In On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy (Biblioasis, out now), University of Toronto associate professor and critic Ira Wells describes his firsthand experience on a committee charged with culling library books from a Toronto school library. The ideological questions that arose during this experience led him to write On Book Banning, which combines personal observations with the history and philosophy of book banning in North America.

Given that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal Party won Canada’s federal election in April, American readers might assume progressive attitudes prevail north of the U.S. border. Yet on May 26, weeks after On Book Banning arrived on shelves, the Alberta government announced an initiative on “ensuring age-appropriate books in school libraries,” which the Association of Canadian Publishers, Canadian Publishers’ Council, and Literary Press Group of Canada said targets “2SLGBTQIA+ characters or themes” and “stigmatizes queer identities and narratives.” Canadian School Libraries spoke out against it too.

With freedom to read battles shaking Canada and the U.S., Wells spoke with PW about censorship from the left and right, ahistorical viewpoints on children's reading, and why we need print books in circulation.

On Book Banning is concise, with a lecture-style approach—can you talk about how it came together?

In the Field Notes series Biblioasis puts out, the idea is to intervene in debates very quickly, so I pitched the book in June 2024, wrote it in July, got editorial feedback in August. It was out in Canada in February, so it was a fast turnaround.

You open with a recollection of being on a committee charged with retaining or discarding books from a school library collection. What did you learn about the weeding process?

Weeding has to do with removing books that are damaged or outdated, and it’s not to be used as a deselection tool for controversial materials, because the process can be abused to weed out anything that you may find offensive. In On Book Banning, I speak about the new censorship consensus because, unfortunately, censorship is being taken up by the illiberal left as well as people on the far right.

My example comes from Peel Region, west of Toronto, a large school board with dozens of schools. In the summer of 2023, they decided that any book written more than 15 years ago was ripe to be removed, out of equity-based concerns that these books were too Eurocentric, too heteronormative, not progressive. But just because it’s for a progressive cause, doesn't mean that it’s not book banning. And it’s wild, for so many reasons, to think that a parent would never read the same book as their kid. This sort of relentless ahistoricism, the idea that you only want to read about things that have occurred within your lifetime, is just astonishing and myopic.

What’s going on in Alberta?

The inspiration comes directly from Ron DeSantis’s playbook in Florida in 2023, in which defending parents’ rights and saving children from pornography became the political cover for book banning. This initiative is undertaken by a quite right-leaning premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, who announced that the province had discovered sexually explicit books in school libraries. School districts in Calgary and Edmonton have already removed several books, including Mike Curato’s Flamer and Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer. Now [legislators] are going to consult with the citizens of Alberta through a survey and use the results to produce province-wide guidelines to determine which books are on the shelves.

In the U.S., when we think about conservative parents’ rights groups and book bans, we might envision Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. Are you seeing those groups as well as homegrown Canadian versions?

There’s lots of overlap, and there are conservative activists in Canada behind the Alberta book banning initiatives. One is called Parents for Choice in Education, or PCE, and one is called Action 4 Canada. They took credit for giving the government the names of the books that they wanted removed from school libraries. The government of Alberta has realized that this is a useful wedge issue for them, and they’re cooperating with those groups.

What are your thoughts on the book trade between the U.S. and Canada, especially around potentially controversial literature?

Because Canada is a big importer of U.S. books, we’re concerned with the degree of anticipatory compliance on the part of publishers with regard to LGBTQ content or anything that may be considered too risqué by the lights of the current administration. There’s every reason to believe that will impact the kinds of books we have access to here. [In addition, if a school district like Peel Region chose] to eliminate all books that were more than 15 years old, that would make us even more dependent upon the American supply, because we don’t have the national capacity to regenerate entire libraries for young people every 15 years. Censorship is bad news, and it’s coming at us from both directions.

What do you make of people’s desire to control children’s books?

People have come to the view that literature is propaganda, and there’s no meaningful difference between a piece of children's literature and a manifesto. When people on the far right accuse books of being indoctrination, or when progressives argue that classics are inherently colonialist, they’re both framing literature in terms of contagion. The library becomes a site of contagion that will harm children, which is a corrosive way of thinking. As John Milton argued 400 years ago, bad ideas will spread regardless of books, and the idea that you're going to save children from harm by preventing them from reading certain books is deeply naïve.

You write about e-books, databases, and forms of digital access that can be unsubscribed and erased. Why are print volumes essential, in your estimation?

I continually run into the argument, “Libraries are outdated! Everything can be put online now. Why do we need the middleman?” My rejoinder is that putting books online makes them less secure. Think of the Internet Archive, where during Covid they put up a massive open library, there was a lawsuit, and half a million titles disappeared instantaneously.

We tend to think of the internet as a free place, but according to Freedom House, only something like 19 countries in the world have a free internet. You can’t put the intellectual infrastructure of your democracy online and expect that it’s all going to be peachy. Authoritarians would like nothing better than virtual online libraries that they could just unsubscribe from. So I’m a big believer in physical books, physical libraries. We need to stand with our librarians and stick up for our intellectual freedom.