Argument is easy to dismiss. A finding by the province’s own Auditor General is not. So this page contains almost nothing of ours except the last paragraph of each entry, which is clearly marked as ours.
Three rules govern what appears here. Nothing is promoted from a claim to a finding, however much we agree with it. Nothing asserts what anyone intended — only what was done, what it cost, and what an oversight body concluded. And anything we could not confirm to a named source was left out rather than softened.
That last rule cost this page several entries we would have liked to include. It is the reason you can rely on the ones that remain — and the reason a government spokesperson reading this page has nothing easy to attack.
On special education as a funding precedent
One strand below needs its framing stated openly, because it is the one place where we are drawing an inference rather than reporting a finding.
The documented facts: public funding of independent schools in Ontario has been proposed specifically for students with special education needs, costed by Cardus in 2019 at $78 million to $195 milliona year, citing a Fraser Institute proposal from 2004. The same institute recommended in 2020 that Alberta “target additional financial resources to expanding independent-school options for special-needs students.” And polling published in January 2026 found 64% of Albertans supported public funding for children with special needs at independent schools, against 39% support for expanding education outside the public system generally.
We previously reasoned from this that a narrower, more sympathetic ask is easier to pass than a broad one, and that a funding channel which exists can later be widened. We have since tested that reading and are withdrawing it. In every province that funds independent schools — Manitoba, Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan — general or religious funding came first and special-education designations were added afterwards. The sequence the theory predicts has not happened anywhere it could have.
What survives is narrower, verified, and comes from the advocates’ own research: of roughly 1,445 independent schools in Ontario, 57 emphasize special education. Whatever anyone intends, disabled children are the opening argument for a policy that would mostly benefit other schools.
We publish both halves because families should be able to weigh it themselves — and because a page that only prints the findings that suit us is not worth reading. The full investigation, including what cuts against us →
For the bargaining context these findings sit inside, start with the 2026 briefing.