Newfoundland was a lot less than 50 years ago, back in the late 1990s. Perhaps you were thinking of La Révolution tranquille that ended  la Grande Noirceur in Québec, from 1959 to 1970.

http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/newfoundland-votes-down-church-schools/

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9volution_tranquille 

NFL had 2 referendums for replacing the archaic parochial school system patchwork with a single secular school system. The Catholic Church and other  churches wasted time and money fighting the clearly expressed public desire all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. That failure predicts what will happen if anyone tries the "founding document" and "Constitution" arguments. Constitutions, like the various bibles, are the work of humans and change over time. The Parochial School system was entrenched in the Terms of Union, but that did not hold up in the face of not one but two referendum results.