High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Manitoba Schools Question was a political crisis in the Canadian Province of Manitoba that occurred late in the 19th century, involving publicly funded separate schools for Roman Catholics and Protestants. The crisis eventually spread to the national level, becoming one of the key issues in the federal election of 1896 and resulted in the defeat of the Conservative government, which had been in power for most of the previous thirty years. Because of the close linkage at that time between religion and language, the Schools Question raised the deeper question whether French would survive as a language or a culture in Western Canada.