Alberta’s Minister of Education and Childcare, Demetrios Nicolaides, says Premier Danielle Smith’s government has found inconsistent standards among school libraries.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
Alberta’s government is planning to set new requirements for school libraries by this fall, prohibiting books that the province deems age-inappropriate because of what it qualifies as sexually explicit content.
Demetrios Nicolaides, the province’s Education and Childcare Minister, said Monday that Premier Danielle Smith’s government has found inconsistent standards among school libraries. Education boards take different approaches to the books available for kindergarten to Grade 12 students, he said, adding that many boards do not have strong enough safeguards in place.
Although the province has previously provided some guidelines for books, it has been only voluntary for school libraries to follow them. Alberta would now require boards to implement and publicize new age-appropriate requirements by the start of the 2025-26 school year.
The policies will apply to public, separate, francophone, charter and independent schools. But the changes are not expected to affect materials in non-school libraries, including 55 municipal libraries located within schools.
“School libraries spark imagination and foster a life-long love of learning within our children,” Mr. Nicolaides told reporters in Calgary. “Yet, unfortunately, through investigations conducted by my office, we have found books in K-12 schools that show extremely age-inappropriate content.”
The age appropriateness of books in school libraries is a complex issue that has led to political disputes and legal challenges. Some argue that libraries should only offer books that are considered appropriate for specific age groups, while others believe that students should have the freedom to choose what they read.
Over the past few years, the scale of such challenges has risen considerably, with widespread activism and organized efforts toward book bans, particularly about LGBTQ subjects.
Mr. Nicolaides acknowledged that the province does not currently have the authority to remove or ban books from school libraries. However, he said, he does not anticipate any future legislative action from his United Conservative Party to change that because “there is already broadly that authority for the minister to set standards and policies with aspects that deal with education.”
The new standards have not yet been firmly developed, he added. The province is seeking public feedback from residents through online surveys over the next few months before providing further details on the requirements for schools.
Still, the minister clarified, the new policies would say “something to the effect that books containing graphic depictions of sexual acts, molestation or self harm cannot be permitted in elementary schools or in junior high schools. That will be, at a very high level, some of the guardrails we’re looking to establish.”
Later on Monday, in a statement on social media, Ms. Smith said children in school are being exposed to material that “strips away their innocence” at a young age, adding it has rightfully upset some parents.
“This isn’t about banning books. It’s about protecting kids,” she said.
The Premier was not made available to take any questions from reporters Monday.
Edmonton and Calgary’s public school boards said the Alberta government’s announcement was a surprise to them.
“Both our divisions follow established, rigorous processes to ensure that library resources are age-appropriate and relevant for students,” trustees from both divisions said in a joint statement Monday.
“This unilateral announcement undermines the spirit of partnership we expect.”
The province said it found “multiple books with explicit sexual content” as part of the investigation conducted by Mr. Nicolaides’s office. But it only provided reporters with a list of four examples, each of which are graphic novels and depict LGBTQ or coming-of-age subjects: Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe; Fun Home by Alison Bechdel; Blankets by Craig Thompson; and Flamer by Mike Curato.
The Globe and Mail contacted all four authors. Each of them said they had not been consulted by Alberta before their books were included in the list, adding that the provincial government had taken their work out of context.
“I only found out about this when you got in touch,” Mr. Thompson, an Oregon-based graphic novelist, said in an interview Monday. His book is a coming-of-age autobiography, he said, that recalls his own childhood in an evangelical Christian family.
“There is nothing sexual in there,” he said, adding that the excerpts highlighted by the province as sexually explicit are dialogue from the mouths of bullies insulting the protagonist or the words of a fundamentalist man at the character’s church.
“It’s a very slippery slope that this is happening,” he said. “Because if the Bible were to be illustrated, it would certainly be an X-rated book.”
Mr. Curato, a Massachusetts-based illustrator, agreed. “Protecting the right to read is protecting the right to exist,” he told The Globe.
“Anything in my book that they’re banning came from my own life as a queer person. Does that mean the experience of my 14-year-old self that’s in my work is not appropriate for other 14-year-old kids to read now? I’m shocked this is happening in Canada.”
He urged Albertans to take the matter seriously by responding to the province’s surveys, because he has seen efforts to ban books “morphing into a way in which queer and trans people can be removed from every other aspect of our society.”
In the United States, the debate over book bans has recently reached the Supreme Court. Last month, a children’s picture book about a puppy at a Pride parade by a Vancouver Island author was among several works at the centre of a court challenge over whether parents have the constitutional right to opt their children out of lessons involving works with LGBTQ characters.
Asked whether Alberta is prepared to defend its new policies in court, Mr. Nicolaides said the province would not rule out legally defending its standards, saying it’s early in the process to “jump too far ahead.”
As a parent himself, he said the issue is serious. “If there was a book on astrophysics that had graphic sexual content, I would have the exact same concerns.”
Joseph Jeffery, chair of the non-profit Canadian School Libraries and a teacher-librarian in British Columbia, said it is not uncommon for parents to voice their complaints about the appropriateness of a particular book that their children have brought home from school or are being taught in the classroom.
“But this is the most restrictive rhetoric against books that we’ve seen of this nature in Canada so far,” he said. “We’ve been hearing of this happening in the U.S., but it has not reached the point of a provincial government saying these things here yet. And I’m afraid of how vague they are being with their new policies because it means we don’t know how far they will reach ahead.”