Three in Four (74%) Ontarians Believe There Should Be Changes to Faith-Based School Funding by either Merging Public and Separate Systems (56%) or Funding all Faith-Based Schools (18%)
Toronto, Ontario, June 4, 2018 — Ontario’s constitutional obligation to fund Catholic schools has been debated election after election, proving to be a touchy subject each time – in 2007 the issue cost John Tory and the PCs the election. However, according to a new Ipsos poll conducted on behalf of Global News, more than seven in ten (74%) Ontarians say that there should be changes made to the current system, which funds only Catholic faith-based schools.
In the poll, Ontarians were presented with three options: merge the two systems, keep everything as is, or extend funding to all faith-based schools in the province. The largest proportion, a majority (56%), said that they would choose to merge the Catholic and Public systems, meaning the creation of a single school system. One in four (26%) said they would choose to keep everything as is, and continue funding Catholic schools, but not other religious schools. Fewer than two in ten (18%) said it is best to extend funding to all faith-based schools in the province.
Baby Boomers were more likely to say that merging the two systems would be best (62% vs. 58% Gen X’ers, 47% Millennials), while Millennials were most likely to support extending funding to all faith-based schools (32% vs. 14% Gen X’er, 12% Boomers). Interestingly, there is no variation in the data based on party support.
These results are consistent with a 2007 poll that asked Ontarians about their views of John Tory’s policy to extend funding to the provinces faith-based schools. At the time, just 16% said they would adopt the widely unpopular policy, and fund all faith-based schools. Similarly, the majority (55%) said they would opt for merging the two current systems into one, while one quarter (26%) said they would like to keep everything as it is and continue funding only Catholic schools.
Separate School Funding Not A Priority For All Ontarians
Despite a majority of Ontarians believing that there should be some sort of change to the current faith-based funding system, the issue is not top of mind for voters. In fact, only a minority agree that separate school funding is a priority for them in this election (30% agree, 11% strongly/19% somewhat). A slightly larger proportion agree that separate school funding should be a priority for party leaders (37% agree, 10% strongly/27% somewhat). In fact, nearly six in ten (56%) Ontarians agree (21% strongly/35% somewhat) that they would like to see the issue put to rest.
Liberal voters are most likely to agree that separate school funding ought to be a priority for party leaders, with half (49%) indicating such (vs. 35% NDP voters, 32% PC voters). Millennials are also more likely to indicate that separate school funding is a priority of theirs (45% vs. 27% Gen X’ers, 21% Boomers), and that it should be a priority for party leaders (55% vs. 35% Gen X’ers, 25% Boomers).
© 2018, Ipsos Limited Partnership
This polling release and the data contained in it are the sole and exclusive property of Ipsos. They are NOT designed to support any election outcome or prediction model and no license to use the polling release or the data is either granted or implied by their publication. Ipsos does not endorse, and has no responsibility for the accuracy of, the result of any predictive model that incorporates this polling data. Furthermore, any use of this information to produce polling aggregations or election models without Ipsos’ written permission will be considered a violation of our intellectual property, and Ipsos reserves the right to take appropriate legal action.
These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between May 25 and 27, 2018, on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of 841 Ontario eligible voters was interviewed online (Ontarian eligible voters aged 18+ from Ipsos' online panel were interviewed online, supplemented by river-based sampling). Weighting was then employed to balance demographics to ensure that the sample's composition reflects that of the adult population according to Census data and to provide results intended to approximate the sample universe. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ±3.2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all eligible Ontario voters been polled. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement error.
For more information on this news release, please contact:
Darrell Bricker, CEO
Ipsos Global Public Affairs
+1 416 324 2001
[email protected]
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