CFE Blog

The government of Alberta has imposed unprecedented censorship on all public libraries in the province – a first in Canadian history. In May, the government pushed through Bill 28, giving the Minister of Municipal Affairs virtually unlimited authority over almost all aspects of all Alberta public libraries – an extreme and unwarranted attack on the province’s public library boards, staff, and administration that a recent poll found were trusted by 82% of Albertans.

In a recent opinion piece in the Toronto Star, staff journalist Justin Ling argues that to improve productivity, Canada needs to tolerate more corruption. This is nonsense – in fact the reverse is true. As he says, simply creating more bureaucracy in response to each scandal doesn’t work.

With the precipitous decline of democracy in the United States, it is all too easy to ignore that Canada’s democracy is in decline as well. We ignore the signs at our peril.

The Carolina Hurricanes may have captured the Stanley Cup, but one of the most discussed stories of the six-game final concerned not what happened on the ice, but what was shouted from the stands. Sports fans have long attempted to rattle opposing team members using distracting gestures, childish nicknames, personal attacks, and, at their worst, discriminatory slurs. 

It is widely understood that a society reveals its character in how it treats those with the least power. In Canada, that measure is under strain.Planned reductions of $132.2 million to Correctional Service Canada spending by the 2028–29 fiscal year are expected to affect institutional services, including prison libraries. Proposals to eliminate professional library staff, framed as administrative efficiency, risk removing a core element of rehabilitation. More fundamentally, they risk creating conditions of state-sanctioned information poverty behind bars.

On May 13, the Alberta government passed Bill 28 which amends the Libraries Act to grant the Minister of Municipal Affairs, currently Dan Williams, authority over “management, administration or operation” of every public library in the province. The Bill gives the Minister unprecedented power to issue “any order that the Minister considers appropriate.”