Alberta Premier Danielle Smith (right) stands with Minister of Education and Childcare, Demetrios Nicolaides, following a swearing in ceremony in May, 2025. Nicolaides announced a ministerial order declaring texts with certain subject matter must be eliminated from school libraries by October 1.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
Kit Dobson is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary.
Back-to-school season arrives with new uncertainties in Alberta this fall. The usual jitters of new classes, peer groups and seating plans come alongside a shroud of uncertainty hanging over school libraries.
Over the summer break, Alberta Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides announced ministerial order 30, which bears the title “Standards for the Selection, Availability, and Access of School Library Materials.” This order, which comes after the Minister expressed concern over “sexually explicit” materials found in school libraries, provides direction to schools and school boards across Alberta. It declares that “explicit sexual content” must be eliminated from school libraries by October 1, and that school authorities are to have policies in place to govern such materials by January 1, 2026. No funding is being given to support these new directives.
The Alberta Teachers’ Association has decried this arbitrary increase to the workloads of teachers and teacher-librarians, and a survey revealed most Albertans believed the province should not create precisely the order that Mr. Nicolaides now has. In doing so, Alberta has joined a culture war about books and book banning that has exploded across North America in the last half-decade.
Earlier: Alberta to ban books deemed sexually explicit from school libraries
The Minister has claimed that this policy “was never about banning books.” While commenters such as representatives of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association have disagreed, what Mr. Nicolaides claims is perhaps true, but only if one uses rather twisted logic to get there. Rather than banning specific book titles, the ministerial order instead bans large swaths of content. Specific book titles are merely part of the material caught in the broad definitions of the Minister’s order, an order that identifies a series of sexual acts or descriptions that are now deemed to be “explicit” and therefore inappropriate.
We can certainly debate what is appropriate for whom and when. Such debates are widespread in this time. I would like, however, to place this ministerial order in context. Others before me have lamented this move by the Alberta government, deeming it – as I do too – as a distraction that targets vulnerable groups, especially LGBTQ2S+ youth. Playing into contemporary moral panics about children and sexuality (and ignoring the fact that any child with the internet on their phone has access to much more sexually explicit material than one tends to find in the library), the government’s move may satisfy Danielle Smith’s conservative base, but risks harming others in doing so.
This ministerial order, moreover, resembles policies and legislation that have been announced in the United States in the past few years. In that country, attacks on individual books seem to be slowing. After several years of massive year-over-year increases, the American Library Association reported a decline in challenges and bans of individual books in 2024. Instead, the ALA suggests, the new line of attack against books has scaled up to organized movements. These movements are attacking libraries and schools themselves, with these bodies being at risk of being defunded, or even, as in the case of the Library of Congress, denounced by President Donald Trump, who summarily fired head librarian Carla Hayden last May.
I have been observing these trends for some time. I teach a course on the topic of challenged and banned books at the University of Calgary. My class has included the book Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. This book is one of the four identified by the Alberta government in their initial press conference, after having been tipped off by a conservative activist group about the book’s contents. (Mr. Nicolaides has stated that he has not read the books under discussion.) My class will include this book again this fall.
In the U.S., policies that have banned broad swaths of books have led to entire libraries being closed. After a somewhat similar policy passed in Florida in 2023, schools and school staff found themselves in the challenging position of potentially committing a third-degree felony crime should a student gain access to material deemed to be inappropriate. Some school libraries completely emptied their shelves; other schools just closed their libraries. A pall was cast over books themselves, their contents deemed so dangerous that students should not gain access to them at all. Such patterns have repeated across multiple states. Book banning no longer needs to be about individual titles; now it is about ideas, concepts – or, indeed, elements of human anatomy and sexuality – that the government has deemed to be out of bounds.
Will such a chill be cast over Alberta schools and, more broadly, society? PEN Canada President Ira Wells has called the Alberta book bans an act of “cultural vandalism.” Interestingly, the ministerial order does not specify penalties for what might happen should a library not adhere to the new guidelines. That the order so clearly mirrors what has taken place in parts of the U.S., however, should be noted by Canadians as a crucial ramping up of the stakes in the current culture wars around books in this country.
As a professor of literature, I often find myself saying that I am glad that we, as a society, continue to take books so seriously that we have such heated debates about them. Books clearly matter – and matter profoundly. As the new school year arrives in Alberta, however, I have grave concerns about the direction these debates are taking. It is my profound hope that Canadians are taking note of the censorious wave that is spreading across North America, and how this wave has descended with force upon Alberta. As we observe the resulting chill, it is my profound hope that we defend the Charter-protected right to freedom of expression in this time.