About 5.6% of students are in private schools. A minority of these are elite private schools, which are attended by only a small fraction of students, but do have a great deal of prestige and prominence. A far larger portion of private schools are religious based institutions. Private schools are also used to study outside the country. For example, Canadian College Italy has an Ontario curriculum, but the school is located in Italy.
Private schools have historically been less common on the Canadian Prairies and were often forbidden under municipal and provincial statutes enacted to provide equality of education to students regardless of family income. This is especially true in Alberta, where successive Social Credit (or populist conservative) governments denounced the concept of private education as the main cause of denial of opportunity to the children of the working poor.
Private universities
In the past, private universities in Canada maintained a religious history or foundation. However, since 1999, the Province of New Brunswick passed the Degree Granting Act allowing private universities to operate in the Province. The University of Fredericton is the newest university to receive designation in New Brunswick.
Trinity Western University, in Langley British Columbia, was founded in 1962 as a junior college and received full accreditation in 1985. In 2002, British Columbia's Quest University became the first privately funded liberal arts university without a denominational affiliation (although it is not the first private liberal arts university). Many provinces, including Ontario and Alberta, have passed legislation allowing private degree-granting institutions (not necessarily universities) to operate there.
Many Canadians remain polarized on the issue of permitting private universities into the Canadian market. On the one hand, Canada's top universities find it difficult to compete with the private American powerhouses because of funding, but on the other hand, the fact that the price of private universities tends to exclude those who cannot pay that much for their education could prevent a significant portion of Canada's population from being able to attend these schools.
In addition to the issue of access, some Canadians find issue with protections instituted within the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as ruled by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2001 and consistent with federal and provincial law that (private) faith-based universities in Canada based on the long established principles of freedom of conscience and religion can exempt itself from more recent human rights legislation when they insist in their "community covenant" code signed by staff, faculty and students that they act in accordance with the faith of the school. The covenant may require restraint from those acts considered in contradiction with the tenets of their faith such as homosexual relationships, sex outside marriage or more broadly abstain from consuming alcohol on campus or viewing pornography. However, private-Christian based schools do not preclude homosexual or lesbian students from attending. Some faith-based universities have been known to fire staff and faculty which refused to adhere or whose actions were in opposition with the tenets of the faith, although in some provinces, their dismissals have been successfully challenged in court based on the circumstances.