Vancouver’s Eastside is generally viewed as a liberal place, but today librarians there have a new battle on their hands.
“They are now spending their time looking for hate speech, which in Canada is an illegal thing,” Jen Ferguson, a Michif/Métis author with ancestral ties to the Red River, told a recent Vancouver Writers Fest session.
She recounted a conversation with a librarian in that part of the city: “She told me that her library has to flip through all the pages of young adult books when they’re returned to make sure that there aren’t hateful and harmful comments written in them.”
The culture wars have seeped across the border from the United States to Canada. The number of book challenges popping up there is nowhere on the same scale as in the US, where 2,532 books were banned in 2021-22, according to PEN America. But while most attempts to ban books in Canada aren’t holding up, they are occurring “every week”, CFE director James L. Turk told Crikey.
A library challenges database created by Toronto University’s Centre for Free Expression (CFE) in June 2022 contains more than 600 items. They stretch from 2010 up until the present and include books that have attracted complaints for supposed violence, illegal behaviour and content, sexism, racism against Indigenous people, age inappropriateness and anti-Christian content.
There are more than 30 Indigenous-authored books that have been banned or challenged in the US and Canada (though mainly in the US), according to the academic journal American Indians in Children’s Literature. In September some school libraries in an Ontario district of Canada removed thousands of books just because they were published in 2008 or earlier under a new “equitable curation cycle”.
Australia no exception
Writers warn that these challenges are part of a broader crackdown on human rights across the world — and Australia may not be immune.
“I am very certain it could happen in Australia,” Christy Jordan-Fenton, an award-winning Canadian children’s books author who co-wrote Fatty Legs with her late mother-in-law Inuvialuit Margaret Pokiak-Fenton, told Crikey. She was referring to what’s called “shadow” or “silent” banning — when books disappear from shelves without anything official put out against their use.
In October, Jordan-Fenton discovered via PEN America that their book was temporarily banned by the Duval County school district in Florida. Pokiak-Fenton was a survivor of the government-sponsored religious schools set up to assimilate Indigenous children into Canadian culture, and the book was an opportunity to be able to tell other people about what happened at the schools “in the same sort of way that Rabbit-Proof Fence informed Australia”, said Jordan-Fenton.
In Canada, the author said she has recently started to encounter “endless hurdles”, including extensive paperwork and a lengthy wait to book school visits in Ontario through the Catholic school board “which I have never encountered in the past”.
“I’m pretty much of the opinion that it is another form of shadow-banning,” said Jordan-Fenton. “It is not okay for Catholic schools funded by public tax dollars to push such an agenda, or for any school for that matter.”
Other forms of shadow-banning include putting books on higher shelves, imposing age restrictions to access them, administrators quietly instructing teachers and librarians not to use materials anymore without this being put into writing, and libraries stopping the purchase of certain books to avoid backlash, she said.
“I don’t know that in Australia or Canada we are going to see full-on book banning,” said Jordan-Fenton. “But people who don’t want to change and want to roll back the clock get really organised and very clever with what they’re doing.”
Diversity challenges
On Monday, Victoria’s oldest independent bookstore, Robinsons Bookshop, apologised after its owner Susanne Horman reportedly called for more picture books with “just white kids on the cover” in a series of posts on X.
“What’s missing from our bookshelves in store?” Horman tweeted from a now-deleted account. “Positive male lead characters of any age, any traditional nuclear white family stories, kids picture books with just white kids on the cover, and no wheelchair, rainbow or indigenous art, non indig [sic] aus history.”
In another post, Horman wrote: “Books we don’t need: hate against white Australians, socialist agenda, equity over equality, diversity and inclusion (READ AS anti-white exclusion), left wing govt propaganda. Basically the woke agenda that divides people. Not stocking any of these in 2024.”
Speaking in Vancouver, Ferguson said that stores such as Robinsons could be playing a part in encouraging diverse literature: “Indie bookstores control their stock 100%. They decide what they bring in, what they stock, if they have a special mission with their books. Corporate bookstores have other rules in place.”
