How Alberta is bringing American book bans to Canada
Far-right Christian nationalist groups imported U.S. censorship tactics to target literary classics and LGBTQ+ stories.
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This story was originally published at Ricochet.
Alberta’s conservative government announced last week that it was backing off on a policy that would have seen hundreds of literary classics banned from schools across the province for containing “explicit sexual content” to now only include books with sexually explicit images.
Education Minister Demetrois Nicolaides told reporters at a press conference on September 8 that visual depictions of sex had been the government’s concern from the start.
“An image can be understood and conveyed at any grade level with any degree of comprehension,” he said. “Whereas, of course, vocabulary and understanding progresses and develops throughout the school year.”
In late May, Nicolaides made a surprise announcement that the provincial government would be establishing restrictions on which books schools across the province could carry in their libraries. Premier Danielle Smith has never pledged to impose restrictions on school libraries.
Nicolaides said his announcement came after parents approached him in November with examples of “extremely graphic and age-inappropriate” books in their children’s public school libraries.
In a news release, the government provided four examples of graphic novels, three of which are explicitly 2SLGBTQ+ themed — Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe; Fun Homeby Alison Bechdel; Blankets by Craig Thompson; and Flamer by Mike Curato — linking to the explicit pages in question. The authors all told the Globe and Mail that the education minister was taking their work out of context.
Laura Winton, president of the Library Association of Alberta (LAA), told Ricochet that librarians are always making decisions about what material appears in their libraries and what doesn’t.
But there’s an important “value distinction to keep in mind,” she added.
“We think about collection building as just that — building, rather than taking away,” said Winton, who serves as the library director in the Edmonton suburb of Beaumont. “They’re thinking about how we prevent certain types of materials from landing in collections.”
Throughout the ordeal, Alberta’s UCP government insisted it wasn’t banning any books, but protecting children from being exposed to inappropriate materials that could be easily found elsewhere.
James Turk, who runs the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University, called the government’s claim that it wasn’t banning books “preposterous.”
“Historically, most censors deny that what they’re doing is censorship,” Turk told Ricochet. “In the mind of the censor, it’s always being done for a noble purpose, so they recoil at the suggestion that it’s censorship or banning.”
Using a censorship database as a how-to guide
It turned out that the “parents” Nicolaides referred to were in fact conservative advocacy groups, who had been lobbying the government to ban”sexually explicit” books.
Thanks to reporting from journalist Brett McKay at the Investigative Journalism Foundation, we know that conservative group Parents for Choice in Education (PCE) took credit for providing a list of “graphic books” available at Calgary Board of Education and Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB) libraries to Minister Nicolaides’ attention.
PCE executive director John Hilton-O’Brien is well-connected to the UCP. He’s the past president of the Wildrose Party, which merged with the Alberta PCs to form the UCP in 2017. From 2009 to 2014, Danielle Smith was the leader of the Wildrose Party, which included a stint as Leader of Opposition from 2012 onward.
The list of 36 allegedly inappropriate books PCE provided to the government was created by Action4Canada. The vehemently anti-2SLGBTQ+ group believes the Canadian government and education system has been “infiltrated by radical LGBTQ activists” and that sex education is part of a “global agenda to sexualize children, interfere with parental rights, eliminate the natural family and normalize pedophilia.”
Action4Canada boasted to supporters on May 26 that its members met with Nicolaides, calling it a “MASSIVE [sic]” victory against “pornographic books.”
It wasn’t just Action4Canada’s list of books that Alberta Education officials reviewed.
McKay obtained records through ATIP revealing that in November 2024, around the time Nicolaides claimed he was approached by “concerned parents,” chief of staff for education and childcare James Johnson shared a link to a searchable database of banned and challenged books in the U.S. that free expression organization PEN America compiled.
Johnson asked ministry staff if they could “see which books are banned the most” and check if they’re in school libraries.
Department staff also looked for titles censored in Austin, Texas, finding that most of them were available in Edmonton and Calgary public schools, and cross-referenced books available at these two school boards with a now-defunct amateur content rating system, Book Looks, which gives books a grade from 0 to 5 that corresponds with suggested age restrictions based on criteria including violence, profanity, nudity and “gender ideologies.”
Book Looks, which was shut down in March 2025, was developed by Emily Maikisch, a veteran of the far-right American parental rights group Moms for Liberty.
Heather Ganshorn, a researcher with public education advocacy group Support Our Students, told Ricochet that it’s unsurprising that the government would draw on resources that were used to ban books elsewhere.
“The playbook seems to be to consult these lists [of books] that have had some success of being banned in other jurisdictions, because you don’t really have to do the work if it’s already been done,” said Ganshorn.
These lists deliberately target 2SLGBTQ+ books to inflame traditionalist conservative sentiments and graphic novels because of their illustrations that can sometimes be “visually shocking,” she added.
“It’s taken out of context, and then they imply that much younger children than is actually the case were exposed to these materials,” said Ganshorn.
“You get people very worked up about a seven-year-old possibly pulling Gender Queer off their elementary library shelf.”
Months after his initial announcement, Nicolaides circulated a list of public schools in Calgary and Edmonton that carry the four books the ministry identified. All of the schools are either high schools or schools that include Grade 9 students, who would be in high school in Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, but are considered middle schoolers in B.C. and Alberta.
“There were no K-6 schools on that list,” noted Winton of the library association, adding that all four books would be appropriate for any library’s juvenile or teen section.
