Alex Hill on the Green Party's Catholic and Public school merger policy

I like working with smart people. Here's Ottawa West-Nepean GPO Candidate Alex Hill's recent words on the Green Party's policy on merging the Catholic and Public school systems.

... I find it rather spurious to claim that "Imposing relativistic beliefs on children is just as bad as imposing religion on them" particularly when you seem to be championing a voucher system or greater 'school choice' -- policy proposals themselves based on a very particular western liberal democratic conception of the good and of how society should be ordered more generally. In a multicultural and religiously diverse society, advocating for preferential treatment of one religious group at the expense of all the others is manifestly wrong, and in no way is eliminating that special treatment some sort of attack against religious people in general or the Roman Catholic Church in particular.

It would be very misleading for me or any of my colleagues to purport to be advocating for 'morally relativistic' policy in Ontario or Canada. We believe in defending and advancing human and civil rights, and this involves ensuring that a teacher can work at a publicly funded school without being barred on the basis of her faith. It means that students at tax payer funded schools can form Gay-Straight alliances. Finally, we believe in a polity in which all denizens share some fundamental assumptions about tolerance, diversity, openness, inclusion, and the rule of law.

Empowering educators and parents and getting them more involved in their children's education is not a bad thing, and it's actually an idea I campaigned on in last fall's provincial election. This goal is not at odds with our party's proposition above, though, and I welcome any discussion about how to make our public school system stronger, fairer, and more effective.

What he said.