The Manitoba Schools Question was the most complex and far-reaching of Canada's several crises involving minority school rights. The 1870 MANITOBA ACT established a dual system of Protestant and Roman Catholic schools. Through Anglo-Protestant settlement largely from Ontario during the 1870s and 1880s, the proportion of Roman Catholics and French to the total Manitoba population fell dramatically. In March 1890 Manitoba's Liberal government under Thomas GREENWAY abolished public funding of Catholic schools. Two Privy Council decisions, 1892 and early 1895, upheld the validity of the Manitoba law but affirmed the federal government's power to restore the lost school privileges.
After much delay and several federal Cabinet crises, the faltering Conservative government introduced remedial legislation in March 1896. Liberal leader Wilfrid LAURIER, energetically supported by explicitly anti-French and anti-Catholic voices such as D'Alton MCCARTHY's, forced the bill's withdrawal. The June 1896 federal election was fought primarily on this explosive issue. Laurier defeated the government largely by winning 49 of 65 seats in Québec. Laurier circumvented danger from pro-remedial Québec Catholic bishops by promising a less abrasive but presumably more effective "sunny ways" approach to the province. The Laurier-Greenway compromise of late 1896, prompting an amendment to the Schools Act in 1897, did not restore separate schools, but it did allow Catholic teachers to be employed in certain circumstances and it did give some religious-instruction privileges within the public schools. Not until the late 1970s were more favourable arrangements made by Manitoba. In modern Québec, the Manitoba Schools Question is viewed as Canada's most significant loss of French and Catholic rights outside Québec.
