After the Second World War, Canada needed an increasingly skilled workforce. High school graduation became a necessity. Also, the baby-boom generation had to be trained, forcing the provinces to build hundreds of schools in the 1950s and 1960s.

Not everyone benefited equally from these investments. In Ontario, francophone enrolment was low. For the Association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario, the cause was clear: Franco-Ontarian youth did not have access to high school in their own language. Given this circumstance, many young people dropped out. Others went to English-language high schools. A minority attended private French-language schools, generally colleges run by religious communities. However, their parents denounced what they called “double taxation”: in addition to private school tuition, they paid school taxes for schools their children did not attend.

In the 1960s, the Progressive Conservative government of John Robarts wanted to settle the French-language high school issue while improving relations between the Province of Quebec and the rest of the country. To counter the perception among French-speaking Quebec nationalists that the French language had no future outside of Quebec, Robarts informed Franco-Ontarian leaders that his government would fund French-language high schools within public school boards.

This solution sparked an identity debate among Franco-Ontarians, many of whom believed that Catholicism should remain part of their identity. At a special meeting on February 18, 1967, Franco-Ontarian delegates accepted the government’s proposal to achieve, as the brief put it, “their full cultural development” so that they could contribute “effectively to the life of Ontario and Canada as a whole.” Some francophones, including members of the clergy, took comfort in the fact that these schools would remain Catholic in effect, since staff and students would be of that denomination. Finally, in 1985, the Ontario government allowed public funding of Catholic high schools in Ontario.