On Feb. 21, the day after PC Leader John Tory announced that his party will, if elected, provide some form of funding to non-Catholic, faith-based schools, the Globe and Mail published an offensive fear-mongering editorial arguing that extending funding would have “hugely negative consequences for public education and for its key melting-pot role in a multicultural society.”
It is shocking that a mainstream paper like the Globe still thinks that the concepts of “melting pot” and “multicultural society” go together.
The purpose of a melting pot is to produce a uniform mix. In a melting pot the majority may be enriched, but the minority is effectively destroyed as a distinctive element.
In the Adler case that went to the Supreme Court of Canada, expert evidence was presented, and accepted by the court, showing that “the Jewish community’s survival as an identifiable and practising religious community depends upon broad access for Jewish children to Jewish day schools.” Other distinctive religious minority communities are similarly affected. The very continuity of distinctive cultural communities like ours is at stake.
While effectively forcing everyone into melting pot public schools may produce a kind of social harmony, it is wrong to purchase social harmony at the cost of the cultural existence of distinctive religious minorities. One can still have social harmony without forcing everyone into the same schools, as shown by Ontario's long experience with Catholic separate schools.
Michael Orr
Toronto, ON
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