The funding status of independent schools varies across Canada, in accordance with whether the province offers partial government funding for independent schools (as is the case in five of the provinces). [...] In all, the parents of over 368,000 students—one of every fifteen stu- dents in Canada—are sending their children to one of the 1,935 independent, non-government schools in the country, and the picture is clear. [...] The Diocesan systems of independent schools in Manitoba and British Columbia offer particularly interesting examples of a midpoint between the greater dependence of the separate Catholic schools and the more autonomous forms of Catholic independent schools. [...] The presence and absence of Catholic separate schools contributes to provincial differences in the proportions of religious independent schools and students. [...] The pattern in the Atlantic provinces is more varied, ranging from a single non- Catholic Christian independent school enrolling just six percent of the stu- dents attending religious independent schools in Newfoundland and Labrador, through 45.4 percent and 85.7 percent respectively of independent school students attending non-Catholic Christian schools in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, to Prince