When did you veer Left, rob? Why are you defending the juvenile actions of an anti-Conservative school board over the responsible protection of children? Piling on with the likes of Don Braid, Margaret Atwood and Naheed Nenshi does not add to your credibility. The argument that the material could be found "online" does not mean the school library should condone it. All the left-wing new vocabulary assaulting Alberta parents does not change a thing.
And here we have a perfect example of what the piece didn't mention: there's a LOT of censorious goofs in the UCP base that have been drinking the Kool-Aid flowing North from the US who absolutely did want to ban books, not just graphic novels. Just, you know, books that don't conform to their ideological priors, not THEIR classics! And they're now equally as pissed at the climb back as the normies were at the ridiculous ban list.
It sounds like you don't understand that kids can see whatever they want to see in their quest for knowledge. Condoning something and accepting reality aren't the same thing.
The EPSB set out to embarrass the provincial government by responding with a blown-out-of-all-proportion response to a simple instruction.
NONE of the other 60+ school boards in Alberta had ANY issues divining what the government's intent was with that original order, and none of them ran to CBC with a list of books supposedly banned by government fiat either.
This was an act of political sabotage, carried out by the EPSB.
Yeah, it sounded like the school board had a hissy fit and got testy: "Is THIS explicit? What about THIS? or THIS!" Childish behaviour when they knew all along what was meant.
I was wondering how long it would take for the real Mr Breakenridge to show his true face - about four issues in I sense that time has arrived. So now would be the time to state I am a right leaning Albertan.
With his long history, both on radio & in print, his true left leaning progressive views are now creeping to the surface. I was concerned when "The Line" announced he was going to be the Alberta voice but I promised myself to give him a chance with the longform format. I was pleased with his handling of the first few interviews and sensed a more neutral interview appraoch.
I believe both Matt & Jenn strive to be as fair and balanced as possible but my ears frequently sense their views are based on there core beliefs of being left of center with a progressive slant. Right or wrong this what my ears pick up.
For example, I frequently hear in my ears that while the Libs under Mr Carney have not delivered on most of their promises they deserve more time because it could be worse if Mr Poilievre and the Conservatives were in power. What I constantly hear is it's better to have a known bad Liberal government than giving the Conservatives a chance.
In closing, I thank Matt & Jenn for creating an Alberta focused segment but I feel we would be better served by someone who pushed against your left of center viewpoints.
More dumpster fires by Mrs Moretta. Book bans weren’t an issue before, they aren’t now.
Instead of attending to the needs of all Albertans she focuses on feeding red meat to her base of alt right evangelicals, anti-vaxxers, take back alberta, enterprise alberta, maple maga and separatists. Every time she starts a dumpster fire she draws your eyes away from the continued destruction of institutions in the province.
Perhaps, just perhaps she could attend to real issues in the province. Perhaps she could demand the oil and gas industry have to attend to their abandoned wells. Perhaps she could listen to Albertans about not wanting coal mining.
Perhaps if she actually cared about kids she would support and back up public health so we wouldn’t have the highest per capita measles infections in the world.
This is just another bullshit dumpster fire by Alberta’s most incompetent premier.
She’s yet to do one thing that positively benefits all Albertans, not one. 4.95 million Albertans are still waiting for her to provide leadership to them.
"We don't want kids exposed to genuine hatred or graphic sexual content"....... books are the least of our worries if this is the concern - open a phone and it is at their fingertips. If this was all they wanted- 4 graphic novels removed- they would NOT be commanding schools and teachers to create a full inventory of all their books on school property - including books bought by teachers for their classes. This is the thin edge of the wedge and these white christo-nationalists have only just begun.
Correct. Many parents don't give their young children uncontrolled Internet access for just this reason, and don't want schools to be shoving pornography or gender ideology on their kids.
The real battle is over who is in charge of kids, parents or bureaucrats.
So, if something is available on the internet it is fine to include in school libraries? Does that include snuff films/images then, or only blow jobs like at least one of the books in question contained?
I am not a fan of the book list approach, and agree that the government should have done a better job implementing, but it seems some school librarians were not able to keep graphic sexually explicit materials off the school library shelves – shelves dedicated to minors. That seems to me like it should have been a pretty low bar for the school librarians to meet. Since they could not (or chose not to?) meet that low bar, it sounds like they left themselves open to this administrative oversight.
