Here are the secret lists of banned books from Alberta's 2 largest school boards
The Calgary Board of Education removed 42 books from its libraries and the Edmonton Public School Board removed 33 in response to an order from Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides.
Earlier this month, a provincial order requiring school boards in Alberta to ban books that portray “any explicit visual depiction of a sexual act” from their libraries, save for textbooks, went into effect.
Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides’s order #034/2025, which he issued in October, required school boards to submit lists of the books they were removing from their libraries to his office by the end of the month.
At the beginning of the new semester a few weeks ago, journalist Janet French reported for CBC News that some of Alberta’s biggest school boards had removed dozens of titles to comply with Nicolaides’s edict, but none would identify which ones.
The Orchard filed access to information requests with the Calgary Board of Education (CBE) and Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB), the province’s largest with 143,000 and 121,000 students, respectively, for copies of the lists they were required to send to Nicolaides.
Both school boards replied promptly and waived all fees, due to multiple people making the same request.
The documents reveal that CBE removed 42 distinct titles and EPSB removed 33. (The CBE list includes 44 entries, but two titles are repeated; the EPSB told CBC News that it had banned 34 titles, but only 33 appear on their list.)
There are just seven titles that appear on both lists.
In May 2025, Nicolaides made a surprise announcement that the province would move to restrict which books can be held in school libraries, citing concerns from “parents” who brought to his attention the presence of “extremely graphic and age-inappropriate material” in their kids’ Calgary and Edmonton public school libraries.
The parents in question were in fact representatives of extremist anti-2SLGBTQ+, groups.
Nicolaides specified four graphic novels in particular: Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe; Fun Home by Alison Bechdel; Blankets by Craig Thompson; and Flamer by Mike Curato, with a new release providing out of context panels to show how beyond the pale they are. All but Blankets are 2SLGBTQ+ themed.
CBE and EPSB have both banned Gender Queer and Blankets, but Fun Home was only banned by EPSB, according to their respective lists. Neither removed Flamer from their libraries, which based on the most damning examples the government could find for its news release, does not appear to actually include any portrayal of sex.
More than three-quarters of EPSB’s list consists of multiple volumes of three series: Brian K. Vaughan’s Saga, Garth Ennis’s Preacher and Kanoko Sakurakoji’s Black bird.
If we count each series as one title, then the EPSB has only banned nine titles. For CBE, that figure is still 37.
While EPSB banned the first nine volumes of Saga, CBE was more discriminate, banning only volumes one, two, four, seven and nine. CBE also banned the second volume of Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man saga.
Each school board banned different volumes of alleged sexual predator Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. CBE banned volume six, whereas EPSB banned volume one. CBE also banned the first volume of Gaiman’s American Gods series, but not EPSB.
This was Nicolaides’s second attempt at a book-banning ministerial order. His first, #030/2025, was issued in July and required school boards to ban all “explicit sexual content” and restrict “non-explicit sexual content” to high schools.
So broad was this order that EPSB prepared a list of about 200 books that it would ban or restrict, including Premier Danielle Smith’s favourite book Atlas Shrugged, as well as literary classics such as The Handmaid’s Tale and The Color Purple, costing the board $43,000 to hire 11 teachers to identify these books over a month in the summer.
This was all just a big misunderstanding, Smith and Nicolaides insisted, with the premier accusing EPSB of engaging in “a little vicious compliance.”
The order was intended to simply ban images of sex acts, they insisted, a caveat that appears nowhere in the original order, so Nicolaides revoked #030/2025 and replaced it with #034/2025 a few months later, which specifically prohibits “visual depictions” of sexual acts for all grades.
Saucy little monkey boy that Nicolaides is, his executive orders included an extraordinarily detailed definition of explicit sexual content in the first order and sexual acts in the second, which are identical:
(i) masturbation, including touching of a person’s own genitals or anus with a hand, finger, artificial sexual organ or other substitute for a sexual organ,
(ii) penetration of the penis into the vagina or anus,
(iii) contact of a sexual nature between the genitalia, mouth, hand, finger or other body part with the unclothed genitalia, pubic area, buttocks, anus or, if the person is female, the breast of another person,
(iv) ejaculation onto or into another person, or( v) the use of artificial sexual organs or substitutes for sexual organs on the clothed or unclothed genitalia, pubic area, buttocks, anus, or, if the person is female, the breast of another person…
CBE’s list, unlike EPSB’s, notes which subsection(s) of Nicolaides’s order each title falls under. The only one that doesn’t include sexual contact that falls short of full penetration (iii), is Vaughan’s Saga volume seven, which is banned solely for featuring masturbation (i).
Other notable titles banned by CBE are:
A Game of Thrones: The Graphic Novel, Volume One by Daniel Abraham;
George Orwell’s 1984: The Graphic Novel by Matyáš Namai;
The Book of Genesis by Robert Crumb;
Breakdown: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! by Art Spiegelman;
Introducing the Enlightenment by Lloyd Spencer and Andrzej Krauze;
Andy Warhol by Isabel Kuhl;
and Introducing Camus by David Zane Mairowitz and Alain Korkos.
See the lists for yourself below.
Hey Jeremy, I was the one who made the original Access to Information request to the Calgary Board of Education (Reference No. 2026-G-0001) for the list of books. I’m so glad it’s out there now for all to see! I’m slowly working through all the books. Book banning is a deeply disturbing practice and a very slippery slope!
Saucy little monkey boy wasn't the first descriptor that occurred to me but I'm definitely warming up to it!