By Jack Brittle, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
On March 20, the Central Branch of the Burlington Public Library (BPL), in conjunction with CBC Radio, hosted an event as part of the Ideas for a Better Canada series.
The series is meant to be a nationwide discussion about what citizens can do to address the “era of eroding democracy” and “focus on local solutions with the potential to inspire national change,” according to CBC.ca.
Four events will be held in libraries across Canada, in Burlington, Charlottetown, Edmonton, and Nanaimo, each covering a different aspect of the broader topic.
All events are free and open to the public.
Nahlah Ayed, host of CBC Radio One’s “Ideas,” acts as the moderator at each event, which will all be recorded and broadcast on the aforementioned show on both the radio and in podcast form. The events are also being filmed for an eventual television broadcast. In Burlington, BPL’s CEO Lita Barrie and their Director of Service Design and Innovation Meg Uttangi Matsos were interviewed by Ayed. Writer Ira Wells, who is also an associate professor at the University of Toronto and last month released his most recent book, On Book Banning, came to the stage in the second half of the event.
The title of the Burlington event was “Your Library is Open (and Believes in Democracy),” and focused on the increasing efforts to ban books and enact censorship upon libraries.
Ayed spoke about how Burlington was chosen for one of the four events.
“It was actually all about the library,” Ayed said. “We knew from previous experience that it put on excellent events and had an engaged and loyal audience. I had previously done an author event there and had kept it in mind that it would be an ideal place to hold a CBC event too.”
“The CBC Collab program that enabled this series is focused entirely on library partnerships, so when we were choosing our proposed locations, Burlington was one of the first,” Ayed continued. “It was a natural for our purposes.”
Ayed started off the night with an introduction to the event, explaining what the discussion would be about and why the focus was on libraries.
“This [BPL] is a forum dedicated to intellectual freedom and democracy,” Ayed said. “What those terms mean and why they’re related, that’s what we’re here to discuss. It’s an urgent conversation, no matter where you sit on the political spectrum, because libraries have become a target in the culture wars of the United States and here in Canada, too.”
Ayed referenced an executive order by the Trump administration, which cut an agency that provided federal funding for libraries and was signed in February, as well as local politicians in
Valley View, Alberta, who voted at a closed-door meeting to move a small public library to a school.
Barrie said that the recent uptick in these kinds of efforts to undermine libraries surprises her, but that BPL is working hard to rise to the opportunity and “reinforce the core role that libraries play in upholding our democracy.”
Barrie said that the shared principle of intellectual freedom is being challenged and spoke about how the library approaches this idea.
“We want to offer a collection with breadth and scope so that everyone will find something that they need,” Barrie said. “But we recognize that everything in our collection might not be for everyone and reserve the right for people to self-select what is appropriate for them, but not to dictate what is right for another person.”
Uttangi Matsos discussed how the library chooses the material they carry.
“We’re not working in a vacuum,” Uttangi Matsos said. “We are using a lot of different tools. We use reviewing media and bibliographies. We have conversations with the publishing industry and with other libraries. We’re talking about the authoritative nature of some of the sources that we are looking at.”
She said that BPL also keeps in mind the community that they are serving and selects material based on their needs and interests.
“We don’t want to build a collection that just sits on our shelves,” Uttangi Matsos said. “We want to build a collection that people are interested in borrowing and taking home.”
To illustrate the wide variety of perspectives that BPL houses in their literature, Ayed highlighted the fact that card-holders are able to borrow both former Chief Medical Advisor to the President Anthony Fauci’s recent memoir, as well as Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2021 book that argues Fauci was part of a global conspiracy and questions the efficacy of vaccines.
Barrie elaborated on this point.
“It comes back to that premise of not precluding other people from having that experience and what we can all learn as a community by getting a little bit more comfortable with listening to perspectives that might be different than our own, and listening to lived experience that might be very different from our own as well,” Barrie said.
“It’s uncomfortable,” Barrie said. “This isn’t something that comes easily, and we don’t always get it right.”