PS I note that some of the images from the books in question cannot be shown on tv and get blurred out. Do you label every parent who doesn't want graphic sexually explicit images in the school library as “white christo-nationalists”, or just everyone who disagrees with your view on what’s appropriate for their children to see at school while essentially in the care of the government?
Meantime, librarians—notably less inclined to ban things than school boards (and certainly less politicized)—have always sensibly restricted books with explicit sexual content in age appropriate ways, and you can't really accuse them of censorship. After all, the youngsters will eventually be able to access the books, when ready for them, just as they'll become eligible to get a driver's license when ready for that responsibility.
Wait until they find out what's available for free on that new-fangled contraption called the internet. This is just another pointless Alberta government own goal, likely to distract from their litany of stupidity on everything from COVID shots to coal mines on the eastern slopes.
You can't beat malicious compliance with ever more detailed instructions. There are always loopholes.
The way to beat malicious compliance is firing people.
What's needed here is a complete turnover of staff or, better, simply replacing the public school system in the big cities with independent charter schools. In towns with only one or two schools, make the schools independent, locally managed, and accountable to a very local elected board.
Based on the comments from my left-leaning Facebook friends, they are all celebrating how bad the Edmonton Public School Board made the Alberta government look. No one supportive of the malicious compliance actually gives a shit about kids reading Atwood or Orwell or Huxley or they never would have been pulled off the shelf. It's all politics to them. This makes that school board look like petty power-play seeking fools IMHO.
I have to admit snickering that it was appropriate the person who said “vicious compliance” instead of “malicious compliance” was also responsible for authoring a poorly written rule that facilitated that malicious compliance.
Overall, this is all kinds of stupid, really a tempest in a teapot. Setting limits on graphic sexual material in public school libraries is unexceptionable. To the extent it was happening, I have to question the judgement or attention of the school librarians responsible for curating the material. However, it wasn’t a ban: this stuff was still available in public libraries, at book stores, and online.
What’s head-slapping stupid is that both Smith and her adversaries wanted people to act *as if it were really a ban*!! Smith’s critics wanted to crank the alarm up to “11”. Smith wanted to gratify her base with a “win” in the cultures wars that animate them.
Everybody is stupider for having to engage with this. There are no winner here. May God have mercy on our souls.
This was either sloppiness by some under-talented (but surely loyal) folks in the Premier's office, deliberate insider sabotage (which has been an ongoing problem in the Premier's office), or an attempted overreach by folks who truly did believe that even classics should be rounded up.
Nevertheless the more existential question is, why do we even have school board's anymore? They are a North American anachronism and extremely inefficient. The trend is for provinces to move away from them and into more individualized or common group school management. The UK and Australia do not have school boards. They have school committees for each school, or a high school plus it's feeder primary schools overseen by the government. School boards are just another layer of bureaucracy on top of everything. Looking at how many elected officials are acclaimed, the public has already moved on. They are more trouble and cost than they are worth.
We have an unelected Senate which is very powerful and elected school boards which are not very powerful. Canada needs the confidence to change once in awhile and have some people upset.
It's incredible to me that the majority of the comments here are supportive of the UCP government, and are being willfully blind about how abjectly idiotic this whole thing is.
""depiction" means a written passage, illustration, photographic or digital image, video or
audio file;"
How simple can we make it for you goofs? The original directive was crystal clear that any "depiction" of "explicit sexual content" was verbotten. Because they're incompetent idiots. And you're so salty at the school board for embarrassing them. Grow the fuck up already.
There is lots in this article to process but one thing is for certain:
The pandemic lockdowns that led to school closures and children learning at home was a real eye opener for many parents who were on cruise control and not paying attention to what their children were exposed to during school hours.
When did you veer Left, rob? Why are you defending the juvenile actions of an anti-Conservative school board over the responsible protection of children? Piling on with the likes of Don Braid, Margaret Atwood and Naheed Nenshi does not add to your credibility. The argument that the material could be found "online" does not mean the school library should condone it. All the left-wing new vocabulary assaulting Alberta parents does not change a thing.
