Good morning, everyone.
It was back to school this week with students across Alberta dutifully filing back into classrooms, pulling out their pencils and getting ready to hit the books. Although it’s not clear which books exactly they’ll be hitting.
Over the last week, the Alberta government has found itself in the middle of a maelstrom around its plan to remove any material deemed “explicit sexual content” from school and classroom libraries.
In a ministerial order issued in July, Education and Childcare Minister Demetrios Nicolaides laid out the standards that school boards were expected to enforce.
The province wanted the restricted material to be removed from school and classroom libraries by October. The order, however, did not come with any additional funding to support the policy, nor did it provide a definitive list of books to be banned.
So in stepped the Edmonton Public School Board, which late last week confirmed that it had created a list of 200 books it had determined needed to be removed from library shelves based on the provincial directive.
The list included a number of classics from well known authors, including Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.
“As a result of the ministerial order, several excellent books will be removed from our shelves,” Julie Kusiek, chair of the Edmonton board said in a statement.
The reaction to the list was immediate and harsh, particularly on social media, a place not known for nuance.
The outcry turned global quickly, especially after Canadian literary legend Margaret Atwood weighed in when her novel The Handmaid’s Tale also appeared on the list.
On X, she told kids to get a copy of her book now, “before they have public book burnings of it.” She later spoke of the ban in a speech she gave to an audience in Poland.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith accused the EPSB of “vicious compliance.”
“I think we need to exercise a little judgment here,” Smith said, adding that if schools need the government to “hold their hand through the process to identify what kind of materials are appropriate,” it would do so.
That was last week. By Monday the book ban that the government insists is not a ban was on pause.
Smith said the pause was only for a short period until the ministerial order is rewritten, so it could come any day now.
“The direction will be to take books with pornographic images out of the libraries and to leave the classics alone,” she said.
What the new order will look like is a mystery, so it’s unclear what books will be barred.
The Globe’s Marsha Lederman wrote about some of the books on the Edmonton list and what they might offer beyond the “sexual” content found within their forbidden pages.
Of course, this week’s fight has also been happening in the shadow of an unresolved labour dispute between the province and teachers, which could see them on strike or locked out within days, as well as a bigger push by the Alberta government to wade deeper into policies around sexuality and gender in schools.
The Globe’s Robyn Urback wrote in her column this week that Alberta’s new legislation requiring girls to prove they were female at birth to join a sports team is another “poorly thought-out policy” similar to the plan to restrict sexually explicit material in libraries.
So students, teachers and administrators now wait to see if they will still be allowed to pick up a copy of dystopian classics Brave New World or 1984 in their school library.
This is the weekly Alberta newsletter written by Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.