The Alberta government and ‘vicious compliance’

Opinion

If she accomplishes nothing else with her hamfisted campaign to impose her government’s ideological will on school libraries across her province, at least Alberta Premier Danielle Smith will have invented a pithy new snippet of terminology: “vicious compliance.”

That’s what Smith accused the Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB) of engaging in when it followed, to the letter, a directive from Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides that local school authorities must ensure school libraries do not include or make available to students “materials including explicit sexual content.”

The ministerial directive, which required all such materials to be removed from school libraries by Oct. 1, referred to “detailed and clear” depictions of numerous specifically described sexual acts, and defined “depiction” as written passages, illustrations, photographic or digital images, video or audio files.

The EPSB’s response to this broad-brush banning of materials from school libraries was to scour its catalogues and, as instructed, remove anything that met the criteria set out in the order. It subsequently released a list of 200-plus titles that would necessarily be removed from library shelves, and to say what was included caused a stir would be an understatement of epic-novel proportions.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, considered by many to be a modern literary classic, would be removed according to the order’s provisions. Also unacceptable under the order’s criteria would be Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Alice Munro’s The Lives of Girls and Women, Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged — a title whose inclusion is particularly ironic since Smith cites it as so highly influential in her own life that thinks it should be required reading for high school students.

“Edmonton Public is clearly doing a little vicious compliance over what the direction is,” Smith said during a subsequent unrelated news conference.

Compliance? Definitely. But vicious? The EPSB’s list may have been politically provocative, but the premier’s description of this to-the-letter adherence to her government’s order as vicious seems mainly to be reflective of her anger at having the folly of her government’s overreach laid bare.

In the aftermath of the EPSB’s list being released, the Alberta government announced it was asking school authorities to pause their compliance efforts until further notice as it rewrites the order to more accurately reflect the United Conservative Party’s intentions.

And those intentions, it has been reported, are rooted in objection to the content of four graphic-novel titles that had been red-flagged for Nicolaides by parents’ rights groups for their visual depictions of sex acts in the context of storylines exploring young people’s gender-diverse sexual awakenings.

Smith’s explanation of the pause and reworking of the ministerial directive included a reminder of those titles and the observation that “we are not trying to remove classics of literature; what we are trying to remove is graphic images that young children should not be having a look at. … And that’s what I hope the spirit going forward will be.”

If the intention truly had been to ensure mature and sexually themed content is managed in a way that limits access to students of appropriate age, the order could have been framed to do so. But for Smith, who continually displays an affection for and inclination to mirror the power-consolidating, government-by-executive-order behaviour currently on display south of the border, the school-library issue clearly became yet another opportunity to make a big, flashy MAGA-mimicking ideological point.

It backfired spectacularly, and the premier’s attempt to shift blame to the Edmonton school board amounts to little more than, one might say, precious contrivance.