Ideas - Libraries are fighting for their freedom — and our democracy

Episode Date: August 28, 2025

In Canada and the U.S., public libraries have become a target in the culture wars. It’s an urgent conversation to have, no matter where one sits on the political spectrum. Libraries exist to give everyone access to a wide variety of content, even when books may offend others. Yet librarians are increasingly having to persuade skeptics that all ideas belong on their shelves. In our series, IDEAS for a Better Canada (in partnership with the Samara Centre for Democracy) we ask: What do we have if the freedom to read isn’t ours anymore? *This series originally aired the week of April 21st, 2025.

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This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. And welcome to our series, Ideas for a Better Canada, today from Burlington, Ontario. How do we as a country revitalize our democracy? How should we navigate the tension over competing versions, of who we are and who we want to be. In our series, Ideas for Better Canada, we are traveling across the country

to libraries in different parts of Canada in search of local ideas that can inspire national change. We're here on a late March day in front of an audience at the central branch of the Burlington Public Library. In this building, there are plenty of books, but so much more.

Resources from 3D printers to a seed bank, you can access information on jobs, on housing. They offer tech classes here, events with authors, workshops for newcomers, activities for kids and teens and older adults. The BPL, you will agree with me, is a pretty great library, no? And yet, in a certain sense, it's not exceptional. Like many other libraries, public libraries across Canada, this is a forum dedicated to intellectual freedom and democracy. What those terms mean and why they're related, that's what we're here to discuss.

It's an urgent conversation, no matter where you sit on the political spectrum, because libraries have become a target in the culture wars of the United States and here in Canada too. Author Ira Wells will be here in half an hour to explain why he's concerned about challenges to our freedom to read and what can be done to future-proof it. But let's start right here at this library, whose story in this community dates back to 1872. With me right now are two members of the Burlington Public Library team. Can I just have you introduce yourself and just tell me what it is that you do at the library? Sure, it's my pleasure. My name's Lita, and I have the privilege of being the CEO here at Burlington Public Library. So aside from thinking I have probably one of the best jobs in the world, I have the opportunity to really work with a fantastic team of staff across our city and work with our community and our municipality to make sure that we're continuing to offer library services

and collections that are relevant and meet the needs of everyone that we serve. So public libraries have been in the news quite a lot lately. In February here in Canada, local politicians in Valleyview, Alberta, voted at a closed-door meeting to close and move a small public library to a school, thereby restricting access to it. In the U.S., on March 14th, an executive order by the Trump administration cut down an agency that provides federal funding for libraries there. And there are many, many other headlines. They seem unconnected. But in both cases, these events were preceded by political objections to the contents of a library book or a gathering. Lita, does any of the surprise you at all? On one hand, it absolutely surprises me as someone who has dedicated her life and her profession to libraries. I didn't expect to be in this moment where core values and concepts like intellectual freedom would be challenged at such a base level in so many different ways. but I think as a sector and we are really trying to rise to the opportunity

and really reinforce the core role that libraries pay in terms of upholding our democracy and how critical intellectual freedom is as one of our core values. Let's talk about that. As you say, intellectual freedom is a core value of public libraries and it's baked right into your official policy. What does it promise exactly? I think that is really one of the pieces that's sort of being questioned is the lack of potentially across our democracy a shared understanding of what intellectual freedom means, that idea that everyone should have the right to access information, and at the same time, that shared right and responsibility that none of us has the role to dictate how someone else might choose to select or access information.

And as an institution, we try and balance those two roles. Meg, what do you do here? My title is the Director of Service Design and Innovation, but what that actually means is that I have the privilege to work with our teams that work in our branches, offering customer service, and the resources and the team that works with our digital resources and collections department. So that's all of the items that you see in the library or online

when you're looking for material at the library. So how is it, Meg, that you guys actually choose your team, choose books and materials, keeping in mind the idea of intellectual freedom, how is it that you make your decisions? Yeah, I mean, we're not working in a vacuum, so we are using a lot of different tools. We use reviewing media. We use bibliographies. We have conversations with the publishing industry, with other libraries.

