Editing Separate school (section)

== Historical background ==
When [[New France|France's colonies in North America]] were conquered by Britain during the 18th century, British authorities were faced with the dilemma of ruling over a large Roman Catholic community.  This was significant, as Catholic-Protestant violence in England and Ireland had been nearly constant since the beginning of the [[English Reformation]].  Since the [[Glorious Revolution]] of 1688, however, Protestantism had been the official religion of the British state as evidenced by the [[Act of Settlement 1701]] which forbade Catholics to become monarch.  This was the beginning of a long period of [[Anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom|anti-Catholic laws and policies in the British Empire]], most famously expressed through the [[Penal Laws (Ireland)|Irish "Penal" Laws]].  In the case of the New World French there was also the fear that the new population was potentially more loyal to a foreign king, that of France, than to Britain.

The first French colony to fall to the British was [[Acadia]] on the Atlantic coast in 1713 (invaded in 1710).  Here the problem of dealing with a French Catholic community was solved through the simple but brutal method of expulsion.  The [[Expulsion of the Acadians]] of 1755 saw some 12,000 Acadians killed and/or forcibly resettled to the Thirteen Colonies, Louisiana, France, England, etc.  Some later returned, but their land and villages had been given away to Anglo-Protestant settlers. However, the trigger for expulsion was about the fear that Acadians would side with France during the "[[French and Indian War]]" (1754–1760/1763).

When the much larger colony of [[Canada (New France)|Canada]] fell in 1763 ([[Quebec City]] invaded in 1759, [[Montreal]] in 1760), deportation was seen as less practical.  Instead British officials promised to allow French Canadians to keep their religion and customs:
{{blockquote|His Britannick Majesty, on his side, agrees to grant the liberty of the Catholick religion to the inhabitants of Canada: he will, in consequence, give the most precise and most effectual orders, that his new Roman Catholic subjects may profess the worship of their religion according to the rites of the Romish church, as far as the laws of Great Britain permit. His Britannick Majesty farther agrees, that the French inhabitants, or others who had been subjects of the Most Christian King in Canada, may retire with all safety and freedom wherever they shall think proper...|[[Treaty of Paris (1763)|Treaty of Paris]], Article IV (part)}}
This guarantee was later threatened on several occasions by assimilationist legislation such as the [[Royal Proclamation of 1763]], but this was largely reversed by the [[Quebec Act 1774]].

After the [[American Revolution]], the new colony was flooded with Anglo-Protestant refugees.  The colony was then divided by [[Constitutional Act of 1791]], with the Anglican Church becoming the [[established religion]] in Upper Canada (now Ontario) while Lower Canada remained legally secular but dominated by the Catholic church.  Inevitably, some people ended up on the "wrong" side of this division, with a French Catholic minority in Upper Canada and an Anglo-Protestant minority in Lower Canada.  Schools of the era were almost entirely parochial schools controlled by the various churches. Only when government mandated standardization and public funding for education were introduced did this then become a political issue. By the time of Confederation in 1867, the majority of Catholics in Upper Canada were of Irish extraction as well as English speaking.

In the 1840s [[Methodist]] minister and [[Reform Party (pre-Confederation)|Reformist]] politician [[Egerton Ryerson]] championed "common schools" that would educate the children of all faiths under one system. He became Chief Superintendent of Education for Upper Canada in 1844. However, Ryerson was not able to convince the Catholic minority and grudgingly agreed to clauses in his education reforms that allowed for minority-faith schools within the publicly funded system. The Catholic case was strengthened by the fact that the Protestant minority in Lower Canada had already{{when|date=December 2012}} won the right to a separate system.

The institutionalization of separate schools in Canada West (Upper Canada before 1840) was secured by the ''[[Scott Act (1863)|Scott Act]]'' of 1863, but with the caveat that rural Catholic schools could only serve an area with a radius of {{convert|3|mi}}.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://torontoist.com/2011/09/catholic-schools-separate-but-equal-funding/ | title=Catholic Schools: Separate but Equal Funding | date=September 16, 2011 }}</ref>

In the Maritime provinces, similar issues were at play. {{blockquote|In 1864, the government of Nova Scotia reformed its system of education, withdrawing support from all schools which were religious or which used any language other than English as a medium of instruction.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.cchahistory.ca/journal/CCHA1970/Toner.html | title=Peter M. Toner, "The New Brunswick Schools Question" }}</ref>}}

In New Brunswick under the Parish Schools Act of 1858, there was only loose supervision from the central board of education, and in practice each school was run independently by its board of trustees, and most schools boards were dominated by partisans from one religion or another. Textbooks were not standardized; Protestant-majority regions used the textbooks of the [[Irish National Schools]] while the English-speaking Catholic areas used the books of the [[Irish Christian Brothers]]. The few Acadian schools used French-language textbooks from Canada East (Lower Canada).