Ganshorn, who authored a recent Parkland Institute report outlining how the concept of “parental rights” is being weaponized against public education, noted that Nicolaides targeted public schools and not Catholic or charter schools, both of which receive equal operational funding to the public system.
“There is an agenda to smear public schools to drive support for privatization,” she said.
Public consultation, UCP style
While Nicolaides’s ministry consulted with conservative activist groups and used a database developed by a free speech organization as a how-to guide, the Alberta Teachers’ Association said none of its members were consulted on the UCP’s impending literary censorship regime.
Nor did the government reach out to anyone from the library association, which had to request a meeting with the minister.
On May 26 — the day of Nicolaides’s policy announcement — the government launched a two-week survey with leading questions, which could be answered by anyone, anywhere and as many times as they wanted.
Despite its limitations, the survey returned on June 20, showing 61 per cent of respondents have never been concerned about the presence of sexually explicit content in school libraries.
Of all the demographics asked whether the provincial government should set standards for how school boards select library materials, the most supportive was parents with kids in K-12 schools. But even among them, 49 per cent were opposed and 44 per cent were in favour.
Despite these inconvenient findings, the government insisted the survey shows “strong support” for the government’s predetermined course of action.
Days before the survey results were released, LAA members presented Nicolaides with the policies on library curation that already exist at school boards in Alberta, as well as some in Ontario, which provide an appeal mechanism for parents, students or educators who believe an item is inappropriate.
“There was certainly a decision made,” recalled Winton, the LAA president. “This was coming, and it didn’t, it didn’t really matter what we thought.”
EPSB’s ‘vicious compliance’
On July 10, Nicolaides issued his executive order #30/2025, which instructs school boards to ban “sexually explicit” materials from K-12 schools and restrict “non-explicit sexual material” to grades 10 to 12, giving them until October 1 to do so.
This order applied to written passages, illustrations, photographic or digital images, and video or audio files.
Additionally, the order requires school boards to compile a “publicly available listing of all school library materials,” and for “a school authority staff member” to ensure that students aren’t reading contraband books “that they would not otherwise be permitted to access if in a school library.”
In response to questions about the government targeting 2SLGBTQ+ content, Nicolaides insisted that his order isn’t “about erasing particular narratives from school libraries.”
“This is simply about ensuring young students are not exposed to content depicting oral sex, child molestation or other very inappropriate content,” said the minister, whose office circulated a list of specific sex acts that can’t appear in books, including masturbation, penetration and ejaculation.
To comply with the order, EPSB staff created a list of 200 books that will be banned from schools or restricted to just high school beginning in October, which was leaked to the press on August 28.
Books the board intended on banning entirely include Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and Portnoy’s Complaint by Phillip Roth, as well as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, an author whose right-wing politics greatly influenced the premier.
Other books, such as 1984 by George Orwell and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, would be restricted to libraries for Grades 10 to 12.
In response to news that her most celebrated book would be banned from Alberta’s second-largest school board, Atwood penned a satirical story about two 17-year-olds who “grew up and married each other, and produced five perfect children without ever having sex.”
“But while they were doing that, The Handmaid’s Tale came true and Danielle Smith found herself with a nice new blue dress but no job,” Atwood continued. “The end.”
At an unrelated August 29 press conference, Premier Smith accused the EPSB of “clearly doing a little vicious compliance” with the executive order, borrowing a phrase that appeared in progressive political commentator David Climenhaga’s blog earlier that day.
Maintaining that the government had no intention of banning literary classics, Smith mused about making Rand’s Atlas Shrugged “mandatory reading” for high school students so they can learn “how important it is that we value our entrepreneurs and we value a free-enterprise economy.”
The backtrack
On September 2, the government announced that it was pausing the book restrictions to rewrite Minister Nicolaides’s executive order while at the same time continuing to blame school boards for misunderstanding the initial order.
“It’s images that we’re concerned about, graphic images,” Smith said at an unrelated news conference in Medicine Hat, a small city in Alberta’s southeastern corner that she represents in the Legislature.
“We were hoping that the school boards would be able to identify those on their own and work with us to try to make sure that pornographic images are not being shown to young children.”
The following week, Nicolaides unveiled the revised order. In addition to applying strictly to images depicting sexual acts, the new order bans offending books from all K-12 schools. School boards now have until January to comply and won’t have to create a digital database of books in their collections.
Tanya Gaw, the CEO of Action4Canada, one of the conservative activist groups that lobbied Nicolaides last year to institute a book ban, called the government’s backtracking “problematic.”
“I don’t understand the rationale in removing these types of books from the list just because there aren’t any graphics,” Gaw told the Canadian Press. “Pornography is pornography.”
Turk of the Centre for Free Expression speculated that the government was “acutely embarrassed” by unfavourable international media coverage of their policy, which was written without “thinking through or understanding” its implications.
“Their real target from the beginning was the type of books the minister began with — that is graphic novels for young adults,” added Turk.
For Winton, it’s important to place this saga in the context of a chronically underfunded public education system, which has led to diminishing numbers of specialized teacher-librarians in schools — a point the teachers’ union has also made.
“It’s interesting to see at a time when we are pulling resources from libraries, when libraries are less and less well-supported, that what our government is interested in doing is not adding supports, not adding access, not adding resources for students, but in fact, taking things away,” she said.