Separate School - Other Provinces

Other Provinces

Retention of separate school boards with public funding was a major issue of contention in the negotiations that led to Canadian confederation, chiefly as a result of ethnic and religious tension between the (largely French-speaking) Roman Catholic population in Canada and the Protestant majority. The issue was a subject of debate at the 1864 Quebec Conference and was finally resolved at the London Conference of 1866 with a proposal to preserve the separate school systems in Quebec and Ontario. The way in which this agreement was written into the British North America Act, 1867 was to the effect that the condition of education in each colony (or territory) at the time it entered Confederation would be continued thereafter.

Consequently, the provinces of British Columbia, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island have never had an education system that included "separate schools".

Up until 1999 the Quebec education system was also separated, with Protestant and Catholic school boards. The system was replaced by a linguistically based secular school system, after the passage of a constitutional amendment

The province of Newfoundland and Labrador had a separate school system until 1997. At the time that the Dominion of Newfoundland joined Canada on March 31, 1949 the schools of that Dominion were all organized on a confessional basis with separate denominational schools for Roman Catholics, Seventh-day Adventists, Salvationists, Pentecostals, and an integrated stream which oversaw the schooling for children of many members of so-called "main stream" Protestant denominations. All of these schools received grants from the provincial government for their operation. Ownership of the schools ranged from parochial (owned and operated directly by a Church) to ownership and operation by a separate not-for-profit society. The constitutional obligation on the Province to maintain this system of confessional schools was eliminated by the Constitution Amendment, 1998 (Newfoundland Act), following a provincial referendum in 1997. The Province then established a single non-denominational public school system.