When asked about book challenges and bans in general, president of the Australian School Library Association (ASLA) Martha Itzcovitz told Crikey, “I am more worried now than I ever have been in my career about this.”
“I had my very first book challenge last year from a parent who thought that books with characters in same-sex relationships didn’t belong in primary school libraries,” she said. It ended very reasonably, with everyone agreeing to disagree and no books were removed. “I think this shows that discussion and willingness to listen to others’ views are so important.”
But Itzcovitz added that she was seeing a backlash against school visits by LGBTQIA+ authors.
“I have spoken to a couple of LGBT authors over the last year who feel that they are excluded from invitations to certain schools and I have also spoken with teacher librarians who have been refused permission to invite certain LGBT authors to speak at both primary and secondary schools,” said Itzcovitz. The issues have been in faith-based schools and haven’t been resolved, she added.
Robin Stevenson is an award-winning queer Canadian author of more than 30 books for kids and teens including Kid Activists: True Tales of Childhood from Champions of Change.
Although most of her book challenges have happened in the US, she has also faced barriers to school visits in Canada.
“We are definitely seeing escalating challenges to any discussion of 2SLGBTQ+ issues in schools,” she told Crikey. “Anti-2SLGBTQ hate groups like Action4Canada are working hard to stir up homophobia and transphobia and I have no doubt we’re going to see a drastic rise in the number of challenges to queer books over these next months and years.”
Action4Canada, a conservative grassroots movement, has “a lot of the stuff on their website which is a copy and paste of Moms for Liberty,” referring to the US group that has advocated for bans there.
‘No legal basis’
In Canada, targeted books include some by a queer immigrant, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Harry Potter, Gender Queer and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.
Stevenson said the books fall into three categories: those with a main character who is Black or Indigenous or books about racism or civil rights, those with LGBTQIA+ characters or about queer history or rights, or those about sexual health or sex education or novels that deal with sexual content.
Nicole Moore, a professor in English and media studies at UNSW Canberra, told Crikey that in Australia there is centralised federal regulation of the classification and distribution of publications, unlike in the US or Canada.
In July, Dr Melissa Kang and Yumi Stynes’ book Welcome to Sex: Your no-silly-questions guide to sexuality, pleasure and figuring it out found itself the target of a campaign by Women’s Forum Australia to ban it from libraries and shops. Big W ultimately removed it from physical shelves to protect staff from abuse. The same month, Australia’s censors resisted calls to restrict Gender Queer, a gender and sexuality youth memoir by non-binary writer Maia Kobabe, after an anti-LGBTQIA+ activist complained to police.
Although both challenges were unsuccessful, Moore said that “groups tried to follow the US model last year and generated publicity”.
A waged war
Some Victorian schools have decolonised their collections in a bid to ensure that they are representative of their community, diverse, and respectful of all views. But this was not censorship, stressed The School Library Association of Victoria (SLAV) executive officer Dr Susan La Marca.
Itzcovitz said that there had been an “upsurge” in Australia of book weeks celebrating the freedom to read, now commonly held in North America, but she’d like to see more in schools and universities.
Banned in Australia, a historical project of AusLit, has a dataset looking at what books were banned, why and for how long. AusLit director Maggie Nolan said that while book banning “has not been an issue in Australia of the magnitude it has been in the US”, having this “means we are in a better position than most countries to make bannings and attempted bannings more visible and the system more accountable”.
Moore said that it was important that publicly funded reading facilities are “seen to be neutral services for all, with a straightforward commitment to making all books available without intervention by either government authorities or vested groups”.
Ferguson said that book challenges and bans “in Canada should be seen as like the canary in the mine metaphor — that book banning and book challenging is a starting place for worse things to come”.
“In the US, I have no rights over my like reproductive system, which is fucking bananas,” she said in Vancouver.
Ferguson stressed that even the “non-readers” must wage the war against a wave of oppression that in the end could affect everyone.
“That’s why we need to care, all of us and why we need to organise,” she said.