Uttangi Matsos spoke about the important role that libraries play in being a space for discourse.
“We are also a place where you are going to have that kind of friction with other people in your community,” Uttangi Matsos said. “Where else do you have that in your community?”
As Wells first came to the stage, he spoke about where he sees the censorship efforts happening on both sides of the border.
“The new censorship consensus includes these two very different political orientations,” Wells said. “The evangelicals and populists primarily rooted in the American South and progressive educators in Ontario, who apparently could not be more different. And yet they both see books and libraries as fields of contagion and disease and sources of harm to students and young people, and they propose a solution, which is to ban.”
Wells said that after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, there was a concerted effort among conservatives to win more local elections and positions as part of a bottom-up strategy. Wells said that this strategy also included going after libraries and their funding because “they are vital intellectual infrastructure for our democracies, but they can also be challenged.”
Wells spoke about the perspective of book-banners, as it pertains to children.
“They are treating children as fragile receptacles of toxic information and believe that if they imbibe the wrong books, that it’s going to somehow break the child,” Wells said. “We should be treating children as resilient and strong, and not infantilizing them.”
Wells said that this attitude exists on both sides of the political spectrum but manifests in different ways. On the right, he brought up the numerous efforts to ban books featuring those with LGBTQ+ identities. On the left, he referenced the Peel District School Board, which engaged in a censorship campaign in its school libraries.
“We don’t actually know how many books they banned,” Wells said. “They chose this somewhat arbitrary 15-year period, where books that were published more than 15 years ago were ripe to go. Books were to affirm the identities of the students.”
“The student who actually blew the whistle on this was a young student of Japanese Canadian descent, and she pointed out that books on the Japanese internment would now be gone,” Wells continued. “That Anne Frank had now been weeded in the name of equity.”
“We can’t whitewash our past,” Wells said. “We can’t cut students off from history. And we shouldn’t be teaching them that the answer is censorship, which is so corrosive to living in a democracy.”
Ayed used a quote from a right-wing organization called Parents for Choice in Education to ask Wells a question.
“‘If anyone has a right to what their children are exposed to, sexual, ideological or otherwise, it is the parents of those children,’” Ayed quoted. “And I guess the question that comes out of that is, do children and teens in Canada have a right to some form of intellectual freedom in school?”
Wells responded and explained his position.
“If you’re asking me as a father and as a citizen, absolutely,” Wells said. “Children need to be able to exercise that intellectual freedom, which only comes from being able to exercise their judgment.”
Ayed also asked Wells if he believes that the term “freedom of expression” has lost its meaning.
Wells said that it has been “tainted by hypocrites.”
He spoke about how recently the American Department of Education released a statement saying that they were “ending Joe Biden’s book ban hoax.”
“And if you can unpack that for a second, what that means is that ‘You may have been hearing about this book-banning stuff, but it’s all just a hoax’,” Wells said. “‘There are no books that are being banned. It’s pornography that’s being banned. It’s LGBTQ indoctrination that’s been banned.’ So, in other words, ‘Go for it.’ And we’re entering, I fear, a frightening new phase of it.”
He also said that the collaboration between the U.S. government and pro-censorship organizations is very concerning.
“Book banning is now becoming a state-sponsored practice in a way that it hasn’t been for 50 or 60 years,” Wells said.
Wells also broke down the claim by some on the right that LGBTQ+-focused books are “indoctrinating” children by highlighting the distinction between education and indoctrination.
“Education is about building up critical thinking capacities,” Wells said. “Indoctrination is about breaking them down. Education is about inspiring independent thought in students, and indoctrination is about submission.”
Wells said that to help ensure further book banning is thwarted, we must be able to call out censorship when we see it and safeguard public institutions like libraries.
To find out more about “Ideas” visit https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas.
Ayed also encouraged attendees to “keep the conversation going” and write to ideas@cbc.ca with their own Ideas for a Better Canada.