We're talking about the authoritative nature of some of the sources that we are looking at. And then we think about the different needs of our community. So what are people looking for in our community? What are they actually reading? We don't want to build a collection that just sits on our shelves. We want to build a collection that people are interested in borrowing and taking home. So we use a lot of data around that as well. And then when we look at the breadth of our collection,

we are trying to think about what is the information that people want from opposing viewpoint. So we're trying to fill gaps within our collection around that as well. Your answer kind of suggests that maybe there's a constant reviewing process as well of what is on your shelves. What if a book isn't being borrowed? We think about what is the value of that book, right? So we're going to look at how is that book communicating the content? Is it local to our region? And do we want to keep it because it's unique? So a lot of those things are considered. We have processes that we follow. We have people that kind of look through those processes and then we determine whether something is going to stay in our collection or because we need

space might not be able to stay. I want to just give a glimpse of the diversity of voices that appear on your on your shelves. And so the online BPL catalog lists the recent memoir, for example, by infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who promoted public health efforts and vaccinations in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the library also carries a recent book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that argues that Anthony Fauci was part of a global conspiracy and question the efficacy of vaccines. As you can imagine, the community comments are very lively. Why include both books? And Meg, I'll start with you. Why include both books in your collection? I think if we don't have both books, we don't have that broad understanding of both scopes of that topic. People are

interested to read from both sides of that topic, whether they agree with it or not, they want to know what's being set. I think one of the fundamental things that we do in the library is we don't judge beforehand how somebody is going to read a book. We have the information available, we have access to it, so that people can read it and receive the information that's in it, and then they can determine for themselves how they're going to respond to that information. If we remove some of those items, we don't give people the opportunity to even be able to experience it. How often have you heard a complaint about either of those books. In terms of those particular ones, we probably see more on our comments in our catalog

than official complaints. I understand that when you receive a complaint, you actually use the word democracy. And I'm wondering, one, how that sits with the complainants. And two, just explain why you go that deeply into the reasoning behind what you're doing. I think that the key things around freedom of thought, freedom of expression are really this concept of choice. and access. And those are such important pieces in democracy. I think when you're living in a community where there is the ability to see people around you that are not like you, you want to be able to interact in a place where you have lots of choice and lots of different viewpoints and then the ability to access those materials as well. So I think those are kind of the parts that

connect it back to democracy. Of course, we all know we've heard the stories that across North America two S-LGBQ Plus-themed books, in particular face customer challenges. Can you both talk about, maybe starting with you, Lita, the kinds of things you would consider in reviewing a complaint about that book? Well, and I think one of the reasons why these conversations that you're having are so important is we really, as a society, haven't given enough space to sort of talking about the whys of these collections. So as much as we open that choice, and particularly as it relates, to our children's material.

We also recognize that the parent has the right and the responsibility to determine what they would like their child to access from the library. But concurrent with that right is they don't have the right to dictate what another parent might choose for their own child. So, you know, definitely across the U.S. and some of the concerns that we're seeing across Canada

is this idea that having that item in the collection is creating harm amongst children. And really what we want to do, and Meg led with this, is we want to make sure that everyone sees themselves in the collection, that there is something in our collection that really speaks to everyone's experience.

I think another piece that we're really thinking about is what it means to have material on display. So we do, you know, from what we do, from a values perspective, we, intellectual freedom is one of our core values and inclusion is one of our core values. So what we choose to display in the library is really about supporting that concept that everyone is welcome. And I think in this moment, you know, we've really been reflecting internally that having something on display is not necessarily a harm. We're not, we're never going to force you to read anything.

You get to the side what you read. But we're going to work on the premise that walking by a book that you, you disagree with is actually not an act that's going to be harmful. And to hold those two things as separate, I think some of the complaints and the concerns that we're seeing across North America is sort of conflating those two pieces that by even just seeing the book that it's causing harm. And I think when we think to this cultural moment that we're in, so many of us have the phones in our pockets. And we are so used to, through our social media algorithms, being able to swipe The second we find something that we don't agree with.

