by Michael Nyby
In the years following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, a wave of populist anti-LGBTQIA+ and anti-racial justice movements made major headway in the United States, sparking a torrent of library censorship attempts. The growing storm in our own country broke the dams in late 2022, which resulted in an unprecedented surge in library censorship efforts in Canada that continues to this day. At the time of the publication of this report in 2024, Canadian libraries had experienced the most ever reported challenges in one twelve-month period. Though the overall volume of challenges has receded slightly this past year, a close look at collected data shows that many of the trends that drove the initial surge are still present and affecting libraries at an alarming rate.
Compiling enough data to create a yearly report on library censorship is a team effort among four separate organizations. The first source of data used in this report is the now-defunct Intellectual Freedom Challenges Survey, hosted by the Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA). In early 2024, the CFLA merged this database with the Centre for Free Expression’s Library Challenges Database, forming the joint Canadian Library Challenges Database. The latter serves as the second data source for this report. In 2023, the CFLA formed a partnership with the Association des bibliothèques publiques du Québec (ABPQ) in order to distribute a French-language version of the Intellectual Freedom Survey to its members. This survey is known as l’Enquête sur les contestations des ressources et des services [Resource and Service Challenges Survey] and serves as this report’s third data source. Lastly, reports by libraries to the Book and Periodical Council’s “Report a Challenge” survey make up the final data source.
Between September 1, 2023, and August 31, 2024, Canadian libraries reported 104 challenges to 96 titles, five events, and one display. Following recent trends, the most common and intense challenges derived from resistance to resources concerning LGBTQIA+ issues and resources perceived to be sexually explicit. The period’s most challenged titles were Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan and It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris, each with three reported challenges. The two titles were challenged for both LGBTQIA+ themes and allegedly sexually explicit content. Eight more titles received two challenges apiece, half of which being challenged for these same reasons, including If You’re a Drag Queen and You Know It by Lil Miss Hot Mess, Sex Is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg, ABC Pride by Elly Barnes and Louie Stowell, and The Bare Naked Book by Kathy Stinson.
Like last year, LGBTQIA+ resources received the most animosity in our most recent sample. This category of challenges was the most numerous, with 28 reported challenges, comprising 26.9% of all reported challenges. Three of the five challenged events and the single challenged display were also LGBTQIA+-themed. These challenges were not only the most common, but also the most malicious, a quality shared with the 21 challenges to allegedly sexually explicit material. In these challenges, the appearance of LGBTQIA+ themes was not apparent in the complaints, but a large share of the reports used similar language to the complaints attached to LGBTQIA+ challenges. Many of the challenged resources in both these categories were accused of “sexualizing” or “grooming” children, promoting pedophilia, or being pornographic in nature. These comments most commonly appear in challenges to educational titles intended for children and adolescents that discuss anatomy and sexuality in frank terms. The most commonly challenged books of this time all fit this description. For instance, both It’s Perfectly Normal and Sex is a Funny Word are described as “pornography”, and a challenge to Let’s Talk About It claims that the discussion of sexuality in a book intended for minors “leads to legalizing incest and pedophilia”.
While the persistent resistance to LGBTQIA+ resources in libraries remains alarming, there may be a slight silver lining to this story. The data currently available indicate a significant decrease in both total challenges and challenges to LGBTQIA+ resources from previous periods. At the time of publication of last year’s Freedom to Read Week report, the available data from the 2022-2023 period indicated that 38% of the 118 reported challenges were to LGBTQIA+ resources. Later data suggest that nearly 50% of challenges from the 2023 calendar year were of the same nature.[1] Since many libraries tend to report their yearly challenges in bulk in the first few months of the following calendar year, we will not have a clear idea until later this year if this decline is genuine or merely statistical noise.
If this apparent decline in censorship efforts is indeed genuine, a closer look at the data reveals that it may only be a regional phenomenon. Much of the decrease in total reported challenges can be attributed to a remarkable drop in total challenges originating from Ontario. In the 2022-2023 reporting period, 35 reported challenges originated from Ontario libraries. This was the highest tally of any province and comprised 29.7% of all reported challenges. In contrast, in the most recent reporting period, Ontario libraries only reported 16 challenges, or 15.4% of the total. At the same time, the data suggest that censorship efforts in western Canada have actually increased year after year. British Columbia now leads all provinces with 41 reported challenges, or 39.4% of the total, followed by Alberta with 31 reported challenges, or 29.8% of the total. The 72 challenges originating from these two provinces alone account for 69.2% of all challenges reported during the most recent twelve-month period, and they represent a large increase from the 55 challenges originating in Alberta and British Columbia in the previous reporting period. To add to this, the concentration of opposition to LGBTQIA+ and sex education resources appears to be stronger in these provinces. In Alberta, 64.5% of reported challenges were to LGBTQIA+ or allegedly sexually explicit resources. This seems to indicate that while libraries in many regions across Canada may have weathered the worst of the storm, the deluge of censorship attempts continues to afflict libraries in our westernmost provinces.
