News from Alberta that the province is considering introducing restrictions on books in school libraries that they consider to contain “explicit” material was not a shock given the trajectory the province has been on, with its attacks on trans youth, pandering to the United Conservative Party’s increasingly far-right membership base or the fact that Danielle Smith is desperately trying to divert attention away from a growing scandal into healthcare-procurement practices that has the potential to be government-ending. In fact, it follows an established pattern set out by autocrats like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, and it might actually be laughable if it wasn’t so serious.
The fact that three of the four books mentioned by Alberta’s education minister during the announcement are queer and trans stories was entirely predictable, as was the fact that the complaints that the minister responded to came from the so-called “parental rights” group Parents for Choice in Education or PCE, and a group called Action4Canada with ties to Christian nationalist groups. Targeting queer and trans materials is part of LGBTQ2S+ scapegoating, which is a page taken from the authoritarian playbook. The very first goal of LGBTQ2S+ scapegoating is to stigmatize, which means censoring discussions and depictions of marginalized groups like queer and trans people, so that it solidifies their role as scapegoats. It also helps them to mobilize their political base (like the Christian nationalist groups and the far-right reactionaries in the UCP base), polarizes the population, distracts from government failures and normalizes political violence.
The Orbán government has used censorship of queer and trans books as a tool, calling the books “propaganda.” In 2023, a bookstore in Budapest was fined approximately CAD $50,500 for selling Heartstopper, the most tame and innocuous of gay love stories, without being wrapped in plastic foil, and being available to minors. Orbán’s government justifies this by claiming they are “defending the country’s Christian values,” and that minors cannot be shown “pornographic” content, or anything that encourages gender change or homosexuality. And it’s this very conflation of homosexuality, gender change and pornography that should have everyone in Canada on edge because Parliament is about to debate a third attempt at age-verification legislation.
Independent senator Julie Miville-Dechêne reintroduced her bill to require age verification before any explicit online material can be accessed in order to “protect children” from pornography. The last version very nearly passed before Parliament was prorogued and ultimately dissolved for the election, but it received very little scrutiny in the House of Commons thanks to Conservative procedural shenanigans at committee. The fact that it passed the Senate at all should be an indictment of the Chamber of Sober Second Thought, given that this legislation is a privacy nightmare that relies on technologically unfeasible magical thinking. While there were a few minor changes made to this version than the two previous attempts, the underlying flawed premise remains—that there is a technology that can be used to estimate the difference between a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old, or that people should feel comfortable uploading their personal information to a third-party verification service to access legal material without fear that it will be stolen or abused.
And we can’t kid ourselves. This isn’t just going to be about online porn, despite what Miville-Dechêne says. We’ve seen consistently over the past decades that innocuous queer materials get deemed to be “obscene” and were seized at customs (see the Little Sisters case that eventually reached the Supreme Court of Canada—and Xtra has a whole archive of stories on this). But the fact that you had so-called “parental rights” groups and Christian nationalists weaponizing book bans to target queer and trans materials means that they will absolutely start using this legislation to start targeting websites and internet service providers, and spooking them with the threats of fines between $250,000 and $500,000 and threatened take-down orders if they don’t age-gate these materials. How many of those providers are going to actually have the intestinal fortitude to say no, this material is not explicit, and should not be age-gated? I’m going to guess very few, because of the size of the penalties involved.
I also find it absolutely galling that Miville-Dechêne decided to play the victim in an op-ed in the Senate’s online magazine in January. “I’ve been called an evangelist, a prude, a censor and an idealist. I’m actually a feminist and a progressive,” she wrote, and then complained that the Liberal government’s objection to the bill was hard for her to accept, and offered no sympathy to the notion she herself raised that age verification poses too great a risk for minorities. For a feminist and a progressive, she also appears to be a useful idiot of the far-right, right down to the overwrought language about protecting children. Someone with her background should know that queer and trans people are absolutely going to be targeted by her very bill, and that no matter how innocuous the material, there will be bad-faith actors who will weaponize the complaint process in her bill, carrying out the work of scapegoating to its fullest extent because she gave them the tools to do so. Her refusal to understand that very fact undermines her very position as a senator who is supposed to provide “sober second thought.”
At a time when Canada is facing creeping authoritarianism, and our neighbours to the south can no longer credibly be called a liberal democracy, we need to be extremely vigilant in this country because fascists always target trans people first, followed by queer people and then go down the list of other minorities they consider undesirable. We are not immune in Canada, because as we’ve seen, too many premiers have been quick to use the Notwithstanding Clause to suspend the Charter rights of those they are targeting, starting with trans youth, and Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre was openly promising to use it during his election campaign. The very last thing we need is a senator who can’t think beyond her narrow conception of protecting children to give them even more tools for censorship and scapegoating, and I would hope that this time around, the Senate will have enough sense to defeat the bill before it can reach the House of Commons once again.
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