When Executive Power Shapes What Students Can Read

In May 2025, Alberta’s Minister of Education issued Ministerial Order 030/2025, setting province-wide rules governing access to literary materials in K–12 schools. While presented as a child-protection measure, a subsequent clarification made clear that the order applies not only to school libraries, but to entire school environments—including classrooms, supplementary reading, and voluntary access spaces.

That distinction matters. It transforms decisions about reading from matters of professional educational judgment into questions of centralized administrative compliance. The issue at stake is not a handful of disputed titles. It is how executive power is being used to shape what students can read—and how easily such power can operate without legislative debate.

Executive authority and school reading environments

Ministerial orders do not require the scrutiny of legislative hearings or committee review. Ministerial Order 030/2025 relies on government-defined content rules, mandatory reporting of removed materials, and public disclosure of school holdings. These requirements apply across all grade levels, with no provision for differentiated access based on age or educational context. Religious texts are explicitly exempt.

As the Centre for Free Expression noted in Embarrassed Alberta Revises Its School Censorship Order. This One Is Worse the revised order expanded—rather than narrowed—its scope. What was initially framed as a school library policy now governs school-wide information environments, collapsing long-standing distinctions between curriculum materials, enrichment reading, and voluntary access.

Four books were initially identified in public discussion surrounding the order, with particular attention directed toward queer-authored works, graphic novels, and memoirs. The focus on format and theme is not incidental; it reflects how certain kinds of books become more visible—and therefore more vulnerable—under administrative screening regimes.

Visibility, format, and administrative risk

The structure of the order makes some materials more exposed than others. Works that rely on visual storytelling—graphic novels, illustrated memoirs, and narrative nonfiction—are easier to flag under rules that emphasize images rather than literary, historical, or pedagogical context.

This pattern is well documented by the American Library Association, whose annual reports on book challenges show that visually explicit or easily excerpted works are disproportionately targeted, even when their educational value is widely recognized. Emily J.M. Knox has shown that contemporary book challenges often function less as debates over individual titles and more as interventions into professional authority and governance. Shannon M. Oltmann similarly documents how administrative pressure can produce anticipatory self-censorship, long before any formal ban is imposed.

These dynamics do not require overt hostility to books. They emerge from systems that normalize surveillance, reporting, and compliance as routine administrative practice.

Indigenous-authored works and contextual judgment

Concerns have also been raised about how government-defined content rules may affect Indigenous-authored works that convey history and lived experience through narrative and image. The ministerial order does not single out Indigenous authors. However, because it prioritizes visual depiction over contextual evaluation, there is a risk that such works could be assessed through standards that do not align with their educational, historical, or cultural purposes.

The Centre for Free Expression has previously examined this dynamic in When a Book by an Eminent Indigenous Author Is Pulled from a School Library, Something Is Wrong.

The lesson from such cases is not that these works are inappropriate, but that administrative shortcuts can override professional expertise and community context with lasting consequences.

Learning from, not equating with, the United States

Comparisons with the United States require care. In several U.S. jurisdictions, restrictions on school and public libraries have gone much further than anything currently occurring in Canada, including criminal penalties for librarians and sweeping legislative bans. That reality should not be minimized.

At the same time, documentation by the American Library Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and EveryLibrary shows how administrative guidance, reporting mandates, and transparency requirements—often introduced without new legislation—have been used to pressure schools into broad removals.

Alberta’s situation is different, but it similarly concentrates authority through executive action and school-wide compliance mechanisms. The concern is not equivalence, but trajectory: once such frameworks are established, they can become more difficult to reverse if political priorities change.

Community, legal, and professional responses

Responses from Canada’s library, education, publishing, and civil liberties communities have emphasized governance and rights rather than partisanship. The Canadian Federation of Library Associations, Canadian School Libraries, the Library Association of Alberta, the Alberta Teachers’ Association, the Book Publishers Association of Alberta, the Canadian Children’s Book Centre, PEN Canada, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and the Centre for Free Expression have all raised concerns about the displacement of professional judgment by executive directive.

Section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects freedom of expression, including the right to receive information, subject only to demonstrably justified limits. Internationally, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child affirms children’s rights to access information and cultural expression.

Public commentary has further clarified what is at stake.

“Censorship rarely announces itself as such. It often presents as protection, order, or concern for children—especially when it is exercised indirectly.”
— Margaret Atwood

“When exclusions are built into procedures and policies, they become harder to see—and harder to challenge—because they are experienced as routine rather than as decisions.”
— Ira Wells

These observations help explain why administrative instruments deserve as much scrutiny as explicit prohibitions.

Why this matters beyond schools

If similar mechanisms were extended to public libraries—through funding conditions, reporting requirements, or ministerial directives—the implications would be profound. Collection development, programming, and access policies could be reshaped without legislative debate, redefining intellectual freedom as procedural compliance rather than professional judgment.

As organizations such as the American Library Association, EveryLibrary, and the National Coalition Against Censorship have repeatedly cautioned, systems framed as transparency and accountability can quickly become instruments of pressure when political priorities shift.

A final reflection

Ministerial Order 030/2025 is not simply about books on shelves. It is about who decides, how decisions are made, and what happens when executive authority displaces professional expertise in educational spaces.

Bad policy does not always arrive loudly. Sometimes it takes shape through administrative language and compliance requirements that quietly recalibrate norms before the public fully registers what has changed.

The defence of intellectual freedom depends on insisting that decisions about reading and learning remain grounded in expertise, accountability, and democratic debate—rather than concentrated executive power.