Don’t bet on politicians raising the topic. But with the provincial election coming, opponents of separate school funding in Ontario want to resurrect the subject most candidates prefer to tiptoe around, galvanized by reports about crumbling schools, stretched resources and a GTA Catholic board’s controversial policy on student fundraising.

“We’re trying to force them to talk about it because they don’t want to,” says Adrienne Havercroft, a supply teacher with the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board.

Havercroft spent five years trying to land a full-time job after graduating and says as a non-Catholic, she can’t access one-third of the job market because Catholic boards consider her ineligible, even though many enrol students of other faiths.

She’s one of the plaintiffs in a legal challenge against taxpayer-funded Catholic schools in Ontario, led by the small grassroots group One Public Education Now (OPEN).

Richard Thain, another opponent, also wants politicians to start talking about the issue, and says funding one religion in a province of many cultures and faiths is “shameful” and amounts to religious discrimination.

The retired Ottawa-area dentist favours the creation of one secular board in two languages and recently spent $20,000 on electronic billboards promoting the cause. They appeared throughout Toronto last month.

Last week his organization, Civil Rights in Public Education, joined other groups supporting the legal challenge at a rally on Parliament Hill.

The province’s elementary teachers’ union have also joined the fray, releasing an education agenda this week in advance of the June 7 election that includes dismantling the separate school system as one of its pillars.

“We do know that having the political will to move to one secular school system will reduce wasteful spending and reduce school closures,” said Sam Hammond, president of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario.

The principle has long been supported by counterparts at the Ontario Secondary Schools Teachers’ Federation.

The rumblings come at a time of increasing financial pressure on school boards and amid repeated calls for Ontario to fix its outdated education funding formula.

The non-partisan group Fix Our Schools is enlisting candidates across Ontario to fight for the billions of dollars needed to repair deteriorating schools. Boards shuffle resources to pay for special education supports and struggle to provide supervision.

A showdown at the Halton Catholic District School Board has further ignited the debate about mixing public dollars and religious beliefs. Despite intervention from the Minister of Education, the board has forbidden students from donating to charities that support any activities the church opposes, including contraception and stem cell research, which rules out recipients like the United Way and the Canadian Cancer Society.

For a cash-strapped government, the idea of folding multiple school systems into one “is low-hanging fruit,” says Reva Landau of Toronto, OPEN founder and the woman behind the legal challenge.

Her group argues operating four systems — English public, French public, and Catholic boards in each language — is not only unfair, but a waste of resources. Money spent on duplicate administrations and infrastructures would be put to better use in classrooms or repairing buildings, they say.

And it makes no sense in an era of declining enrolment that has led to school closures and prompted boards to compete for students.

OPEN has hired legal counsel, raised $62,000 through crowdfunding and hopes to file an application in court in the next few months, says Landau, a retired business systems analyst who has a law degree.

Politicians are quick to dismiss the debate as a complex constitutional matter that can’t be changed, and voters have been too quick to swallow that, says Landau.

“But Quebec showed us the way on this. The hard work has already been done.”

Quebec and Newfoundland stopped funding religious schools two decades ago, after their legislative assemblies passed decisions and then sought Ottawa’s blessing, delivered in the form of constitutional amendments.

Landau says Quebec’s decision to back out of its Confederation deal with Ontario, which guaranteed education to each other’s religious minorities, means Ontario is no longer legally on the hook.

Those in favour of public discussion say there’s no reason to wait.

“If there was ever a time for an Ontario political party to have the courage to announce a task force to phase out funding for separate schools, this is the time,” says Charles Pascal, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

“Seems like the only way to get this done is for a courageous grassroots group to use litigation to wake up the electorate and the legislators they elect.”

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So far, only the Green Party of Ontario supports that approach, a position it has held for at least a decade.

“In consultation with all stakeholders, Greens will end duplication in administration, buildings and busing by integrating the public and separate school boards,” leader Mike Schreiner said in an email.

The Liberal government has long maintained it won’t consider eliminating separate schools, which Education Minister Indira Naidoo-Harris reiterated this week.

“This is something that we are not looking at,” she told the Star. “It’s been in place for a long time. I, frankly, think it would be very disruptive to move forward with something like that.”

That’s no surprise to David King, a former Alberta education minister who is behind a movement in that province to merge public and Catholic schools into one secular board.

“Regardless of the conversation in the community, political parties are really, really afraid of dealing with this issue,” he told the Star. “But when a government has the will to do it, it happens.”

He expects a court case in Alberta, similar to the Ontario challenge, in the next 18 months.

With files from Kristin Rushowy

Andrea Gordon can be reached at agordon@thestar.ca

What’s happening elsewhere in Canada:

Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan are the only provinces that fund both public and Catholic school systems.

Quebec stopped funding separate schools and created one secular two-language public system in 1997.

Newfoundland also stopped funding denominational schools in 1997, a move endorsed by the public in two referenda. In an interview with CBC last year, former premier Brian Tobin said he’s proud citizens voted not to be “chained to the past” and that maintaining multiple school systems was no longer affordable and would have resulted in an “inferior education.”

In Saskatchewan, a court battle has gone on for more than a decade over whether non-Catholic students have the right to funding in Catholic schools. A Queen’s Bench ruling a year ago found that funding such students was a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But the province has appealed the decision.