Alberta's provincewide review and new standards for school library books, ostensibly aimed at removing “explicit sexual content,” raises troubling questions about the true motivations behind government policy and echoes a significant past legal battle over religious influence in public education.
While the stated goal is ensuring “age-appropriate school library materials,” the context suggests a potential departure from the government's duty of religious neutrality.
Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides said the move was a response to concerned parents who provided examples of problematic books.
However, conservative Christian activist groups like Action4canada and Parents for Choice in Education have claimed credit for supplying the government with lists of books they wanted removed: Gender Queer, Fun Home, Blankets, and Flamer. Each of these books prominently features 2SLGBTQ+ characters and themes, and Blankets critiques conservative evangelical communities directly.
This situation bears striking similarities to events that led to the 2002 Supreme Court of Canada decision in Chamberlain v. School District No. 36 (Surrey). In that case, the Surrey school board refused to approve three books as supplementary learning resources for kindergarten and Grade 1 classrooms because they depicted same-sex parented families.
The Supreme Court majority ultimately found the board's decision to be unreasonable and unlawful. A central reason for the court's ruling was the finding that the Surrey board's decision was “significantly influenced by religious considerations.” The majority noted that the board's “overarching concern” was the “controversy in light of some parents' religious objections to the morality of same-sex relationships.”
In the majority's reasoning, decisions cannot be based on religious views that “deny equal recognition and respect to the members of a minority group” or use the “religious views of one part of the community to exclude from consideration the values of other members of the community.”
The court in Chamberlain explicitly stated that a school board violates the “principles of secularism and tolerance” when it proceeds on an “exclusionary philosophy, acting on the concern of certain parents about the morality of same-sex relationships, without considering the interest of same-sex parented families and the children who belong to them in receiving equal recognition and respect in the school system.”
Justice Louis Lebel found the district's decision “not just unreasonable but illegal” because it was “fundamentally motivated by accommodating the moral and religious belief of some parents that homosexuality is wrong.”
The parallels to Alberta's situation are striking. If the Alberta government's policy on school library books is being driven by organizations whose motivation stems from religious or moral disapproval of 2SLGBTQ+ identities and themes, then it faces the same challenges that the Surrey school board did.
Using the concerns of groups whose views are rooted in exclusionary religious beliefs about 2SLGBTQ+ people to determine which books are acceptable appears to directly contravene the principle of secular, inclusive public education as articulated by the Supreme Court in Chamberlain and the duty of religious neutrality established in MLQ v Saguenay (2015).
Public schools must be safe and inclusive spaces for all students, reflecting the diversity of Canadian society. Allowing religious or moral objections to the existence or validity of certain identities to dictate educational resource policy risks marginalizing students with those identities and undermining the fundamental principle of tolerance and respect for diversity that should underpin public education.
Our schools should be spaces where students can discover who they are and feel supported at every step in that journey. Banning 2SLGBTQ+ books from our schools sends the message that the province wants to ban 2SLGBTQ+ students next.
The Alberta government's actions appear to prioritize the demands of specific religious conservative groups over the principles of secularism, inclusivity, and equal recognition for all families and identities within the school system, potentially following the path the Supreme Court has already deemed unlawful in the context of educational decision-making influenced by exclusionary religious views.