And here we have a perfect example of what the piece didn't mention: there's a LOT of censorious goofs in the UCP base that have been drinking the Kool-Aid flowing North from the US who absolutely did want to ban books, not just graphic novels. Just, you know, books that don't conform to their ideological priors, not THEIR classics! And they're now equally as pissed at the climb back as the normies were at the ridiculous ban list.
This is all so stupid.
It sounds like you don't understand that kids can see whatever they want to see in their quest for knowledge. Condoning something and accepting reality aren't the same thing.
There is a difference between acknowledging that porn exists in an online world, and putting a porn section in a government-run school library.
If you cannot see the difference between those two concepts, you are trying VERY hard not to.
Based on what Alberta was doing, it wasn't anything related to a "porn section"; something that doesn't exist in any library.
The EPSB set out to embarrass the provincial government by responding with a blown-out-of-all-proportion response to a simple instruction.
NONE of the other 60+ school boards in Alberta had ANY issues divining what the government's intent was with that original order, and none of them ran to CBC with a list of books supposedly banned by government fiat either.
This was an act of political sabotage, carried out by the EPSB.
Stop trying to pretend otherwise.
Yeah, it sounded like the school board had a hissy fit and got testy: "Is THIS explicit? What about THIS? or THIS!" Childish behaviour when they knew all along what was meant.
I was wondering how long it would take for the real Mr Breakenridge to show his true face - about four issues in I sense that time has arrived. So now would be the time to state I am a right leaning Albertan.
With his long history, both on radio & in print, his true left leaning progressive views are now creeping to the surface. I was concerned when "The Line" announced he was going to be the Alberta voice but I promised myself to give him a chance with the longform format. I was pleased with his handling of the first few interviews and sensed a more neutral interview appraoch.
I believe both Matt & Jenn strive to be as fair and balanced as possible but my ears frequently sense their views are based on there core beliefs of being left of center with a progressive slant. Right or wrong this what my ears pick up.
For example, I frequently hear in my ears that while the Libs under Mr Carney have not delivered on most of their promises they deserve more time because it could be worse if Mr Poilievre and the Conservatives were in power. What I constantly hear is it's better to have a known bad Liberal government than giving the Conservatives a chance.
In closing, I thank Matt & Jenn for creating an Alberta focused segment but I feel we would be better served by someone who pushed against your left of center viewpoints.
More dumpster fires by Mrs Moretta. Book bans weren’t an issue before, they aren’t now.
Instead of attending to the needs of all Albertans she focuses on feeding red meat to her base of alt right evangelicals, anti-vaxxers, take back alberta, enterprise alberta, maple maga and separatists. Every time she starts a dumpster fire she draws your eyes away from the continued destruction of institutions in the province.
Perhaps, just perhaps she could attend to real issues in the province. Perhaps she could demand the oil and gas industry have to attend to their abandoned wells. Perhaps she could listen to Albertans about not wanting coal mining.
Perhaps if she actually cared about kids she would support and back up public health so we wouldn’t have the highest per capita measles infections in the world.
This is just another bullshit dumpster fire by Alberta’s most incompetent premier.
She’s yet to do one thing that positively benefits all Albertans, not one. 4.95 million Albertans are still waiting for her to provide leadership to them.
Why was it only the Edmonton School Board who HAD to viciously comply?
"We don't want kids exposed to genuine hatred or graphic sexual content"....... books are the least of our worries if this is the concern - open a phone and it is at their fingertips. If this was all they wanted- 4 graphic novels removed- they would NOT be commanding schools and teachers to create a full inventory of all their books on school property - including books bought by teachers for their classes. This is the thin edge of the wedge and these white christo-nationalists have only just begun.
Correct. Many parents don't give their young children uncontrolled Internet access for just this reason, and don't want schools to be shoving pornography or gender ideology on their kids.
The real battle is over who is in charge of kids, parents or bureaucrats.
So, if something is available on the internet it is fine to include in school libraries? Does that include snuff films/images then, or only blow jobs like at least one of the books in question contained?
I am not a fan of the book list approach, and agree that the government should have done a better job implementing, but it seems some school librarians were not able to keep graphic sexually explicit materials off the school library shelves – shelves dedicated to minors. That seems to me like it should have been a pretty low bar for the school librarians to meet. Since they could not (or chose not to?) meet that low bar, it sounds like they left themselves open to this administrative oversight.
