I should begin by clarifying the question in the title of this post. Faith is, of course, something of great personal spiritual significance to those who have it; what I want to know is, what is so special about faith from the point of view of public policy?

John Tory, the not quite eponymous leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, has recently backed down from his previous plan to extend public funding of religious schools (on which see, inter alia, this Jaköbische rant). Tory has now said that he would allow a free vote on the matter, which in practice is likely to mean that the proposal will fail even if his party were to win the election next week.

The current system, in which taxpayers get to indicate whether they wish to support the regular public school system or the Catholic "separate" schools, makes no sense whatsoever synchronically. The system exists because it was a political necessity at an earlier point in Canadian history; it continues because any party that tried to abolish the separate school system would alienate large numbers of Catholic voters.

Obviously, the present system is unfair; it grants a privilege to one religion that is withheld from all others. As Jake points out, Tory's approach is one—the stupid one—of two possible principled solutions. It would eliminate (or at least reduce) the unfair discrimination among faiths that exists under the present system. What it would not do, though, is eliminate the unfair discrimination in favour of faiths as against other kinds of beliefs.

Me, I'm an atheist. I also don't have children. But if I did have children, I wouldn't want to send them to an atheist separate school, nor do I want my tax contributions to go to such a school. This is partly because I don't want anything to do with any school that tries to indoctrinate students with any kind of beliefs about any religious propositions, even beliefs that I happen to agree with. (The other part of it is that atheism is really too simple to be spun out into a whole curriculum of (ir)religious instruction—what do you do, have the kids kneel down five times a day facing the Galapagos Islands and recite the words "There is no God full stop"?)

So I want my hypothetical children and my actual tax dollars to go to secular schools. But that doesn't necessarily mean schools that are just like the current Ontario public schools; religious instruction is not the only kind of instruction that concerned parents or taxpayers might want made available as part of their (community's) children's education. I think I would like to send my real money and imaginary offspring to a feminist school, or even an entire feminist school system. And, under John Tory's plan for Ontario's schools, why on earth shouldn't there be such a system, run on funds that would otherwise have gone to the public schools? If Tory wants to divert money not only to Catholic schools but also to Protestant schools and Muslim schools and Jewish schools and Sikh schools and so on, why not to feminist schools as well? Or how about schools that teach linguistics in addition to the regular Ontario curriculum? If religious schools are accorded this special status (and this cash), why only religious schools?

Obviously, feminism and linguistics are different from religion. Neither of them requires any belief in the supernatural; they are firmly grounded in observable reality, supplemented in the case of feminism by a certain sense of what constitutes fairness and justice. And there's really nothing about feminism or linguistics that would be contrary to the mandate of the public schools, so you could say that what I really should be doing is advocating that the public schools become more feminist in outlook and start teaching linguistics. This is probably true. But my question for John Tory (and the two or three other people in the province who actually think his plan is a good idea) is, what's so special about religion that people should be allowed to take their money out of the public schools if and only if they want it to go to religious schools instead?

If we think about the financial upshot of Tory's plan, it turns out to be very similar to previous proposals, by various large- and small-c conservative politicians, to introduce vouchers or tax credits for parents to send their children to private schools. In every respect in which it differs from those proposals, it seems to me to be even worse:

1. The public schools would lose revenues not only from parents who actually send their children to religious schools, but also from other taxpayers who chose to support one of the separate school systems instead of the public one.
2. Instead of simply signing away money to parents, the provincial government would be taking on the burden of arranging to fund an uncertain number of separate school systems, deciding which ones had enough of a supporting community to be viable, and so on.
3. Only religious schools would be eligible.

Politicians who advocate for private-school vouchers argue that they are a means of providing "choice" in education. John Tory's plan is tantamount to a voucher system in which the vouchers could only be used at religious schools—a thoroughly arbitrary limitation of choice, and one that would, if introduced in that form by the legislature, almost certainly be challenged in the courts under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Tory's proposal deserves all the derision it has received and more. I'm glad to see that he won't be requiring his MPPs to vote for it, but why should he even waste their time by bringing it forward for them to vote on it?