We're used to being able to control what we see and making sure that what we see aligns with our values. And I think we're really seeing that in our branches of how that's translating into real life. There's no real life manifestation of the swipe, really, yeah, except for the complaint process, as you say. I want to anchor this in an example just because I didn't give one. The book that I was going to mention is,

if you're a drag queen and you know it, is a children's picture book written by the founder of Drag Queen Storytime. Could you speak to, Meg, what it is that if someone came to you with a complaint about that book, which I understand some have, what it is that you outline in terms of the necessity of having that book in your shelves? Right. I think, I mean, first of all, it's a picture book. So it is designed in a way to be fun, colorful. It is based on a song, if you're happy, and you know it. So a lot of the themes within the book are really meant to be something that a parent could interact with with their child or that the child could interact with themselves in a fun way.

In terms of that concept of why somebody would even ask for us to not have that book in the library, I think in so many ways people are looking at it through a single lens. They're looking at it through, I wouldn't want my child to read that, so why would I let other people read that? Or they're looking at it through, this might teach my child about something that I don't want them to learn about. I think what's missing in that is there are different styles of learning. There's different styles of parenting. And there's different ways that people access pieces of that knowledge. So in terms of like that particular book, I think it's that just because one person

doesn't feel it's right for them, it doesn't mean that other parents don't feel that it's right for their children. And the fact that we have something like that in the library is really so that we are able to provide that choice to our community. When you have a book on a shelf, it's one thing, But then when you have the author in, you have several events a year of people discussing various topics, some of them very contentious, you must have complaints coming through those. I'm wondering just what your approach is. When people express concern about things that we're offering at the library, we really, part of our process is really ensuring that people feel heard and listen to and that they have an opportunity to share their position about why they might disagree. with us having a particular author and from that point being able to really have that conversation about why and acknowledging that you know not all of our events are intended

for everyone in the community for understandably there may be some individuals in our community who are not interested but again it comes back to that premise of not precluding other people from having that experience and what we can all learn as a community by getting a little bit more comfortable with listening to perspectives that might be different than our own, and listening to lived experience that might be very different from our own as well. How do you navigate those conversations? As you say, it's a challenging notion to persuade someone who maybe isn't predisposed to accepting the idea of having to hear in a poising point of view. I mean, I imagine it's part of the training. The core piece of that is just acknowledgement and

empathy. Really, like we don't try and challenge if someone feels hurt or sad about something that we have in the collection, first and foremost, we start by acknowledging that. We're never trying to challenge someone else's feelings about another book or something that we're doing in the collection. And if I think, you know, I am so lucky to learn so much through the role that I have. But I have also been so privileged to see how empowering that can be to, to to someone who has been adversely affected by one of our choices to just say sorry to them and acknowledge that we're not questioning their experience.

We're not saying that their feelings are invalid or not true. And that really often creates a great place to be able to then listen to someone else's concerns and in turn sort of share some of our rationale or reasoning for offering an event or offering an item in the collection. And at the end of the day, some of those conversations, they don't necessarily end with someone being on board with our choice or really excited about what we're doing,

but we're kind of coming back to that place of mutual respect and being able to acknowledge someone else's experience and hopefully have left them with a sense of being heard and increased understanding of what we're trying to accomplish through the work that we're doing in community. Could this way that you look at books and navigating these differences inform the rest of us in society? Sure.

The first piece is, it's uncomfortable. This isn't something that just comes easily, and we don't always get it right. I think part of it is being brave to engage in some conversations sometimes, being brave to stand in your own values or the values that you believe in. But then I think in terms of what we do at the library, is seeing others as humans, treating people with dignity and respect, regardless of what they, the argument that they have or the belief system that they have. We are very, we treat privacy

and impartiality really importantly in the library as well. So the idea of like passing judgment on someone just because they happen to take a certain book out of the library, that's part of what we learn in our core is not something that we want to be doing. I think when you translate that into what we see in society, be patient with others, treat people with respect and listen. Finally, when we're thinking about the next iteration of our democracy, this is an opportunity to make the argument. Why do public libraries deserve the understanding and support across pottery lines and personal beliefs? Again, did I ever expect to be in this moment? No, but I think if we see what's happening across North America, and again, a huge,

huge things to CBC for making this an in-person event. How important it is for us to connect in-person to each other when we talk about some of these issues. There is so much that we have gained from our online world, but there is so much that just needs to happen in person. And we are really one of the few public services that is a lifespan service. So people are welcome within our doors from the day they are born, throughout their entire lifetime.

