TORONTO - It's unlikely another Ontario politician will soon follow in Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory's footsteps by revisiting his pledge to publicly fund religious schools, political analysts said Wednesday, lest they wish to suffer the same fate at the ballot box.

"I don't think that any politician is going to be foolish enough in a major political party to want to revisit this issue and become the second John Tory," said York University political scientist James Laxer.

Polls throughout the 30-day campaign showed Tory's pledge to extend funding to religious schools that opt into the public system to be deeply unpopular with voters.

Ontario residents rejected Tory's proposal because they were uncomfortable with what they saw as "hiving off" students into schools based on religion, said Ryerson University political science Prof. Myer Siemiatycki.

It may have also played into anxieties some voters have about visible minorities, he added.

"(Faith-based funding) had never been an issue at all . . . until Mr. Tory made this an issue," Siemiatycki said.

Roman Catholic schools, already under the umbrella of the public system, shouldn't see any fallout once the dust settles because no politician would want to re-open the can of worms that dominated this campaign, Laxer said.

"And that's exactly what would happen if you tried to say, 'OK, well, if we're not going to have funding for other faith-based schools, we've got to question the funding for Catholic schools," he said.

A provincial referendum on Catholic funding is not unprecedented in Canada. The government of Newfoundland held two referenda in the 1990s and obtained two constitutional amendments from the federal parliament before scrapping its Catholic board.

Likewise, there were separate Protestant and Catholic school systems in Quebec until 1998 when the system was replaced with linguistically based secular school systems.

But Siemiatycki said he doesn't think any politicians "have the stomach" to broach the issue of Catholic school funding once the legislature resumes sitting.

Advocates for faith-based funding said Wednesday evening the voter backlash Tory suffered over the Conservative proposal won't stop them from lobbying the Ontario government over what one representative called a "question of fairness."

Howard English, a spokesman for the Public Education Fairness Network - a group representing several religious communities, said 53,000 children in some 400 private religious schools will still be outside the public education system after the provincial election.

"It might be the natural tendency of an elected official to say, 'I don't want to deal with this.' But there are realities that will face all elected officials, and the fairness issue is a reality that we still have to confront in Ontario," English said.

"Sooner or later, Ontario is going to have to deal with it."

Some provinces fund faith-based schools to varying extents. Quebec gives all faith-based schools about 60 per cent of the funding public schools receive. Alberta allows faith-based schools to be funded as part of public boards. It also provides 60 per cent of public-school funding to private schools, including faith-based ones.

Others, such as Nova Scotia, do not fund religious schools at all.

Without the spectre of faith-based funding looming over the legislature, Laxer predicted the government will move quickly to review the education funding formula, a complex set of rules for allocating dollars to schools.

"Now that faith-based schools is off the agenda, I think that the issue is going to move back to 'how do we establish permanent, long-term funding for the school system that is going to be manageable?"' he said.

The New Democrats had raised inadequacies in the education formula as a campaign issue, but they were largely drowned out in the din surrounding faith-based funding.

The Conservatives had promised an immediate review, while Premier Dalton McGuinty said he was targeting 2010 as an appropriate time to review the formula.