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July 4th, the Conservative Alberta government signed a ministerial order banning any books with “explicit sexual content” from schools, excepting religious texts. Schools are required to be in compliance by October 1st—a very quick turnaround to sift through thousands of titles. The largest school district in the province, Edmonton Public School Board, released a list of 200 books to be removed from school library shelves under this order, including The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
In response, Margaret Atwood wrote a satirical short story, saying, “Here’s a piece of literature by me, suitable for seventeen-year-olds in Alberta schools, unlike — we are told — The Handmaid’s Tale. (Sorry, kids; your Minister of Education thinks you are stupid babies.)” The story is about two “very, very good children” who “grew up and married each other, and produced five perfect children without ever having sex.” They “practised selfish rapacious capitalism” and “never died, because who wants to dwell on, you know, death and corpses and yuk?” Meanwhile, “The Handmaid’s Tale came true and Danielle Smith found herself with a nice new blue dress but no job. The end.”
Danielle Smith claims the Edmonton School Board is practicing “vicious compliance” with this list and that books like The Handmaid’s Tale were never intended to be banned. She said the government will “hold their hand through the process to identify what kind of materials are appropriate.”
But The Handmaid’s Tale does contain depictions of sex. In fact, it’s an important part of the book. The “handmaids” referred to in the title are raped to produce children. These scenes are described on the page. Under this ministerial order as it is worded, The Handmaid’s Tale is exactly the kind of book the Alberta government is requiring be removed from school library shelves.
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Of course, it isn’t the book the Conservatives had in mind. The examples given were LGBTQ+ books, not classics that are taught across the country. They want schools to see through the letter of the law to the intent, which is to censor the kinds of books they find dangerous or overly sexual—which usually means queer books. They just don’t want to have to spell out their bigotry explicitly.
Ira Wells, president of anti-censorship group PEN Canada, calls this the biggest book ban of its kind in Canada, saying,
“What the government of Alberta is doing here is book banning. It is literary censorship and we should use those words.
All parents — myself included — are concerned about the media that our children consume. We want to be sure that our children are consuming age-appropriate media.
But here we have a case where partisan politicians are taking it upon themselves to determine what our children should read. That’s a Rubicon that we don’t want to be crossing.”
Read more about this story at Global News.