Book banning has become passé in Canada, and when works do get challenged, it’s often for opposite reasons than those seen in the past.
A map depicting books that are “forbidden” around the world released this week identified the most-banned book in the country as Noir Canada, a 2008 academic work in French detailing alleged misconduct of Canadian mining companies in Africa. After ferocious litigation, it ceased publication and was pulled from shelves. The book remains available at libraries and used copies, for a hefty $141, can be found on Amazon .
With the notable exception of “obscene” literature being seized at the Canadian border — which is still, somehow, a regular occurrence in the country that invented Pornhub — “most freedom of expression work is no longer about books,” said Brendan de Caires, executive director of the freedom of expression organization PEN Canada.
The Book and Periodical Council’s Freedom to Read Week project keeps track of all the banned and challenged works in Canada, and it provides a window into changing taboos. The majority of challenges are at public libraries, with some at schools and bookstores. Very few succeed.
Border seizures are in a category of their own, and tend to include the “comically pornographic,” de Caires said. In 2011, graphic novelists headed to a comic arts festival had copies of their work of “extreme satire,” Young Lions, which included pencil sketches of a man having sex with a dead woman, seized and destroyed at the border.
The challenges list contains many well-worn and eyeroll-worthy complaints: The book of short stories containing Brokeback Mountain is too gay, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos are too gay, the Handmaid’s Tale is too violent, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue shows too much skin. But these types of challenges are now nearly neck-and-neck with complainers from the progressive side of the spectrum. A public library patron in Ontario complained Shakira’s children’s book L’école autour du monde promotes a “First-World saviour narrative,” while others complained about religious works that preach against same-sex marriage.
Dated children’s books are some of the most frequently and successfully challenged works, including Tintin Au Congo , which was challenged twice in the same library and moved out of the children’s section. The French-language work was first published in the 1930s and was recently condemned by United Kingdom’s Commission for Racial Equality for containing “hideous racial prejudice” and depicting Congolese who “look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles.” But it’s still sometimes found mixed in with the Berenstain Bears in children’s libraries.
De Caires said there was a shift, starting about 10 years ago, in freedom of expression debates — taking place, as always, mostly on campuses.
“It used to be, in the old model, ‘We want to hear more about forbidden subjects, and you’re not giving us access to them.’ But since then, the majority of free expression action on campuses is, ‘We don’t want to hear from these obnoxious people, mostly right-wing provocateurs.’ ”
De Caires finds these types of debates predictable and uninteresting, and the bulk of work on freedom of expression is shifting from people who fruitlessly complain about books to attacks on journalists and bloggers. Also on the table are concerns about the shady, hard-to-discern role Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other social-media outlets have in policing and suppressing speech by “deplatforming” people without any kind of clear public process — often using algorithms that work in undisclosed ways.
“One of the big discussions is how automated processes like algorithms and recommendation engines, how they distort freedom of expression … Because they have a knock-on effect. If you have an algorithm that’s driving everyone to a tiny sliver of content, you’re actually depriving the people on the platform of access to everything else.”
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Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2019
