Will Anne of Green Gables soon be banned in Alberta schools?

Will the beloved Canadian classic Anne of Green Gables be banned in Alberta schools?

The answer would be yes if Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party Government actually intends to enforce the vague and sloppy guidelines it has written for school libraries, supposedly to protect innocent school children from exposure to “inappropriate sexual content.” 

This will not necessarily happen, though, since the true purpose of this highly performative exercise is not to protect children but to ensure the continued political support of evangelical parents of school-aged children (many of whom will nevertheless continue to enroll their kids in private religious schools or home school them), wind up homophobic and “anti-woke” elements in the UCP base, and trap the party’s political opponents into appearing to defend pornography. 

This also explains why the Smith Government promptly ignored the results of the survey it commissioned last spring as soon as it discovered a majority of respondents had said no, we don’t want the government setting standards for school libraries. 

If the Alberta government was truly sincere about protecting minors from inappropriate material, it would remove the Bible from school library shelves. Leastways, it would insist that such parts of the Bible as Chapter 19 of the Book of Genesis be kept in a back room under lock and key. The UCP’s regulatory carve-out for Scripture notwithstanding, surely no one can argue that particular sordid tale of violence, drunkenness, lust and incest in an isolated oilsands community* is appropriate reading for impressionable youngsters!

By contrast, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables is the quintessential Canadian novel and rightfully a national and international treasure. 

Published in 1908, Anne is for good reason one of the best-selling books in the world, having sold more than 50 million copies in at least 36 languages. 

Emphasizing the value of community and gently instructing its readers in the worth of genuine charity over exploitation, it is nevertheless a tale well told – moving, amusing, highly moral, never boring, eminently re-readable, and refreshing, now as when it was published in the early 20^th Century, for the central roles given to the girls and women who are its principal characters.

Reading Anne, my gentle readers, will make you a better person. There are not many books of which that can be said.

I suppose you could argue that there’s enough right there to make modern MAGA conservatives despise Anne. Plus, of course, the story takes place on Prince Edward Island, potentially triggering Alberta separatists obsessed with Senate seat counts. Still, I doubt even Danielle Smith and the UCP would dare to ban Anne on such grounds alone because of its iconic status.

To be fair, Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides, Alberta’s self-appointed educational censor-in-chief, insists this new policy is not a book ban. Nevertheless, books will be banned, and not merely the four genuinely inappropriate examples discovered in a couple of public school libraries, racy images from which were published by the government on its child-accessible Alberta.ca website.** 

As always with this UCP crowd, we can count on it there is more to come. 

The four offending books, it has now been established, were found by literary vigilantes from a group that lobbies for private schools and home schooling and another that claims its goal is to “to protect Canada’s rich heritage which is founded on Judeo-Christian biblical principles,” nowadays in these parts code for homophobic hate. 

Why home and private schoolers would care about the content of school libraries is an interesting question worth asking. Perhaps they would like to see funding directed elsewhere than to public schools.

Be that as it may, it is sloppy drafting and Dr. Nicolaides’ obvious intent to mimic Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” book ban that puts Anne of Green Gables and many other books that are entirely appropriate for young readers at risk of running afoul of the UCP’s desire to censor stuff. So don’t assume this couldn’t happen here.

Consider Anne Shirley, the story’s plucky 11-year-old red-headed orphan, famously musing how she wishes for, “A bosom friend – an intimate friend, you know – a really kindred spirit to whom I can confide my innermost soul. I’ve dreamed of meeting her all my life. I never really supposed I would, but so many of my loveliest dreams have come true all at once that perhaps this one will, too. Do you think it’s possible?”

Or this, when Anne speaks to Marilla Cuthbert, her stern but kindly adopted mother, of her bosom friend, Diana Barry: “I love Diana so, Marilla, I cannot live without her. But I know very well when we grow up that Diana will get married and go away and leave me.”

There’s more, of course, including a scene in which Anne and Diana get drunk together on raspberry cordial that isn’t. But readers are encouraged read Anne and judge for themselves.

God only knows, though, what Dr. Nicolaides’ impurity hunters might interpret as “non-explicit sexual content,” as the government puts it. 

Alas, in 2000, a professor then at Canada’s Royal Military College published a paper, Bosom Friends: Lesbian Desire in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne Books, which had supposedly serious Canadian commentators bloviating about whether the resulting bruhaha would destroy Prince Edward Island’s tourism industry. Needless to say, it did not. 

Presumably, as is a long tradition among Canadian journalists, no one writing about this at the time had actually bothered to read the paper by Professor Laura Robinson. This often happens, I believe, because too many journalists fear discovering the scholarly work they have set out to mock is more sensible than its title suggests, thereby ruining a good yarn. 

But it would be a tragedy if what seemed like an edgy academic topic in 2000 turned into an excuse for something sinister 25 years later when a censorious theocratic political regime south of the World’s Longest Undefended Border had caused large numbers of citizens of Wild Rose Country to take leave of their senses. 

Take my word for it, we have not heard the last of this. Dr. Nicolaides’ literary hall monitors are looking for more books to ban. Public libraries are next. 

*Sodom is described in the Bible as an oilsands town, as was its sister city of Gomorrah. See Genesis 14:10. I leave readers to draw whatever conclusions they wish from this fact, and the fiery fate of the Twin Cities of the Vale of Siddim.

**Dr. Nicolaides (PhD, 2013, University of Cyprus) says there are more. We can safely infer, though, that the four books presented as evidence on the government’s website are the only ones found that would be considered genuinely inappropriate by most voters.