CFE Blog

On October 8th, in the middle of Banned Book Week, I had the privilege of seeing the documentary film, The Librarians, and then moderating a panel discussion with the filmmaker Kim A. Snyder and two remarkable women, Courtney Gore and Becky Calzada who are featured in the film.

I was shocked when the University of Alberta administration informed me, one of its law professors, that I was being placed on non-disciplinary leave for my social media comments in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination—comments that unquestionably fall within the scope of academic freedom and freedom of expression.

Last week, the federal government blocked the Irish hip-hop group Kneecap from entering Canada. The group was scheduled to perform two concerts, one in Toronto and the other in Vancouver.

Having been so widely ridiculed for its first Ministerial Order banning all books with “explicit sexual content” from all school libraries, the Government of Alberta just issued a

Alberta Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides is responsible for arguably the largest ban of school library books in Canadian history. The first Alberta school board to apply his Ministerial Order has had to ban 226 of currently-held books from all its schools because they contained passages with “explicit sexual content” as defined by the Minister’s Order.

The Government of Alberta embarrassed itself and all Canadians when Education Minister Demetrios Nicholaides issued a directive in July to all Alberta school boards banning from all Alberta school libraries, both elementary and secondary, a wide array of books that met his definition of having any “sexually explicit content” or “non-sexually explicit content” whatsoever.