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How ideological book censorship is threatening Canadian libraries

Little did I know the harm it was causing.

According to diversity bureaucrats in charge of libraries at Ontarios second-largest school board, I should never have been allowed anywhere near my favourite book, because it says nothing about my own lived experiences.

Recently, the Mississauga, Ontario-based citizens group Libraries Not Landfills exposed an internal training document from the local Peel District School Board (PDSB) containing instructions for librarians on how to destroy the vast bulk of their book collections for ideological reasons.

Citing a need to promote anti-racism, inclusivity and critical consciousness, the document explains how to remove any harmful, oppressive or colonial content.

Most books published before 2008 had to go; childrens titles like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and even Anne Franks Diary of a Young Girl, were pulled off the shelves. Such books are rife with explicit and implicit biases that make them inherently racist, classist, heteronormative, and/or sexist.

Books deemed harmful were to be destroyed in a sustainable manner, either shredded or landfilled. In an FAQ section, the document rationalized treating books as garbage by arguing that PDSB operates within a white supremacist structure and that these resources are to be weeded out as not inclusive, culturally responsive or relevant. Because of the harm they were causing, they could not be sold or donated.

News of the policy quickly created a media firestorm.

One PDSB student told the CBC that half the books in her schools library had disappeared over the summer, including such favourites as the Harry Potter and Hunger Games series. There were rows and rows of empty shelves with absolutely no books, she said. Public outrage followed.

Ontarios Education Minister, Stephen Lecce, immediately condemned the removal of books as offensive, illogical and counterintuitive. PDSB leadership, caught in the act, claimed it was all a simple miscommunication, although it was obvious from the document that staff were simply following instructions from board administrators.

PDSBs deliberate policy of book destruction provides clear evidence of the dangers posed by handing administrative control of public institutions to anti-racist activists operating under the guise of promoting diversity, inclusion and equity.

This rejection of the pluralism and freedom of thought inherent to expansive library collections is, unfortunately, infecting other components of the literary world as well, from book publishers to organizations that claim to defend Canadians freedom to read.

Together with a group of other childrens book authors, I wrote to the Writers Union of Canada, the Ontario Library Association and PEN Canada (a free expression lobby group) asking for their response to the PDSB book-burying scandal. Two offered only meek statements of indifference; PEN Canada never even bothered to respond.

As a former elementary school teacher, I have seen first-hand the wide diversity of Canadian childrens literature dating back decades. Shizuye Takashimas 1971 A Child in a Prison Camp, for example, recalls the authors experience in an internment camp in the Second World War. Tanzanian-Canadian Tololwa M. Mollels gorgeous The Orphan Boy won the prestigious Governor-Generals Literary Award for Illustration in 1990. There is no diversity problem in Canadian libraries that needs fixing.

The bureaucrats at PDSB attack timeless classics as Euro-centric texts that were penned long before students birth dates, and may not reflect the lived experiences of students.

But as a teacher, I found that classic literature such as Frances Hodgson Burnetts The Secret Garden had the power to shape all childrens young minds. In prose that inspires a sensitivity to the beauty of our language, the book showed my students how a simple Yorkshire cottage boy, Dickon, could transform two spoiled, upper-class English children with his simple, earthy values.

Similarly, Canadian author Joyce Barkhouses The Pit Pony vividly depicts the dangerous working conditions of turn-of-the-20th-century Cape Breton coal miners, including child labourers. Yes, Barkhouses characters are all white, but her books vivid picture of an earlier Canada allows our youngest citizens of whatever ethnic origin to learn about our shared history and strengthen Canadian identity in the next generation.

Insisting on diversity in each individual book, as the PDSB policy does, misses the larger picture: true diversity is achieved through a plurality of viewpoints, characters and stories within a librarys entire collection.

The PDSBs misguided book-burying crusade reminds me of the warning from the German poet Heinrich Heine: Those who burn books will in the end burn people.

Written in 1821, Heines prophecy was realized on May 10, 1933, when, under the Nazi regime, Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment Joseph Goebbels orchestrated the infamous mass burning of Jewish and un-German books at Berlins Opernplatz. This was not only a symbolic destruction of literature but a precursor to the devastating human atrocities that followed.

Well-written childrens books do not cause harm. They entertain, illuminate, enlighten and educate. They carry the legacy of our culture, the history of our societies, and the seeds of our future growth. To inspire a lifelong love of reading, we need libraries with shelves sagging under the weight of their collections. The real harm lies in destroying books.

Marjorie Gann is a Senior Fellow with the Aristotle Foundation and author of Five Thousand Years of Slavery, co-authored with Janet Willen. This column was adapted from the original full-length C2C Journal version.

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