnerable populations.

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Ontario Catholic schools and Gay-Straight Alliances

I've jokingly remarked to my husband in the past that if I'd been born 60 years earlier, I probably would have been a Jesuit priest, rather than the openly-gay university professor that I've become. But if I'd been born a mere 6 years earlier, my parents would have had to decide whether they wanted to pay tuition for a private Catholic school education for my three final years of high school. Until 1986, Catholic education in Ontario was only funded through to Grade 10. (Ironically, if I'd been born only one year earlier, I could have avoided what did happen to my high school education, when the school I attended, De La Salle College, a private school that had joined the Toronto Catholic Board after public funding became available, opted to re-privatize as a protest against the Rae government's destreaming of Grade 9, leaving me and many of my friends in the lurch for our last year of high school because the school would not initially be offering OAC (Grade 13). But I digress...)

The issue of public funding of Catholic schools has been a hot-button issue recently for Xtra!, Toronto's main gay newspaper, and their coverage has been picked up by a number of other media outlets, including the Star and the Globe. Specifically, they are concerned over the situation in the Halton Catholic District School Board, and its policy regarding gay-straight alliances (GSAs), a policy which effectively was to ban their existence. In conducting further investigations, the paper discovered that none of Ontario's Catholic School Boards actually have a gay-straight alliance in their schools.

This situation has outraged many of Xtra!'s writers, who have called on other gay organizations to join in applying pressure to the boards to change their policies, or to perhaps contemplate yanking public funding for these schools on the basis of their discriminatory policies.

In some respects, I sympathize with the position of the GSA advocates. I certainly believe that my own high school years might have been very different if there had been a school culture that was more open to gay students (as it was, gay and questioning students just flocked to the newspaper and the yearbook!) I also disagree with the Catholic Church's stance on homosexuality. But that being said, I also think that these Catholic school boards are implementing a policy that is consistent with current Catholic teachings, and that as such they are as much within their constitutional rights to ban GSAs as they are to prohibit pro-choice student groups. So while I support Xtra!'s sentiments, I can't say that I'm convinced by their proposed solutions.

The crux of the situation is that public funding for Catholic education in Ontario is protected under section 93 of the Constitution Act of 1867. Specifically, the rights and privileges of any denominational schools or system of separate schools that existed by law at the time that province joined Confederation are protected. It's why until recently Quebec's protestant schools were protected, and so too were half a dozen different denominational school boards in Newfoundland. The issue in Ontario is a bit trickier because public funding to the senior years of high school was only extended as of 1986. (Indeed, this is why when the Robarts government extended public funding to francophone high schools in the 1960s, he started with public schools, to allow for full funding, despite the fact that most Franco-Ontarians were Catholic.) In theory, I suppose, there might be a case for revoking funding to Grades 11 and 12. But this gets me to my larger point...

I believe that at present Ontario's Catholic schools have the constitutional right to govern themselves in accordance with Catholic teaching, however much I might disapprove of this. As I see it, there are two main ways that this could change. The first would be to convince Ontario's Catholics, and specifically those running the school boards, to break with the papal authority over key social issues such as homosexuality, and permit clubs like GSAs in their schools. The tricky issue here is that although many Canadian Catholics (including some Catholic school teachers) don't support current Church teachings on issues such as contraception, homosexuality and abortion, those that do not are also less likely to still be politically engaged. This would also be a major political battle.

The second option, and one promoted in the last provincial election by the Green party, would be to seek a constitutional amendment to end Ontario's Catholic school protections. This would require the consent of the federal and Ontario governments. Such an amendment was reached with Quebec, when it moved from a confessional to a linguistic series of school boards in the 1990s, and with Newfoundland, when it abandoned its costly funding of six separate denominations. Unfortunately, while I personally support this option, I don't see it as likely in the short term. Catholics (whether practicing or not) still make up slightly over a third of the province's population and as such constitute a major voting block. Unlike the situation in Quebec, Ontario has not moved in a hardcore secular direction, and, current economic woes aside, it is not in nearly the financial straits that were faced by Newfoundland when it eliminated its costly denominational system. Moreover, Premier Dalton McGuinty has given no sign that he (a Catholic himself) has any inclination to move in this direction. Even terminating public funding to grades 11 and 12, which might be constitutionally defensible, would likely prove to be a political nightmare for whichever government implemented it. Acquired rights are awfully hard to undo.

Of course, there is one final option. Catholics who firmly disagree with the current teachings of the Church and its schools can vote with their feet and have their children educated in the public school boards of the province. While public funding is guaranteed, it is ultimately tied to student enrollments, and a hit to the bottom line might finally bring home the message that the Catholic school boards discriminatory policies are no longer considered acceptable in this province.

ETA: I should probably add that, as a historian, I'm not certain about whether the right of the Catholic school boards to ban GSAs would hold up in court, particularly if the provincial ministry of education attempted to force the issue. I rather suspect that this would fall into a bit of a grey area in terms of legal and constitutional rights, which might well be very tricky to sort out.

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