How in Canada books are banned from reading
What does it have to do with the United States?
Not so long ago we wrote about Canadian libraries becoming a place for new migrants to come together. There take place concerts, master classes, and national culture festivals.
However, there are also challenges that library workers and staff face. It is not uncommon for parents or community activists to protest if a book collection contains something they don't think should any belong there. In recent months, this issue has become particularly acute.
However, it did not start in Canada, but in the United States. Therefore, Canadian experts strongly advise to keep a close eye on what is happening in the neighboring country: many phenomena originate in the U.S. and then spread around Canada.
One of those things is the books removal from libraries.
What's going on in the States
Last month, a school board in Tennessee, USA, voted unanimously to ban the Holocaust graphic novel "Maus", which won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, from being taught in classrooms. This outstanding work tells the story of a son trying to find common ground with his father through telling his father's story he was in the concentration camps. The novel depicts the Germans as cats and the Jews as mice. So here comes the title of the book.
This is not the only such case, but the tendency of parents, political activists, school board representatives, and legislators to argue that some books have no place in school libraries. It is, in a word, a protest against literature.
Libraries in the U.S. are on a new front line in a fierce political struggle for diversity and inclusion and have to deal with attempts to limit access to books and eventually face threats to the funding and operations.
State aid to all public libraries in Missouri remains in limbo amid a legal dispute over a policy that has resulted in a number of books being removed from school library shelves.
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Officials in a Texas county were considering closing public libraries instead of complying with a court order to return banned books to the shelves.
And, residents of a township in Michigan voted against a tax levy last fall to fund one of the community's only public libraries for the next 10 years, over the inclusion of LGBTQ books for young people in its collection.
What does Canada have to do with it?
Florian Gassner, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, explains this a little. He says that there is a long history of diverse practices like censoring books or any other content, that do not call it censorship.
In such circumstances, the various governing bodies do not directly ban any materials. Instead, rules are established that allow parents or community members decide what is acceptable for bookshelves in their community and what is not. And if the decision is not followed, libraries goy penalties.
When it comes to protecting children from inappropriate content, Gassner said book bans and library restrictions may not be so practical, since children can easily access graphic material in many other ways. At the very least, everyone has an Internet-enabled phone in their hands.
He said that the situation speaks more to "a rift" in society and how people position themselves on certain issues, but that "very dangerous and highly symbolic to start chipping away at our cultural archive" and the treasury of information and ideas stored in libraries.
Florian Gassner said it would be wise for Canadians to be "vigilant" about trying to ban or restrict something.
He sums it up this way: "Much of what happens in Canada is an aftermath of what happens in the United States".
But according to Wendy Wright, chair of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations' Intellectual Freedom Committee and the director of the public library in Smithers, B.C., "the political climate in the United States is already affecting libraries in this country, some of which have been the subject of protests.
She also pointed to recent cases in Manitoba in which protesters have called on local councils to force public libraries to remove certain books, and if not, have threatened to withdraw funding from libraries.
There was also an incident in February in Chilliwack, British Columbia, when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was called to investigate an unsubstantiated allegation that books in school libraries contained child pornography. It later turned out that the allegations were groundless.
Wright believes that this response from parents, activists, and community organizations signals a "cultural shift." She perfectly observes that libraries are doing "aren't doing anything different than they've ever done before in offering a wide range of books, services and programs to a diverse population with different perspectives."
