New reporting is connecting a controversial American conservative group that’s been labelled as “extremist” by civil rights advocates to Alberta’s new school library standards.
Freedom of information requests filed by the Investigative Journalism Foundation found that Alberta government officials consulted lists of the most banned books in the United States and the controversial amateur website BookLooks.org when developing the province’s recently announced new school library standards.
According to emails obtained by the IJF, government officials from the Ministry of Education and Childcare actively referenced both PEN America’s report on banned books and entries on BookLooks.org in the early stages of the policy’s development.
BookLooks was launched in 2022 by Emily Maikisch, a former member of the book review committee for Moms for Liberty, an organization that has been instrumental in calls for book bans and bans on teaching about slavery, racism and LGBTQ2S+ topics in schools across the U.S. A 2023 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center compared Moms for Liberty and similar organizations to pro-segregationist parent groups that flourished in America back in the 1950s, and they officially put Moms for Liberty on a list of “anti-government extremist entities.”
We break down how this is more proof of the way that American-style anti-LGBTQ2S+ extremism is crossing the border and directly influencing Canadian policy, and why it matters.
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