Putting God Out of Canada’s Schools
by Dr. Michael Wagner
Home education and private schooling are essentially
the last bastions of Christian education in Canada. This
was not always so. Until the 1980s, Christian influence
was not unusual in Canada’s public schools, at least
superficially. Each province has its own public education
system with its own particularities, but the Christian nature
of Canada was evident to one degree or another, often in
the form of school prayers or Bible reading.
Unfortunately, Christian influence in Canadian society
declined throughout the second half of the twentieth
century. That decline cannot be attributed to any single
factor. However, it is clear that Christianity was formally
expelled from the public education system as a result of
the adoption of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s Canadian
Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982.
From Washington to Canada
Strange as it may seem, the story of the expulsion
of Christianity from Canada’s public schools begins in
Washington, DC. In the early 1960s, the United States
Supreme Court expelled prayer and Bible reading from
American schools in two separate rulings. David Barton,
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in the 1994 edition of his book America: To Pray? or Not to
Pray? notes: “In decisions rendered on June 25, 1962, in
Engel v. Vitale, and on June 17, 1963, in Murray v. Curlett
and Abingdon v. Schempp, the Supreme Court forbade
the inclusion of religious activities in major activities of
daily student life by striking down school prayer and Bible
reading. Never before in the history of our nation had any
branch of our government taken such a stand” (p. 15).
These decisions were very controversial and were
especially upsetting to Christians. For many years
afterwards, Christian activists campaigned to get prayer
and Bible reading back into American public schools,
but to no avail. On the contrary, Barton writes that the
court-imposed abolition of school prayer “provided the
judicial ‘toehold’ needed to accomplish the subsequent
extraction of other beliefs and practices rooted in religious
teachings which had long been held as fundamental to
national behavior and thus national policy” (p. 21).
Of course, the Engel v. Vitale and Abingdon v.
Schempp rulings had no relevance to Canada at that
time. There was no reason for Canadian Christians to
be concerned. Canada had a very different legal and
constitutional system than the United States. However,
that changed with the adoption of the Charter of Rights
and Freedoms in 1982. The Charter was modelled in part
on the American Bill of Rights, so American constitutional
jurisprudence suddenly became relevant to Canada in a
way that it never had before.
The Zylberberg Case
In 1985, five parents in Sudbury, Ontario who objected
to religion in public schools applied to have the daily
religious exercises of their public schools discontinued.
The last name of one of the parents was Zylberberg, so
this became known as the Zylberberg case.
Even in the mid-1980s, it was not unusual in some
Ontario public schools to have religious exercises, such as
opening or closing the school day with the Lord’s Prayer
and/or Bible reading. Generally speaking, the students
were expected to participate. Technically, however, the
religious exercises were not compulsory because parents
who opposed them could have their children excused.
The Sudbury parents lost the initial court ruling in
1986, but they appealed to the Ontario Court of Appeal,
which ruled in their favour in 1988. Terri Sussel, in his
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1995 book Canada’s Legal Revolution: Public Education,
the Charter, and Human Rights, explains the significance
of this decision as follows: “The Ontario Court of Appeal’s
conclusions in the Zylberberg case were based in large
measure on U.S. decisions relating to the guarantee of
religious freedom in the First Amendment to the U.S.
constitution. Thus, notwithstanding the differences in
wording between the religious freedom clauses in the
U.S. and Canadian constitutions, the Court of Appeal
relied on two landmark U.S. school prayer cases from
the 1960s that ruled that mandatory religious exercises
were unconstitutional” (p. 141).
The Zylberberg decision was very
influential on education policy
across the country.
The two landmark cases referred to by Sussel are
Engel v. Vitale and Abingdon v. Schempp, which are the
same ones mentioned by David Barton. That is, the U.S.
Supreme Court decisions that put God out of American
schools had been (to a certain degree) imported into
Canada to put God out of Canada’s public schools as
well. The legal reasoning behind liberal American judicial
activism had reached over the border and helped to
secularize Canada’s public education system.
From Ontario to Most of the Country
The legal precedent established by the Zylberberg
case subsequently impacted other parts of the country.
For example, Sussel points out that “the BC Supreme
Court—concluding that the mandatory school prayer
legislation in British Columbia was ‘indistinguishable’
from the Ontario legislation considered in the Zylberberg
case—struck down the school prayer provisions in the
BC School Act as unconstitutional” (p. 143).
In short, the Zylberberg decision was very influential
on education policy across the country. Indeed, as Sussel
notes, the Zylberberg “school prayer case in Ontario
had a ripple effect on parents, courts, and legislatures
throughout the country, and by the early 1990s, virtually
all provincial education legislation mandated the
separation of religion from the Canadian public education
curriculum” (p. 153).
Alberta and Saskatchewan
The main exceptions to the effects of the Zylberberg
case are Alberta and Saskatchewan. When these two
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provinces joined Confederation in 1905, the 1901 North-
West Territories School Ordinance which governed
the education systems of these future provinces, was
incorporated into Canada’s Constitution. The Ordinance
explicitly permitted the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in
public schools.
The main exceptions to the effects
of the Zylberberg case are Alberta
and Saskatchewan.
That is to say, as far as Alberta and Saskatchewan
are concerned, the Constitution guarantees the right
of public schools to include the recitation of the Lord’s
Prayer in their activities. Most of them don’t, of course,
but it’s at least an option. So whereas prayer in public
schools is forbidden by the Charter of Rights in much of
the country, these two provinces are exempt from the
Charter on this point due to their unique constitutional
circumstances.
It should also be noted that the Catholic separate
schools of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario are also
exempt from the implications of Zylberberg because they
have specific protections in the Constitution.
Conclusion
The legal situation described here only applies to
government schools, so home educators are free to have
as much or as little religious content in their educational
programs as they want. Indeed, many parents teach
their children at home primarily to ensure that they
receive a Christian education. But for much of Canada’s
history, Christian elements were common even within the
government schools themselves.
There are many reasons for the decline of Christian
influence within Canada, but the adoption of the Canadian
Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 provided the
legal mechanism for expelling Christianity from the
government schools.
Dr. Michael Wagner is an
independent researcher and
writer with a PhD in political
science from the University of
Alberta. His most recent book is
True Right: Genuine Conservative
Leaders of Western Canada. He and his wife have eleven
children and have been home educating for over 20 years.
HOME Matters Summer 2019