Censorship, Challenges and the Fight to Read (1900-today)
Canada likes to think of itself as a country of moderation.
We tend to imagine censorship as something that happens elsewhere—in authoritarian states, under dictatorships, or in societies less confident in freedom of expression. Canadian history tells a more complicated story.
Books have been condemned from pulpits, removed from classrooms, withheld from libraries, intercepted at the border, seized by police, altered before publication, threatened by lawsuits, restricted by school boards, and quietly discouraged by institutions unwilling to risk controversy. Sometimes the censor was the government. Sometimes it was a church, a school principal, a library board, a corporation, a parent, a political organisation, or a frightened publisher.
And sometimes nobody needed to issue a formal ban at all.
That is one of the central ideas behind this book.
Censorship exists on a spectrum. At one end is the unmistakable prohibition: a court injunction, a Customs seizure, a police raid, an official order preventing a work from being sold or distributed. At the other are less visible pressures—a school administrator advising teachers to avoid controversy, a publisher changing passages after a warning, or an institution deciding that a book is simply too troublesome to defend.
The effect can be surprisingly similar.
A reader does not care very much whether a book disappeared because Parliament banned it or because every school in the district quietly stopped ordering it. Either way, the book becomes harder to read.
The fifty-two works collected here trace more than a century of Canadian arguments over who should be allowed to read what.
The story begins in Quebec in 1904 with Rodolphe Girard’s Marie Calumet, whose irreverent treatment of clerical life provoked condemnation from Archbishop Paul Bruchési and serious consequences for its author. Only a few years later, Albert Laberge would discover how religious hostility could shape not merely the reception of a novel but the willingness of an author to publish it at all.
By the 1920s and 1930s, censorship was colliding with sexuality, political radicalism, education, and competing visions of Canadian identity. Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh was banned or restricted by libraries because of its frank treatment of sex and marriage. The Communist play Eight Men Speak encountered police surveillance, theatre licensing restrictions, and postal censorship. Jean-Charles Harvey’s Les Demi-civilisés was condemned by the Catholic hierarchy, with immediate consequences for his career.
War brought different pressures.
Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage was altered before Canadian publication amid concerns that its treatment of unemployment and military recruitment could violate wartime regulations. Decades later, The Valour and the Horror would provoke another national argument about war—this time over who has the right to interpret the experiences of veterans and question military decisions.
Schools and libraries appear repeatedly throughout these pages because they sit at the most sensitive point in the censorship debate. Adults generally agree that children cannot be given absolutely unrestricted access to everything. The disagreement begins when we ask where the boundaries should be drawn—and who gets to draw them.
Canadian schools have challenged books for sexuality, profanity, witchcraft, political radicalism, environmentalism, homosexuality, racism, religious criticism, body image, abortion, and representations of Indigenous peoples. Some decisions seem almost quaint with distance. Others remain fiercely contemporary.
A trustee objected to A Jest of God because fictional teachers had sex outside marriage. Parents attacked The Impressions Series for supposedly promoting Satanism through fairy tales. The Harry Potter novels were removed from a Newfoundland elementary-school library after a complaint about witchcraft—even though neither the complainant nor the principal had read them.
Other cases are considerably harder.
Should an older novel containing racist stereotypes remain available because it documents the assumptions of its time? Should a school remove a book temporarily while members of an Indigenous community review its portrayal of their culture? Should students encounter a racial slur in its original historical context, or should publishers and educators redact it?
There are no easy answers.
That is precisely why these cases belong here.
Censorship debates are often most revealing when both sides believe they are defending something important. Parents may be protecting children. Religious communities may be defending deeply held beliefs. Indigenous families may be challenging harmful representation. Victims of crime may fear exploitation. Governments may invoke national security. Corporations and individuals may seek protection from defamatory allegations.
Freedom of expression does not automatically erase those concerns.
But neither should those concerns automatically erase a book.
Several cases in this collection also demonstrate how censorship can be achieved through money and procedure rather than prohibition. Noir Canada faced multimillion-dollar defamation litigation and ultimately disappeared from publication through settlement. Banksters and Prairie Boys drew legal threats not only against its author but against the publisher, printer, and booksellers. By Way of Deception became the target of an international effort by the Israeli government to prevent publication on national-security grounds.
Sometimes the process itself becomes the punishment.
Police do not need to win an obscenity prosecution if repeated raids persuade stores to stop carrying a publication. A corporation does not necessarily need to win a defamation suit if the cost of defending one frightens a small publisher into silence. A school board need not formally ban a novel if teachers understand that assigning it could bring months of controversy.
Canadian censorship has also changed with Canadian society.
Early cases frequently involved religion, morality, and clerical authority. By the middle of the twentieth century, obscenity and sexuality increasingly dominated challenges. Later decades brought arguments over racism, LGBTQ+ representation, Indigenous history, political conflict, gender, historical language, and cultural appropriation.
The vocabulary changed.
The fundamental question did not.
Who decides what other people are allowed to read?
This book does not assume that every challenged work is admirable, accurate, tasteful, or harmless. Some contain language that is offensive today. Some make arguments readers may find deeply objectionable. Some portray minorities in ways that deserve serious criticism. Some describe sexuality or violence with uncomfortable frankness. A few contain claims that were strongly disputed by the people or institutions they criticised.
Freedom to read is not a certificate of approval.
It is the principle that disagreement is usually better answered by examination, criticism, context, and competing ideas than by making the offending work disappear.
The fifty-two cases that follow are therefore not simply a catalogue of banned books. Together, they form a history of Canadian anxieties.
They show what Canadians feared children might learn, what institutions feared adults might believe, what governments considered dangerous, what communities considered insulting, and what powerful people sometimes preferred others not to read.
And they remind us that censorship rarely introduces itself by saying, “You are forbidden to think this.”
More often, it says something much easier to accept: Perhaps this book would be better kept out of sight.
You can read the essays and make notes in the paperback and hardcover versions of 52 Banned Books in Canada: Censorship, Challenges and the Fight to Read (also available in eBook format)
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