Danielle Smith and her ministers burrow deeper into their self-dug book-ban and bargaining holes

Laugh and the world laughs with you; ban The Handmaid’s Tale and the world laughs at you

by David Climenhaga

August 30, 2025

Premier Danielle Smith and her education and finance ministers spent much of the day yesterday digging themselves deeper into the holes they started with their it's-not-a-book-ban ban on books and their self-inflicted impasse in bargaining with the province’s teachers’ union.

With the book ban, Premier Smith and her army of social media bots apparently don’t seem to realize that if you’re accusing a school board of “vicious compliance” for trying to come up with a list of books that need to be banned in response to your own sloppily worded Ministerial Order, you’re revealing your own incompetence for all to see.

This is what happens when you order a reluctant third party to do a dirty job so you won’t have to face the music when the list of books to be burned (sorry, I meant banned) inevitably includes a title to two (or 50) that arouse controversy among educated people.

Yup, you get egg all over your face, and it’s going to take a while to wipe it all off, even if you did finally announce proof of medical coverage that doesn’t look like someone printed it on a dot-matrix printer.

Yes, tout le monde Canada is now laughing at Alberta’s authoritarian social conservative government for the fact Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale ended up on a list of banned books the same government ordered Edmonton’s school board to create, and they’re not going to stop laughing just because you try to blame the school board. The rest of the world will likely join in the chuckles later today.

“Edmonton Public is clearly doing a little vicious compliance over what the direction is,” Ms. Smith petulantly declared during the health ID news conference. (AlbertaPolitics.ca takes this as evidence that the premier reads our blog.) 

“If they need us to hold their hand through the process to identify what kind of materials are appropriate,” she added sarcastically, “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.”

As previously noted in this space, it’s already perfectly clear what they were trying to do. To wit: to ensure the continued political support of evangelical parents of school-aged children, wind up homophobic and ‘anti-woke’ elements in the UCP base, and trap political opponents into appearing to defend pornography.

The error made by the Edmonton Public School Board was trying to comply with this ludicrous order in the first place, instead of telling the minister to get lost.

As prominent Edmonton lawyer Simon Renouf commented on yesterday’s post, Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides’ order establishes neither goals nor standards, as it claims. “It imposes new, and objectionable, duties on school boards to do the government’s dirty work for it, that are well outside the Education Act.”

Mr. Renouf continued: “Surely any self-respecting school board (those not intimidated by Take Back Alberta agitators) should say: ‘Sorry, minister, we’re not going there. Banning books is not school board business. We hire professional teachers and librarians to select the books in our libraries, and we will go to court to assert our right – and obligation – to do so.’”

Alas, in Alberta as in the country to our south, there is an astonishing lack of institutional spine to resist the authoritarian impulses of our MAGA governments.

As for Mr. Nicolaides’ (above) and Finance Minister Nate Horner’s lame effort at a morning news conference yesterday to pin the too-real possibility of a September teachers’ strike on the Alberta Teachers Association, it turned out to be a regurgitated version of the previous evening’s unconvincing press release.

There is something inherently hilarious about the spectacle of a couple of professional politicians, although in this case not particularly talented ones, accusing people who have real jobs of “playing politics.”

The response by Larry Booi, a former president of the ATA who the CBC tracked down on vacation in Nova Scotia, summed up the problem now faced by the government thanks to those two ministers’ uninformed meddling in labour relations – which like the operation of school libraries turns out to be an activity better left to professionals. 

“These two ministers are spinning so hard that they’ve got to be suffering from vertigo today,” he told the Edmonton morning drive show’s interviewer. “When you can cast yourself as the protectors of the classroom conditions and you’re being complicit in destroying them over the last six years, that’s pretty something!”

“They finally recognized the need to address those classroom conditions,” Mr. Booi continued. “But if they don’t address the salary conditions as well, I think teachers should make no apology for demanding both.”

Danielle Smith expounds on her literary tastes

As was also predicted in this space yesterday, Premier Smith was none too happy with the EPSB’s proposed proscription as per Dr. Nicolaides’ orders of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a book the premier has indicated in the past is more to her taste than Ms. Atwood’s oeuvre.

“I didn’t read Atlas Shrugged until I was 22,” Ms. Smith confesssed to an inquiring reporter, explaining a lot. “I had a friend in Grade 10 who read it. Maybe we should make it mandatory reading in high school, because it is a pretty influential book and I think it does really articulate how important it is that we value our entrepreneurs and we value a free-enterprise economy.” Moreover, she added, it is “absolutely appropriate for school children of that age.”

I will leave readers with screenwriter John Rogers’ famously accurate assessment of the late Ms. Rand’s magnum opus: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”