On the subject of LGBTQIA+ resources, one remarkable element of this period’s data is the stark drop in reported resistance to Drag Storytime events. Reports to these events dropped from a total of 23 in 2022-2023 to a mere two reports in 2023-2024, both of which originated in Québec (a “Pride Storytime” event was also challenged in British Columbia, but there is no indication in the report that drag performers played any part in the event). However, it must be noted that the relative scarcity of reports of such resistance does not signify its disappearance. We know from media accounts that libraries across Canada continue to face serious pushback when hosting these types of events, the most severe of which manifested as a bomb threat called in to the Thunder Bay Public Library.[2] That being said, the significant decrease in reports of such actions may be heartening for libraries who host these events, many of whom have expressed real concern for the safety of their workers and patrons. That sentiment must be slightly tempered, however, as the data also indicate that the drop in challenges to events was accompanied by a slight rise in challenges to LGBTQIA+ material resources, from 22 challenges in 2022-2023 to 24 in 2023-2024.
Though the continuing opposition to materials concerning gender and sexuality remains the central narrative in this year’s analysis, it is not the only political touchstone that has manifested in library censorship attempts. Since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, libraries have experienced challenges to resources covering the history and politics of the area. That trend has continued in the 2023-2024 period, as two challenged resources were accused of being “Russian propaganda”. Attitudes regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also manifested in multiple challenges during this period. Two resources portraying the experiences of Palestinian people were accused of anti-Semitism, and one library reported hate speech graffiti on the periodical Muslim Sunrise. Similarly, two resources were challenged for purported Islamophobic content, a rise from one challenge of this nature in the previous twelve-month period.
Prior to the post-COVID surge in library censorship efforts, Canadian libraries most commonly experienced challenges to works featuring perceived racist content, the majority of which concerning materials deemed discriminatory against Indigenous peoples. Though this trend has been greatly overshadowed by the vocal rise in resistance to other resources, it has never really disappeared – or even diminished. In the 2023-2024 period, 22 challenges to racist content were reported, representing 21.4% of the total sample. Ten of these challenges were to works deemed racist against Indigenous people, and five were deemed racist against Black people. A notable title on this list is Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which has – up until now –received very little attention in Canada despite its frequent appearances on the American Library Association’s annual Top Ten Most Challenged Books lists. In 2024, two separate school districts reported challenges to To Kill a Mockingbird, with complainants citing concerns about vulgar language and the novel’s “white saviour’ narrative. Another notable occurrence in recent challenges of this nature is the emergence of resistance to resources perceived to be racist against White people. Prior to September 2022, there was not a single reported challenge of this since sort the Canadian Library Association began its efforts at challenge data collection. This changed in the 2022-2023 reporting period with two challenges (both to children’s picture books) for perceived anti-White racism. This trend has continued into this most recent period with a challenge to an Indigenous community program that the complainant described as “contrary to the Canadian Human Rights code” for its exclusion of non-Indigenous community members.
Of course, in any discussion of challenges to library resources, it must be noted that even the best available data only tells a small piece of the actual story. Though our efforts at collecting data from libraries provides us with a snapshot of trends in library censorship across the country, we cannot know the full extent of censorship efforts. The American Library Association has estimated that between 82% to 97% of intellectual freedom challenges in libraries go unreported, and recent research in Canada has shown that we likely report at a similar rate.[3] With that in mind, our analysis can only hint at the actual situation on the ground in Canadian libraries; even so, our data collection efforts fairly conclusively indicate that the last two years have been, historically speaking, landmark years in library censorship. As we continue to monitor this recent surge of library censorship, our data collection and analysis efforts serve to track and predict how these efforts play out on the ground. In doing so, we hope to provide libraries with the tools and guidance needed to weather the storm.
[1] Nyby, M. J. & Ellis, R. H., (2024) “A Confluence of Trends in Library Censorship”, The Political Librarian 7(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.7936/pollib.8918
[2] Law, S. (2024, March 18). Community provides support after bomb threat at Thunder Bay Drag Queen Storytime event. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/drag-queen-story-time-target-of-another-threat-1.7405539
[3] Nyby, M. J., Hill, H., & Ellis, R. H. (2023). A Failure to Communicate: Assessing the Low Rate of Materials Challenge and Censorship Reporting Among Canadian Public Libraries. Public Library Quarterly, 43(3), 385–401. https://doi.org/10.1080/01616846.2023.2254883
Michael Nyby is a public school librarian and former chair of the CFLA-FCAB Intellectual Freedom Committee.