PS I note that some of the images from the books in question cannot be shown on tv and get blurred out. Do you label every parent who doesn't want graphic sexually explicit images in the school library as “white christo-nationalists”, or just everyone who disagrees with your view on what’s appropriate for their children to see at school while essentially in the care of the government?
Meantime, librarians—notably less inclined to ban things than school boards (and certainly less politicized)—have always sensibly restricted books with explicit sexual content in age appropriate ways, and you can't really accuse them of censorship. After all, the youngsters will eventually be able to access the books, when ready for them, just as they'll become eligible to get a driver's license when ready for that responsibility.
Wait until they find out what's available for free on that new-fangled contraption called the internet. This is just another pointless Alberta government own goal, likely to distract from their litany of stupidity on everything from COVID shots to coal mines on the eastern slopes.
Internet oversight places the onus exactly where it belongs: with the parents.
You can't beat malicious compliance with ever more detailed instructions. There are always loopholes.
The way to beat malicious compliance is firing people.
What's needed here is a complete turnover of staff or, better, simply replacing the public school system in the big cities with independent charter schools. In towns with only one or two schools, make the schools independent, locally managed, and accountable to a very local elected board.
Based on the comments from my left-leaning Facebook friends, they are all celebrating how bad the Edmonton Public School Board made the Alberta government look. No one supportive of the malicious compliance actually gives a shit about kids reading Atwood or Orwell or Huxley or they never would have been pulled off the shelf. It's all politics to them. This makes that school board look like petty power-play seeking fools IMHO.
I have to admit snickering that it was appropriate the person who said “vicious compliance” instead of “malicious compliance” was also responsible for authoring a poorly written rule that facilitated that malicious compliance.
Overall, this is all kinds of stupid, really a tempest in a teapot. Setting limits on graphic sexual material in public school libraries is unexceptionable. To the extent it was happening, I have to question the judgement or attention of the school librarians responsible for curating the material. However, it wasn’t a ban: this stuff was still available in public libraries, at book stores, and online.
What’s head-slapping stupid is that both Smith and her adversaries wanted people to act *as if it were really a ban*!! Smith’s critics wanted to crank the alarm up to “11”. Smith wanted to gratify her base with a “win” in the cultures wars that animate them.
Everybody is stupider for having to engage with this. There are no winner here. May God have mercy on our souls.
This was either sloppiness by some under-talented (but surely loyal) folks in the Premier's office, deliberate insider sabotage (which has been an ongoing problem in the Premier's office), or an attempted overreach by folks who truly did believe that even classics should be rounded up.
Nevertheless the more existential question is, why do we even have school board's anymore? They are a North American anachronism and extremely inefficient. The trend is for provinces to move away from them and into more individualized or common group school management. The UK and Australia do not have school boards. They have school committees for each school, or a high school plus it's feeder primary schools overseen by the government. School boards are just another layer of bureaucracy on top of everything. Looking at how many elected officials are acclaimed, the public has already moved on. They are more trouble and cost than they are worth.
We have an unelected Senate which is very powerful and elected school boards which are not very powerful. Canada needs the confidence to change once in awhile and have some people upset.
It's incredible to me that the majority of the comments here are supportive of the UCP government, and are being willfully blind about how abjectly idiotic this whole thing is.
https://kings-printer.alberta.ca/Documents/MinOrders/2025/Education_and_Childcare/2025_030_Education_and_Childcare.pdf
""depiction" means a written passage, illustration, photographic or digital image, video or
audio file;"
How simple can we make it for you goofs? The original directive was crystal clear that any "depiction" of "explicit sexual content" was verbotten. Because they're incompetent idiots. And you're so salty at the school board for embarrassing them. Grow the fuck up already.
Maybe chill a bit, Marcel. There are only 14 comments now, two hours after you posted this. The "majority" of which you speak is, what? two comments?
Peter Stockland at The Rewrite, on Substack, has posted an excellent essay on this subject. Well worth a read.
There is lots in this article to process but one thing is for certain:
The pandemic lockdowns that led to school closures and children learning at home was a real eye opener for many parents who were on cruise control and not paying attention to what their children were exposed to during school hours.