John Tory has a reputation as a decent, well-intentioned guy, and none of my personal experiences with him would suggest otherwise. But this is one of the more irresponsible ways to troll for votes I can think of.
If you really think the current school funding model is unfair, and there's no disagreement here, what you should be exploring is how to stop funding Catholic schools to the exclusion of every other religion. But there are no votes in that. So instead, Tory is prepared to sacrifice the public good in order to curry favour with other religious groups.
Maybe, to give him the benefit of the doubt, he doesn't see it that way. Maybe he thinks he'd just be making the province fairer. But even if technically it would be fairer, it would also push us toward precisely the sort of society that pretty much everyone has agreed we don't want.
Nearly every Western country is struggling with the polarization and/or ghettoization of various ethnic minorities. Canada, luckily, has struggled less than most. But if the state starts subsidizing schools in which Muslims interact only with other Muslims, Jews with other Jews, Hindus with other Hindus and so on, this is going to become a much uglier place in a hurry.
What we learn in school isn't just how to read, write and master math formulas we'll never see for the rest of our lives. It's also how to interact with others. If we start limiting that to interaction with the like-minded, kids will be horribly unprepared to get by in the pluralistic society awaiting them after they graduate. And eventually, it'll cease to be a pluralistic society at all.
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Update: Some of the comments below - which are mercifully a lot more thoughtful than what was coming up yesterday on race and crime - take issue with my suggestion that the province stop funding Catholic schools. Just to be clear, I never suggested that could be done easily, which is why I wrote that leaders should be "exploring" the option. If they're going to strike up a panel on anything, I'd rather it be to look at something along the lines of the tricky constitutional dance that Newfoundland did in the '90s.
