Québec's was a change with next to no difference (save ironically for Francophone Protestants) since almost all of those in "Protestant" Schools continued on in the "English" schools. Further while Ontario has 37 Roman Catholic School Boards, Québec had but nine Protestant School Boards. Ontario's Roman Catholic schools are widely distributed across the province, Quebec's were heavily concentrated in the vicinity of Montreal
This isn't accurate. Quebec went from a model where publically-funded schools were either Catholic or Protestant (and most Protestant schools were indeed Anglophone), to a model where publicly-funded schools are officially nonreligious and either Anglophone or Francophone. It's a total change for virtually everybody, albeit some Catholic schools have shown varying degrees of urgency (read: none) in actually implementing many of the changes. Many Protestant schools were already Protestant in name only, as most Quebec Jews will tell you.
Also, I assume by your last sentence you meant that Quebec's
Protestant schools were heavily concentrated in the vicinity of Montreal, since Catholic schools were found throughout the province.
It's also flatly untrue that Ontario would have any harder time (in legal or legislative terms) getting a constitutional amendment passed than Quebec or Newfoundland did. On the other hand, the political will doesn't exist because groups like OECTA have a disproportionate financial interest in electoral politics (Quick quiz: Of the top 5 candidates in the last Ontario NDP leadership race, how many received contributions from OECTA, and how many were publicly in support of defunding Catholic schools? And is there any correlation between the answers to the previous question?). Likewise, some people have a personal stake in mendaciously misrepresenting the facts.
There is at the end of the day, no principled case for maintaining 100% public funding of Catholic schools and denying any degree of public funding to schools for other religious communities. The "we have no choice, the Constitution makes us" argument simply doesn't fly in light of the Quebec and Newfoundland experiences. It's institutionalized discrimination, plain and simple. Either establish a funding model with transparent, neutral criteria which is equally accessible to all religious communities, or join the 21st century and abolish the anachronism that is public Catholic education.
