With recent elections in Ontario and Alberta, along with ongoing challenges to Catholic education in Canada, the national landscape has shifted dramatically in the last year. Dr. Robert Murray, Managing Director of the Government Affairs and Public Policy Practice Group at Dentons Canada LLP, will be explaining what that means for educators at all levels and what we can learn from these national trends in his presentation entitled The Politics of Catholic Education in Canada.

“It’s important for trustees and administrators across the country to make sure that they recognize that local decisions are never simply local,” says Dr. Murray. “They can have both provincial and potentially national consequences.”

Dr. Murray’s presentation will help attendees see the parallels and connections between seemingly disparate things going on across the country. He says it can be easy for individual school boards to assume that they are the only ones dealing with an issue, when that’s almost certainly not true.

Read more: Dr. Robert Murray added as presenter at CCSTA AGM

A local “Toonies for Tuition” campaign will ensure that young people in unfunded Canadian provinces receive a Catholic education.

On April 29, Chairperson Patrick Daly, along with secondary student council presidents from the Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board, presented a cheque for $29,498.45 to Marino Gazzola, President of the Canadian Catholic School Trustees’ Association (CCSTA) for the national Toonies for Tuition Initiative. Toonies for Tuition (CCSTA Charitable foundation) provides tuition assistance to Catholic students in provinces that have limited or no public funding for Catholic schools. 

Commending and thanking students, staff and parents for their generous support of the campaign, Daly explained that, unlike Ontario students “who are blessed to have publicly funded Catholic education,” students in unfunded provinces have to pay the cost of tuition out of their own pocket.

Read more: HWCDSB raises close to $30,000 for Toonies for Tuition

In late March, CCSTA President Marino Gazzola was one of about 30,000 people that came together in Los Angeles, California to connect, learn, and celebrate Catholic education around the world. The Los Angeles Religious Education Congress (RECongress) is an annual event that “offers in-service education and spiritual formation to those in catechetical and related ministries,” says Jan Pedroza, Religious Education Congress Program Coordinator. Hosted by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the congress is a Catholic-focused congress that has grown to include people from a wide variety of different vocations and faiths. It was Mr. Gazzola’s first time attending the event, and he says it was an amazing experience.

“It was certainly the best conference or congress I’ve ever been at,” he says. “It was unreal. The experience of being at a Mass with almost 10,000 people was just out of this world.”

Mr. Gazzola says they had heard such glowing reviews about the congress from Catholic educators in western Canada that the CCSTA felt they had to send a representative. He was there for the whole event, from Thursday to Sunday.

Read more: CCSTA President attends RECongress