Alberta’s Book Ban Is a Blatant Act of Cultural Vandalism

On May 26, Alberta announced that it was entering the book-banning business. “Multiple books found in some school libraries show extremely graphic and age-inappropriate content,” warned a government press release. To save Alberta’s children from this material, the government promised to act: first, by inviting Albertans to provide feedback on what is “acceptable for school library collections,” and second, by setting province-wide standards that every school board will be required to implement before classes resume in the fall.

When The Tyee pointed out that three of the four targeted books featured LGBTQ+ narratives, Minister of Education and Childcare Demetrios Nicolaides shot back: “The fact that our actions of protecting young students from seeing porn, child molestation, self-harm and other sexual material in school libraries are being labelled as anti-LGBTQ is frankly irresponsible.”

Book banners can always be counted upon to deny that label while simultaneously invoking children’s innocence to justify the very censorship they disavow. “This isn’t about banning books,” Premier Danielle Smith posted on X. “It’s about protecting kids from graphic, sexually explicit content that has no place in a classroom.” (None of the books appear to have been part of any classroom curriculum, nor were students compelled to read them.)

Let’s be clear on our definitions. A book “ban” is “the removal of a title from a library because someone considers it harmful or dangerous,” Emily Drabinski, former president of the American Library Association, told NPR. A book “challenge” is when someone raises an objection to a book. All four titles initially challenged by the government—Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Craig Thompson’s Blankets, and Mike Curato’s Flamer—were quickly removed from school shelves in Calgary and Edmonton. Trustees claim the books have been pulled for review. In the meantime, they are subject to a de facto ban from Alberta’s schools.

The government’s actions raise several questions, such as what constitutes “age-appropriate” and how is “explicit sexual content” being defined. (One cherry-picked quote used to justify the government’s fear mongering describes the “painful, itchy beginnings of my breasts.” If Alberta’s elected officials find that titillating, they should seek counselling.)

More fundamentally, Albertans must now consider whether partisan elected officials have a mandate to cull the province’s libraries to reflect their own values. Smith may have won political power, but does that power include the ability to decide what children are allowed to read?

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Book bans have surged across North America. PEN America has tracked nearly 16,000 such cases in American public schools since 2021—“a number not seen since the Red Scare McCarthy era of the 1950s,” the organization states. These bans primarily target LGBTQ+ narratives or books dealing with race and people of colour. Nearly half of the 10,000 books banned in the 2023/24 school year were removed from schools in Florida.

Indeed, Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s crusade against “LGBTQ indoctrination” is an obvious source of inspiration for the Alberta initiative. The Smith government’s use of out-of-context quotes and images as scare tactics (complete with attention-grabbing content warnings) calls back to DeSantis’s “Year of the Parent” campaign in 2022, in which thousands of titles were stripped from the shelves. Two of the specific books that DeSantis targeted—Gender Queer and Flamer—are at the centre of the Smith government’s current campaign.

As in Florida, Alberta’s blatant act of cultural vandalism is cloaked in the rhetoric of “parents’ rights.” The government’s survey asked how library books should be “selected and managed.” The responses will likely be used both to defend decisions politicians have already made and to ban efforts to come. Ultimately, the survey seems designed to provide the government with maximum discretion. It defines “sexually explicit content” as descriptions or illustrations “of sexual behavior or sexual acts of any kind”—a definition broad enough to include, for example, the dictionary, which has indeed been banned in some Florida schools.

This is not a neutral exercise. After providing survey takers with a link to “disturbing” content available in Alberta’s schools, the survey asks: “How do you think school libraries should handle materials with sexually explicit content?” Note the question quietly assumes that we’re in agreement that sexually explicit content is already a problem for schools. It’s now a matter of how to handle it.

Other questions cater directly to the parental rights groups determined to remove LGBTQ+ material from the shelves. Survey takers are asked whether parents and guardians should play a role in “reporting or challenging” any “sexually explicit content”—and are then asked whether such content requires parental consent. One option offered is the removal of the material, which is to say that Albertans are being asked to endorse a book ban.

A major flaw in Alberta’s approach is its use of isolated images ripped from graphic novels to imply schools are awash in pornography. For nearly a century, free speech jurisprudence has emphasized that obscenity be judged in the context of an entire work—its structure, intent, and overall effect on the reader—and not by individual sentences or images. (That was the core of judge John Woolsey’s reasoning in his landmark 1933 decision lifting the ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses.) Those quick to denounce works by Mike Curato or Alison Bechdel should apply the same standard: read the whole book, not just the most salacious pages.

There is also the matter of who gets to shape the future of Alberta’s school libraries. You might assume such a survey would be limited to parents with children in the system. But the survey invites responses from any “interested Albertan,” and in practice, anyone can take it. I took it from Ontario. When the government weaponizes the results to justify book banning, Albertans will never know the origins of the voices that purport to speak for them.

Alberta’s book-banning process is a victory for the Parents for Choice in Education and Action4Canada, the social conservative activist groups that appear to have influenced, or enabled, the Smith government to act.

That government is claiming an extraordinary new power. Across the country, the contents of school libraries are determined by school boards, not moral gatekeepers. If it gets its way, Alberta’s United Conservative Party will enjoy unprecedented control over what the province’s children can voluntarily check out from a library. The likely result is that the “rights” of one red-pilled faction will trump the rights of everyone else. Most importantly, they will trump the rights of children to make decisions for themselves.

Smith’s move hastens the arrival of American-style culture-war politics in Canada. And we know exactly where things are headed. In the US, similar schemes started with books like Gender Queer and Flamer but ended in a mass purge of acclaimed literary works. The Alberta government’s capacious definition of “sexually explicit content” easily encompasses Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In fact, Action4Canada has already compiled extensive lists of what it would bar from the nation’s schools. It includes Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, John Green’s Looking for Alaska, and Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle. Voices declaring war on some of the brilliant storytelling of our era are now shaping Alberta’s education policy.

If the goal is to shield children from graphic sexual content, the Alberta government is doomed to fail. We live in a moment when middle and high school students walk around with a vast library of pornography in their pockets, when hard-core videos featuring every conceivable kink and fetish are universally available, and when social media algorithms are force-feeding children images over which parents have absolutely zero control. Banning library books is a refusal to deal with the complicated digital reality kids already inhabit.

Still, censorship has its uses. It can be a powerful tool in rallying a base against an outgroup or a scapegoat. “Parents are right to be upset,” Smith posted on social media, in a transparent attempt to inflame passions. Alberta’s children, she claimed, were falling victim to “material that strips away their innocence at far too young an age.”

Banning books won’t preserve childhood innocence. But it will rob young people of stories that might have enriched or validated their lives, and it will teach others that censorship is the solution to ideas you find challenging or contrary to your personal values.

Not long ago, in criticizing the “mission creep” of regulatory bodies, Smith spoke out against an “official version of truth” being imposed by government or professional associations. “George Orwell’s fictional Nineteen Eighty-Four should remain fiction,” she said. Now, she proposes guidelines that could ban Nineteen Eighty-Four from schools in her own province. Orwell turns in his grave.