The Roman Catholic Church and the North-West School Question

The separate school question is a continuing controversy in Canada - a variation on the classical issue in western history of church-state relations in education, heightened by the conflict between French and English. In this carefully researched work, Dr Lupul investigates the school question in the North-West Territories in the late nineteenth century before the division of the area into the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. This was an impotant development in Canada's educational, political, and religious history. The last quarter of the nineteenth century was an era of intense nationalism that embraced the political principles of the primacy of the state and the need for a common school system for all children. In the North-West the Roman Catholic Church has exercised a dominant influence on social development up to the mid-1870s , which it was most unwilling to relinquish to the state and its vanguard of Anglo-Protestant settlers. In this scrupulously objective account, Dr Lupul describes the relations between the government of the Territories and the Church during the period of Church ascendency in education before 1888, the establishment of state control in 1892, and the negotiations for a school settlement more satisfactory to the Church prior to 1905 which precipitated a serious political crisis for Sir Wilfrid Laurier and the Liberal party. Dr Lupul is the first scholar to make thorough and effective use of the archives of the Romanc Catholic Church in western Canada in connection with a topic of socio-political significance.