Danielle Smith is right, the board is wrong in stupid book ban fight...

Edmonton school board playing political games with banned books list.

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Danielle Smith told school boards in Alberta to take sexually explicit material out of school libraries. In response the Edmonton Public School Board leaked out a list of 200 books they would be removing and claimed they had to take these books off the shelves to comply with a provincial directive.

Gone would be Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Maya Angelou and George R.R. Martin.

The move by the Edmonton board is a political stunt, an attempt to start a fight with the Premier and her government and so far it’s working. It’s being described as a book ban, it’s being described as driven by the province.

It’s not, it’s a temper tantrum by the Edmonton board because they don’t want to take four books with graphic, visual depictions of children and youth engaged in sexual activity off the shelves. So, they added a bunch of books that have been taught for generations like 1984 and The Great Gatsby.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith was asked about the board’s actions on Friday and made clear that she does’t support what they are doing and that they are missing the mark.

The full video clip of Smith is below and you can watch her talk about this for five minutes but it contains the graphic images Smith is trying to remove from schools and you may not want to see it. One more point on the video, the claim is always that this is anti-LGBTQ because some of the images and books focus on that, but there are images of straight kids having sex as well.

This is clearly age inappropriate.

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Smith’s stellar response…

Standing at the podium, Smith calmly answered the reporter’s questions and laid out the facts as images from the books were played on a screen next to her. None of the TV stories or newspaper stories about her government’s directive will show these images - because they can’t.

“I'm warning you that the content may be disturbing and it's not appropriate for young users. Viewer discretion is advised,” she said.

In addition to noting that the TV stations present wouldn’t be able to show the images that were available to elementary school students, she added that sharing them on Facebook wouldn’t be allowed.

“I know that I would get delisted from Facebook for showing these kind of images on Facebook because they're pornographic. That is what we are trying to address,” she said.

Instead, Edmonton Public decided to ban 200 books and try and turn this into a free speech issue. They act as if taking anything off the shelf is the big dark monster of censorship when it’s about age appropriate material.

I don’t know of any school libraries stocking the latest issues of Playboy or Penthouse in their periodical sections. They don’t do that because it would be age inappropriate.

“We asked school boards to use their discretion to identify books that might not be age appropriate for elementary school children, and then to an Edmonton Public is clearly doing a little vicious compliance over what the direction is,” Smith said.

Smith then laid down the challenge to the Edmonton board, straighten up and fly right, or the province will show up and do it for them.

“If they need us to hold their hand through the process to identify what kind of materials are appropriate for senior high school students, what kind of materials are appropriate for junior high school students, and what kind of materials are appropriate for elementary school students, we will more than happily work with them to work through their list one by one so we can be super clear about what it is we're trying to do,” Smith said.

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The board’s games need to end…

The board clearly knew that putting out this list would create a publicity headache for Smith and her government. They knew that most media would be too lazy or too biased to tell the whole story.

That’s exactly what happened.

Now we are being told in stories from CBC, CTV and the like that politicians shouldn’t be deciding what is in libraries. Those decisions we are told should be made only by professional, trained librarians.

Well, they let this crap get on the shelves in the first place, so it looks like they need some adult supervision.

Smith shouldn’t back down though, she needs to stand firm and explain to these trustees and board administrators that they are a creation of the province and they answer to the provincial government.

She will face a lot of pushback, a lot of lazy media reports. It’s like when Scott Moe objected to some of the material that was being distributed in Saskatchewan schools and he was accused of being against sex education.

No, he was against graphic fetish material being distributed to young kids and he was right.

If the media told the truth on this story, 90% of parents would support Premier Smith.

The video, with a warning…

I’ve warned you already, but I’ll do it again. This is Smith calmly answering the reporters questions on this while showing the images that are being defended amid cries of censorship.

Viewer discretion is advised.

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