He shared this opinion with the staff of an Etobicoke home for teens with autism, owned by the Griffin Centre, a non-profit mental health agency. The Etobicoke Guardian reports that Ford held a public meeting with the centre’s staff last Thursday. He informed them the home’s neighbours were upset about police calls, noise disruption, and not receiving advanced warning about the residents. Deanna Dannell, the director of Griffin Centre, sent an email to the Canadian Press, stating that the centre had spoken to Ford before the home opened and explained their housing situation.

Apparently, Ford sympathizes with the teens but believes they should not be allowed to leave the house. He is willing to buy the house and sell it, if need be, the Guardian says.

There has been some warranted backlash against his beliefs.

“It was disappointing to hear that kind of reaction from [Ford],” Dannell told the Star. “Certainly we had hoped for something different.”

John Tory, a Toronto mayoral candidate, released a statement calling Ford’s comments “from another age”.

Ford blames the Liberal government for closing Thistletown Regional Centre in the west end. “It was a beautiful centre, had 43 acres that allowed families to have their children with challenges there,” he told the National Post.

Children with challenges…

Although Tory benefits by pointing out a Ford’s flaws, he raises a good point. Canada has a serious problem when the people in our government do not want to respect those with mental disabilities. There is no easy way out. No one knows that better than the staff who work with autistic children.

So despite the noise and other various disruptions, these people deserve as much fresh air as the rest of us. Canadians will have taken one step forward and five steps back if we try to whisk away all human “inconveniences.”

Institution out of time: A Catholic convent and boarding school circa 1880. Photo courtesy Canadian National Archives.

In Alberta, Ontario, and Saskatchewan, parallel education systems still exist: the secular public school boards, and separate Catholic school boards. It is time to abolish that system. The problem of separate school boards is not their Catholicism; it is their separateness. Public funding elevates one religious tradition above all others, and in secular, multicultural contemporary Canada, that is no longer a viable option.

The propriety of the Catholic school system was up for debate recently when the Halton Catholic District School Board banned gay-straight alliances because, as the chair Alice Anne LeMay said, such student groups are “not within the teachings of the Catholic Church.” An investigation by the gay and lesbian newspaper Xtra! later found that such groups are effectively banned in all 29 of Ontario’s Catholic school boards. Just a year ago, Catholic leaders, including Catholic school board trustees, led the charge against a new sexual education curriculum for all Ontario public schools, and successfully scuppered the new scheme.

These episodes are troubling, but keeping score of who wins which policy scuffle is beside the point. These problems stem from the overarching fact of constitutionally entrenched religious public schools. Separate school boards for Protestants and Catholics are a function of Article 93 of the 1867 Constitution Act, intended at the time to protect minority religious rights. The reasons that a 4th century European institution should have been embedded in our 19th century constitution may have made sense at the time, but that time is long past.

The precedent for ending separate education exists. Quebec secured a constitutional amendment exempting it from Article 93 in 1997, and thereafter reorganized its school boards along linguistic lines, not religious ones. Newfoundland and Labrador merged their school boards into one non-denominational system in 1998.

The United Nations Human Rights Committee has already urged Canada [PDF] to “adopt steps in order to eliminate discrimination on the basis of religion in the funding of schools in Ontario.” Polls find significant public support for the idea, and it would undoubtedly save millions in administrative overheads. But pressure from the UN, public support, or financial incentives are all secondary to the simple truth that creating a singular, secular public school system is the right thing to do.

The problem is political will. No party is willing to touch the issue, especially after Ontario Progressive Conservative leader John Tory’s disastrous 2007 campaign promise to fund all religious schools, for which he was widely ridiculed. Party leaders fear, probably correctly, that proposing a merger of the separate and public school boards would be labelled as anti-Catholic. It is not. It is an acknowledgment that times have changed and state-sponsored religious education of any type or denomination is no longer appropriate.