Readers can celebrate their freedom to read this week by trying to solve a zillion-piece mystery at the St. Albert Public Library.
Freedom to Read Week runs from Feb. 23 to March 1 in Canada. The campaign sees libraries across the nation celebrate intellectual freedom and fight against censorship.
The St. Albert Public Library has once again set up a display of books that have been challenged (sought to be banned) at Canadian or U.S. libraries in its front lobby to mark the occasion.
New this year is a Book in a Jar contest that asks guests to guess the name of a book that has been sliced into a zillion pieces and put in a jar. Guesses will be entered into a draw for “I Read Banned Books” tote bags and other prizes.
It might seem ironic to destroy a book for Freedom to Read Week, but this book was damaged and set to be removed from the shelves anyway, St. Albert Public Library librarian Julie Ruel said in an email. Fragmenting a book like this shows how book-banning efforts often take small parts of books out of context.
The library’s board also approved an updated intellectual freedom policy Feb. 19 as part of Freedom to Read Week. The policy states that the library affirms the right of individuals to seek and receive information from all lawful points of view without restriction.
This policy was about the library preserving the rights of St. Albert residents to choose what they want to read, said library CEO Peter Bailey (who was able to identify that aforementioned book in the jar in about half a second).
“It’s your right not to read or take out that book. It’s not your right to decide for other folks.”
Rise of censorship
Bailey said this year’s Freedom to Read Week takes place amidst a rising tide of attacks on public libraries related to the 2SLGBTQ+ community — a trend recently highlighted by the CBC’s The Fifth Estate.
Researchers Richard Ellis and Michael Nyby (chair of the Canadian Federation of Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee) examined this trend in a study published in The Political Librarian last year. After a sharp drop in 2020 with the start of pandemic-related restrictions, the number of challenges reported by Canadian libraries rose sharply in the next three years and reached 0.483/100,000 people in 2023 — a roughly 3.6 times increase from the 2015–2019 average.
The nature of these challenges also changed. Whereas less than 13 per cent of Canadian challenges involved 2SLGBTQ+ materials from 2015 to 2019, the study found that nearly half of the challenges in 2023 involved such subject matter.
Speaking as an independent researcher, Nyby said this shift may have been due to right-wing groups such as Action4Canada (a big player in the book-banning movement) finding receptive audiences during pandemic-related lockdowns. When those lockdowns lifted, those groups shifted their focus to libraries and 2SLGBTQ+ issues. He said this shift makes Freedom to Read Week more important than ever.
“In Canada, anyway, there has never been any sort of concerted effort to keep books out of the hands of young people like there has been today, and it’s really based more than anything on a homophobic, reactionary movement,” Nyby said.
Nyby encouraged residents to read banned and challenged books during Freedom to Read Week and to tell civic leaders that they support both libraries and the 2SLGBTQ+ community.
“Are we going to support our neighbours and going to support our children, or are we going to dictate to them who they’re allowed to love and how they’re allowed to live life?”
Visit freedomtoread.ca for more on Freedom to Read Week.
