Happy Catholic Education Week 2012 (May 6-11)! God bless you premier McGuinty, Tim Hudak, and Andrea Horwath for upholding the Catholic faith above all others before and under Ontario law. You uphold Catholic school funding in the face of fiscal austerity in health care and education. You uphold this funding in the face of wage freezes for public sector employees.
Ontarians can wait a little longer for essential medical services, go without them altogether, or pay for them themselves -- if they have the means. Hospital expansions and renovations can wait. Communities with both a half empty public and a half empty Catholic school can close one or the other and ship half their kids elsewhere to go to school, rather than combining the two student bodies into the best of the two buildings. School maintenance backlogs, already on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars in some school boards, can grow for a few more years yet before the schools actually start to fall down. Doctors, nurses, teachers, and other public sector employees can handle a few years of wage freezes or sub-inflation increases. Our cities can learn to do more with less.
The important thing here -- the really important thing -- is that all Ontario taxpayers continue to fund the promulgation of Catholic religious beliefs to the 80-90% of Catholic families who use Catholic schools but do not go to Church. God bless all of our Members of Provincial Parliament for setting proper priorities and for ignoring the majority wish to move to a single public school system for each official language. That takes a truly breathtaking combination of callousness, insensitivity, and political cowardice. In Ontario, we are fortunate to have politicians with all of these qualities in spades.
