When Zaheer Molu was a little boy in a Scarborough public school he had to recite the Lord's Prayer.Today, he pays more than $600 a month to send his 6-year-old son Abbas-Ali to an Islamic school.
"Going to school shouldn't mean you have to give up your religion and what you believe in," Molu says.
If Abbas-Ali lived in Quebec or any province west of here, there's a good chance a provincial government would pay about half his school costs.
Ontario is the only province where taxpayers pay 100 per cent of the costs for students who attend Catholic schools and none of the costs for students attending Islamic, Jewish, Christian or other faith-based schools.
Other provincial governments either partially fund all faith-based schools, which meet guidelines, or fund none of them.
"Ontario really is an anomaly," said Ira Walfish, head of a coalition pushing for equal funding for all faith-based schools.
If elected premier on Oct. 10, Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory plans to extend taxpayer funding to all faith-based schools that teach the Ontario curriculum, follow standardized testing and have accredited teachers.
With an election just two months away, this is shaping up as one of the most controversial issues and one of the few things, so far, that clearly defines a difference between Tory and Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, who opposes the idea.
At a time when the province is more diverse than ever, it's "fundamentally unfair" to fund Catholic schools exclusively, Tory says.
Many Ontarians agree. But there's a great gulf between those who think his plan – to extend what Catholics get to all faiths – is the right fix, and those who would prefer to end public funding of the Catholic system.
Tory is "opening a can of worms," says Green Party Leader Frank de Jong, a part-time teacher who supports getting rid of Ontario's Catholic school system.
It's a can the Liberals and New Democrats don't want opened. They prefer to hang on to a different can – status quo.
Liberals don't defend school funding for just one religion as fair; they dodge the question entirely by saying the system is rooted in Ontario's history and they're focused on improving the current system, not plunging public education into turmoil and financial uncertainty.
There are few details of just how Tory's plan would work – he's left that up to a commission that won't meet until after the election.
Here's what he has said:
About 50,000 children, now being taught in unfunded and unregulated faith-based schools, would have the chance to join the public system. It would unite kids through a common curriculum. Many faith-based schools won't want to submit themselves to the requirements for funding and will remain independent.
There won't be more school boards because faith-based schools will fall under the existing public or Catholic boards, Tory says.
McGuinty and Education Minister Kathleen Wynne disagree with Tory over what it will cost and what it will do.
Tory's plan will strip money out of public education and put it into private faith-based schools that will "segregate" children and damage Ontario's success as a multicultural society, they say.
Behind the scenes it gets really nasty with Liberals saying the lack of detail in the school plan shows this policy is "puddle-deep."
Conservatives retaliate by asking whether McGuinty felt segregated when he attended Catholic schools as a boy.
The Progressive Conservatives say this is a fair and incremental change in public education.
Liberals say it could open the floodgates and once faith-based schools are free, some parents who now send their kids to public school will shift over to them.
"Where does it stop? Do you then say now we need ethnic schools?" said Rick Johnson, president of the Ontario Public School Boards' Association.
"We have a public system that works pretty damn well and we just have some tinkering to do to make it more welcoming," to faith-based groups, he said.
The association doesn't have an official position about Tory's plan yet. "We're looking for tonnes of clarification."
The public may be talking about reopening the entire debate about having a public and separate Catholic system, but Johnson doesn't think most politicians will go near there.
"In politics you're talking about a block of voters. There are more than 600,000 kids in Catholic schools, that means there are 1.2 million parents that vote."
The act that created Canada in 1867 set out the ground rules for a separate Catholic school system and that's the reality Ontarians are still working with, Wynne says.
"In 1867, if you asked the question how can we best get along, we came up with an answer. If you ask the question now, the answer is not to fund a wide range of private religious schools," Wynne said.
"Our answer is no. We're not going in that direction because we really want our kids to be learning together and understanding each other."
Molu, whose son attends the As-Sadiq Islamic School in Thornhill, hears this a lot.
"It's just silly. Our kids aren't just confined to school and the mosque. We have neighbours, we go to the park, we're involved in hockey and soccer, it's not just Muslims that we're around."
There's always fear of change, said Walfish, chair of the multi-faith coalition for equal funding.
"The bottom line is it works very nicely in other provinces. There's no reason in the world why we can't take a portion of 50,000 kids and incorporate them into the public system without the sky falling the next day," he said.
But it's the fact that it will cost more, at a time when existing school boards have trouble balancing their budgets, that raises alarm bells.
Tory has said, if elected, he would increase next year's education budget by $800 million. Up to $400 million of this would go to faith-based schools.
But the Liberals have already promised public schools will get close to $800 million more next year. They claim that Tory's plan would cut in half the planned increase to public schools.
And these initiatives always end up costing more than expected, says Sean Conway, who was education minister the last time Ontario extended faith-based funding in 1985.
When former Progressive Conservative Premier Bill Davis decided to extend full funding to Catholic schools in 1984 he said it would cost $40 million a year.
It was "substantially more expensive than advertised," and cost several times the original figure when the policy was implemented a year later under Liberal David Peterson's government, Conway said in a telephone interview yesterday.
Even while the government was extending funding to the Catholics they knew it was unfair to other faiths but felt there was enough on the plate already, Conway said.
Tory, who was once Davis's principal secretary, remembers meetings as early as 1975 about the unfairness of Jewish schools being treated differently than Catholic ones.
Jewish groups have long been fighting for public funding for their religious schools. More recently, other faith groups have got on board.
This isn't the first time the Progressive Conservatives have tried to deliver what those groups want.
Former premier Mike Harris introduced a private school tax-credit for parents. It was very unpopular and contributed to the Liberal win in 2003.
The Liberals repealed it.
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