Apolitical Staples

I believe the word you are looking for, Mr. Staples, is discriminatory.

And it isn’t just a question of viewpoint — it plainly is. Still, there it is = Liberals get more give on these sorts of issues.

It is certainly discrimination. It also happens to violate international human rights law.

In 1999 the UN Human Rights Committee’s ruled, in the “Waldman” decision, that Ontario’s current official religious discrimination in faith-based school funding violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This ruling is fully binding under international law. Only 11 such rulings have ever been issued against Canada, and almost all have been complied with as a matter of course. The Committee is a quasi-judicial body separate from the discredited and highly politicized UN Human Rights Commission/Council.

The Covenant is one of the world’s most fundamental human rights treaties, developed as a response to the horrors of the second world war to provide an international law that operates above national law, that both prohibits discrimination and requires the state to pass domestic law to prohibit discrimination and to give victims of discrimination an effective legal remedy under domestic law. With respect to religious discrimination in faith-based school funding, Ontario has done neither.

The Covenant and its Optional Protocol, allowing citizen complaints about rights violations, were ratified by Canada on May 19, 1976 only after the Federal government went through a ten-year process of obtaining the written approval of Ontario and the other provinces.

Ironically, the only reason why anyone can say that the treaty is not binding is because the government has also failed to comply with its obligation to provide a domestic remedy for all violations of the Covenant. The Ontario Human Rights Code was intended to be such a mechanism, but it does not apply to faith-based school funding due to a limitation in s. 19 of the Code, so does not prohibit this kind of discrimination which is nevertheless illegal under international law.

Since the 1999 ruling, Ontario has been in violation of international human rights law. In the words of the Committee: “by becoming a State party to the Optional Protocol, the State party has recognized the competence of the Committee to determine whether there has been a violation of the Covenant or not and pursuant to article 2 of the Covenant, the State party has undertaken to ensure to all individuals within its territory the rights recognized in the Covenant and to provide an effective and enforceable remedy in case a violation has been established.”

Explicit religious discrimination in education funding was found to violate the treaty. The government now has an obligation under international law to provide a remedy that eliminates the discrimination.

John Tory’s proposal to remedy the discrimination by including the small excluded minorities is the only politically viable solution, and builds on a trend of providing more choice in public education. I am shocked by the hypocrisy of some politicians who claim to stand up for human rights, but then ignore ongoing violations of international human rights law in Ontario for reasons of political expediency.

I know that their policy is discriminatory but their defence of it (can’t have then segregated, blah, blah, have to teach Ontario values, blah, blah) is a whole different kettle of fish - this is where I am grasping at words.