It was the late summer of 1971, and Ontario’s new 41-year-old premier was on the horns of a dilemma.
For the previous decade, while he was minister of education, the province’s Catholic bishops had consistently lobbied him to provide more funding for their separate-school system. Bill Davis met them halfway. Even though the Constitution obliged governments to fund Catholic schools only through Grade 8, Davis extended that through to Grade 10 when he was education minister in John Robarts’s government in the 1960s.
But now Davis had replaced Robarts as premier, and the bishops were back for more. They wanted the separate-school system funded right through to the end of high school. The new premier called a news conference to say that he’d considered their entreaties but that the answer was no.
The Ontario of 1971 was a very different place from today. It was overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant — coincidentally, also the base of the governing Progressive Conservative party. Davis’s base appreciated their new leader “sticking it” to the Catholics by holding firm. Shortly after Davis announced his no, he called an election and, to some observers, cleverly exploited the issue for electoral advantage. Davis won a bigger majority government than the one he’d inherited from Robarts, and Ontario’s Catholics (not to mention the Liberals and New Democrats supporting them) were crestfallen.
But friends of Davis say the way he won that ’71 election stuck in his craw over the years. He felt guilty about it. So he kept the lines of communication open with the bishops over the ensuing years. He made no promises, but he suggested that, if he felt the time was right, they could all revisit the issue.
Agenda segment, June 12, 2009: Bill Davis
Davis won three more elections for the Tories but still declined to extend funding for Catholic schools. He was concerned about inflaming his party’s base and potentially provoking sectarian divisions in the province.
But at the same time, he also couldn’t help but notice how Ontario was changing. Significant Italian, Portuguese, and Filipino immigration into Davis’s hometown of Brampton brought more Catholics into a city that had been 95 per cent Protestant when he grew up there.
One day, while he was cutting his front lawn (yes, premiers did that back in the day), some students from the local Catholic high school stopped by for a chat.
“Why is it,” one student asked the premier, “that when my friends in public school go into high school, their education is paid for, but when we graduate from Grade 10 to 11, we suddenly have to pay tuition to stay in our Catholic schools?”
For one of the rare moments in his public life, Davis was stuck for an answer. The bishops’ arguments felt timelier. And with Ontario’s population becoming increasingly Catholic, Davis began to think that fairness and equity demanded a change in policy.
Benchers give Premier William Davis a standing ovation as he take his legislative seat for the last time as premier. December 15, 1984. (John McNeill/Globe and Mail/CP)
What happened next was one of the most dramatic 180-degree turns in Ontario history. On June 12, 1984 — 40 years ago today — Davis called opposition leaders David Peterson and Bob Rae and urged them to be in the house before question period for an important announcement. He provided no details.
Davis then rose in the legislature and announced his thinking had evolved since the 1971 election. The government would begin to provide full funding to the Catholic-school system to the end of high school.
The house erupted with a standing ovation, but for very different reasons. The opposition was grateful that its efforts had paid off. But Tory backbenchers rose to their feet because, before the announcement, premier’s office staffers had instructed them to do so. There was still considerable unhappiness about the move in caucus. In fact, the education minister of the day, Bette Stephenson, later acknowledged she’d learned of this fundamental change in policy just that morning. And she wasn’t happy. In his memoir From Mad Dog to Senator, former PC MPP Bob Runciman likened the move to the worst authoritarianism he’d ever seen at Queen’s Park.
Agenda segment, February 7, 2012: Catholic-school funding
But Davis still had a strong hold on his caucus, and opponents such as Runciman simply felt they couldn’t publicly oppose their premier. When it came time to vote, the measure passed 129-1. (The lone holdout was PC MPP Norm Sterling.)
But the vote in the house did not mirror public opinion. The public-school teacher unions mounted massive demonstrations. They predicted that, with Catholic high-school tuition now covered by the taxpayer, more Catholic students would stay in the separate system instead of switching to the public one. Enrolment in public schools would thus drop, forcing school closures, and non-Catholic teachers would lose their jobs.
Four months later, Davis announced his retirement from politics — and after that, the issue truly exploded into the public’s consciousness. At a news conference during the ensuing spring 1985 election campaign, I asked Anglican Archbishop Lewis Garnsworthy a question about the Catholic-school funding issue. His response was like a volcanic eruption.
“This is how Hitler changed education policy in Germany!” he said. “By exactly the same process — by decree! And I won’t take that back.”
Reporters were gobsmacked. Other clergymen at the news conference instantly tried to distance themselves from the remark. The new premier, Frank Miller, called Garnsworthy’s comments “odious.”
But the archbishop’s words unleashed a torrent of further criticism against the governing Tories. Even though both opposition parties supported the policy, a big chunk of the electorate felt a need to punish the PCs. They instantly dropped 10 points in the polls.
On May 2, 1985, voters elected a hung parliament: 52 PCs, 48 Liberals, and 25 New Democrats. The NDP decided to end the 42-year-long PC dynasty and backed Peterson for premier; over the next year, the Liberals and NDP combined to pass the Catholic-funding extension bill. The Tories would be in the political wilderness for the next 10 years, until Mike Harris brought them back to power in 1995.
I saw the now 79-year-old Harris last week, and we talked about this time. “I’m convinced the only way we could have won that 1985 election was for Bill Davis to stay on and lead us through it,” he said. “He was the only one who could convince the electorate that things would be okay.”
In fact, when Davis left office in January 1985, the PCs were polling at 50 per cent support. Under Miller, they fell to 37 per cent on election day.
Agenda segment, January 24, 2023: How religion and schools defeated a PM
While Davis and others felt extending Catholic-school funding would bring more fairness to the system, it might have had the opposite effect. Before long, other religious groups were asking why Catholic students should have their choice of both a fully funded public and religious-school system, while no one else did. Even a committee of the United Nations criticized Ontario for this imbalance. Explanations pointing to the original compromise at Confederation (Protestant schools in Quebec and Catholic schools in Ontario would both receive public funding) increasingly fell on deaf ears in very multicultural 21st-century Ontario.
In 2007, PC leader John Tory tried to rectify this inequity by offering public funding to other religious schools. While he rightly identified an unfairness in education funding, the public overwhelmingly rejected his solution. Tory and Premier Dalton McGuinty were tied in the polls until the PCs’ faith-based funding announcement. After that, Tory’s numbers sank; McGuinty won a second consecutive majority. Since then, polls have consistently shown that a majority of the public would prefer “defunding” the Catholic-school system and unifying both systems. The Green party ran on that platform several elections ago and doubled its vote.
But the issue seems to have fallen into abeyance since. The lesson that all parties seem to have taken from both the 1985 and 2007 elections is that the mix of politics, education, and religion is completely toxic. And so the status quo persists.
And it all started 40 years ago today.
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