It’s not often a court case has your kid asking you where they’re going to be going to school.
But that happened on April 20, when a court case in my home town of Yorkton, which had nothing to do with my family, suddenly through our lives into a bit of a tizzy.
You see, a Queen’s Bench Justice in Yorkton, deciding a 12-year old case between two squabbling school divisions means our youngest, Spencer, might have to switch schools in a year. Our neighbours kids, too, are in the same boat.
You see, we aren’t Catholic, but we send our kids to a Catholic school. In our case, its because we want our kids to go to a school where God is welcomed, not banished. We go to the Alliance Church, but I like to think that as Christians, we’re all playing on the same team.
Not so, according to the judgement. Without getting into the constitutional rigmarole, it comes down to if you aren’t baptized Catholic, the Justice says the province can’t pay for your kid to go to a Catholic school.
Let me point out that this whole case is about just a few dozen kids in a small village, Theodore, whose parents wanted to keep a school in their community and didn’t want them bused to another town. That’s not such a bad thing, keeping their school open. Since the public system was going to shut down their school, they took it over, set it up as a K-8 Catholic school, and kept it going. In the time that this case has been before the courts, a child could have been in Grade 1 at the beginning and would have already graduated by now.
That’s 12 years of legal fees of one taxpayer-funded organization suing another, because one didn’t want to lose funding to another.
The disruption, if this judgment stands, will be enormous. I’ve heard numbers of 15 to 30 per cent of students attending Catholic schools in Saskatchewan not actually being Catholic. I would venture to guess it’s probably a lot higher than that.
You see, the Catholic separate school system in Saskatchewan is, in reality, this province’s system of vouchers or charter schools. By choosing to put your kid in that system instead of the default public system, you are taking at least one step that shows you give a damn when, I’m sorry to say, many don’t. French immersion programs are the closest thing we have to an elite program without sending your kid to a private school, because parents who go that far really do give a damn.
Don Morgan, the education minister, has already noted that following this judgement will mean emptying out Catholic schools and cramming them into public schools where there is no room for them.
That’s just not going to fly. Politically, this government is already under water with low revenue, an austerity budget, and increases in taxes in many sectors. It’s easily the most unpopular provincial budget in a generation.
This government cannot afford to displace maybe a sixth or more of the students across Saskatchewan. It might be the court’s doing, but the Saskatchewan Party government will take the heat. That’s a heck of a lot of pissed off families, and voting parents, if tens of thousands of kids are uprooted from perfectly good schools they are already attending and shoehorned into public schools.
This case is going to go to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal if for no other reason than allowing the government to punt and get some breathing room. It won’t be settled probably for another five years, once the Supreme Court of Canada tackles it, and rest assured, this is a Supreme Court case.
In the meantime, there will be a lot of non-Catholics thinking of converting, but that’s a whole other column.
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
