If the UCP government is concerned about the age appropriateness of books in school libraries, then it should ensure school boards have the funding necessary to hire more teacher-librarians, the head of Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) says.
Last week, Minister of Education Demetrios Nicolaides announced that the provincial government will establish stricter guidelines about what books can be in school libraries by September, claiming that a group of concerned parents approached him with a list of “incredibly inappropriate” books they had found in Edmonton and Calgary public schools.
In a news release, the province singled out four graphic novels in particular—Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe; Fun Home by Alison Bechdel; Blankets by Craig Thompson; and Flamer by Mike Curato—all of which deal with 2SLGBTQ+ or coming-of-age themes. The release provided excerpts of sexualized context that the authors all say were taken out of context.
It turns out, as per reporting from Brett McKay at the Investigative Journalism Foundation, that the books were brought to the minister’s attention by conservative lobbying groups Parents for Choice in Education and Action4Canada, both of which boasted about their impact on the government’s announcement.
Parents for Choice in Education (PCE), led by former Wildrose Party founding member John Hilton O’Brien, is among Alberta’s most significant anti-2SLGBTQ+ lobby groups and a strident proponent of private schools. During former premier Jason Kenney’s government, PCE was a leading voice arguing against legislation that mandated schools to support gay-straight alliance clubs if students requested them.
The Kenney UCP was happy to meet PCE’s request, and in return PCE campaigned heavily for Kenney in the 2017 UCP leadership race.
Rather than acting on behalf of “far-right special interest groups” that have long targeted 2SLGBTQ+ students and teachers, ATA president Jason Schilling says the government should leave decisions about school libraries to the experts—teacher-librarians.
Alberta Teacher's Association president Jason Schilling says the provincial government needs to provide more funding to hire teacher-librarians if it wants to ensure age-appropriate material in school libraries. Credit: ATA.
The problem is that the number of educators filling this role has declined immensely throughout the province. According to the ATA, there are fewer than 10 teacher-librarians in schools across Alberta.
“Most positions have disappeared and been taken over by a library tech or another support staff at the school,” said Schilling. “To have an actual teacher librarian in school [is] very rare now.”
A teacher-librarian, Schilling added, doesn’t make decisions about which books can appear in a school’s library alone, but is able to use their informed perspective to work with school boards and teachers.
“They have a level of expertise that helps curate books, and they may build relationships with kids and set things up so that we're making sure that we have the right books, age and grade appropriate books, in our schools,” he said.
As it stands, school boards set their own policies on which books are age appropriate for their libraries, with voluntary provincial guidelines designed to assist them.
The Edmonton and Calgary public school boards—the province’s two largest—said in a joint statement that they have their own “established, rigorous” procedures for ensuring that books in their school libraries are age-appropriate, with “clear mechanisms in place” for community members to raise objections.
“I'm not quite sure what the problem is that we're trying to fix,” said Schilling, “but having a teacher-librarian in the school just brings another level of expertise that is beneficial to everybody working in the school and the students who attend those schools.”
In a May 26 statement, Canadian School Libraries board chair Joseph Jeffrey said that the organization is “deeply troubled” by Nicolaides’ announcement.
Echoing Schilling’s concern of underfunding, Jeffrey noted that the Alberta School Library Association was forced to dissolve last year due to declining membership.
“There is no one size fits all model that can easily be applied to every school. Without trained specialists to make these decisions, it is not surprising that issues would arise,” Jeffrey wrote.
In a May 29 letter to Minister Nicolaides, Library Association of Alberta president Laura Winton called the UCP policy “an explicit form of censorship as decisions that require the expertise of educators and librarians will be made by politicians,” emphasizing that no other Canadian province has taken this measure.
Objections to content in school libraries, however, don’t appear to be a major issue in Alberta.
Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Free Expression has a database of challenges to items in library catalogues across Canada from 1976 to 2025.
Since it’s based on voluntary submissions from librarians, the dataset is limited, but one can still draw inferences based on the information included.
The database lists just two challenges to library collection in K-12 schools in Alberta, neither of which were initiated by parents.
In 2018, Alberta Education objected to “graphic representation of sensitive content,” including sexual assault, in the graphic novel Betty: The Helen Betty Osbourne Story by David Robertson, which details the abduction and murder of a 19-year-old residential school survivor in 1971.
The ministry placed the book on its list of books not recommended for classrooms, but emphasized that it’s “ultimately up to [teachers] to decide what resources are used to teach students.”
More recently, in 2024, an administrator at the Calgary Catholic School Division objected to the presence of children’s book Phoenix Gets Greater by Marty Wilson-Trudeau and Phoenix Wilson in a pile of recently purchased books for a K-9 school, arguing that the book contradicted Catholic teachings by having a 2-Spirited protagonist.
The school’s librarian removed the book from its catalogue and urged other division schools’ librarians to be cautious about purchasing the book, since their school’s administrators may object to it.
While Nicolaides’ announcement specifically targeted public schools in Alberta’s two largest cities, concerns about the propriety of books in school libraries tend to have more purchase in rural Alberta.
Schilling, who began his career as a teacher in the rural southern Alberta Palliser Regional Division, is attuned to these sensitivities.
“A lot of the text that I was using in the literature in schools was already pre-approved by the school district. If I was bringing something in that was different, I would use my professional judgment to make sure it was age and grade appropriate,” he said.
“But we also want to challenge students in terms of their thinking and their worldview.”
With files from Jim Storrie.