And that is really a unique privilege that we have in community. And I can't think of a more important time to have libraries thriving across our country. We are also a place where you are going to have that kind of friction with other people in your community. Where else do you have that in your community where you can come in, you're welcome, and you're going to see other folks in your community. So it's a really important part of our society. Thank you very much. I wanted to open it up to any questions you have for,

members of our library team here before we move on to the interview with Ira Wells. All you have to do is come to the microphone here in the middle. Please, sir. Thank you. My question has to do with the very, very fragile nature of funding for public libraries. All it takes is a majority on council or a majority on your board to really damage an institution like this. How do you, as administrators, in the library system, future-proof yourself from such an eventuality. We saw it happen a few days ago. We recognize in Burlington, and this room is a demonstration of it, the tremendous support that we have from our community.

But as administrators, we never want to take that for granted. And ensuring that we have those relationships across with our key funders, who are the municipality, and that we're also proactively communicating the work that we do and our value to our community as well. So we do an annual customer satisfaction survey. I hope some of you have completed it. If not, it will be coming out in June again. And we really try and listen to our community and use that data to make meaningful improvements to the services that we're offering. And then we communicate those changes both to our funders and to our board

as a way to kind of keep that conversation going. Please go ahead. Thank you. I just wanted to say thank you for being on the front lines, for being reluctant heroes in some ways, and underline the fact that representation is so important and having a public space where people can come and see themselves in the pages of the books.

As a member of the 2S-LGBQ Plus community, I want my kids to have access to those books. I would have loved to have those. I'm a bit gray in the skull you might have noticed, and they weren't there at that time. And by doing this, you're actually saving lives, because sometimes for queer and trans youth in particular, it's life-saving to see them represented in those pages and in those displays as you walk by. So just wondering if you have any comment on that, but I did want to thank you for doing the work that you're doing. Well, thank you so much, and I think one of the tremendous pieces that we've seen through the last decade in Canadian public libraries is just the breadth of collections that are available to us through our publishing community and through new writers and new voices to make sure that our collection really is reflective of our community as a whole. And not only that self-reflection, but I think, you know, if we think about some of the challenges and tensions that we're seeing in the community, you know, books are ways that we have conversations with ourselves and with each other. And to be able to read about another person's lived experience, the learning and the empathy that happens through that exercise, I think, is something that those of us who are big readers sort of take for granted.

but it is such a critical piece to creating the communities that I think we all want to live in. Please go ahead. Hi there. As a future educator, it's someone who's spending every day with the population that's being affected mostly by potential bans. My question is in terms of how are teachers and students overall being considered when it comes to looking at different books and pieces of media and bringing them to the library? Yeah, I think our contact, you know, as a public library, is somewhat different than the role and responsibility of a school library. So for us, it is really about that relationship directly with the parent and the child, which I think is a big difference from what you as an educator are looking at in the classroom. On a personal note, even just in my own parenting style, I think for our democracy to get back to a place where we,

we want it to be. Part of that is going to be trusting parents to make informed decisions, but also trusting our kids to be smart and capable people. We all take from books what we need in a moment. And I think sometimes as grown-ups, we over-assert the impact that one particular title might have on a child's life. Just a personal anecdote to it. So my daughter happens to be a person who is deaf. So there's a line of thinking that saying as a parent, I might want to protect her from misrepresentations of what it means to be a deaf person because that might cause her harm in terms of her belief and her self-confidence. As a parent, I made a different choice. I think it's important to her and her autonomy and her sense of self to have access

to the broad range of historical context of how her lived experience has been presented in fiction and in nonfiction so that she has access to material about how people with her lived experience in the past, what that was like. From my perspective, that strengthens her autonomy and strengthens her confidence.

That's my perspective as a parent, but I think as a professional librarian, I think that's an opportunity area for us as a democracy, is to entrust more faith in our children, in our young people, at their capacity to apply that context to their books as well. Thank you so much, Lita Berry and Meg Yutangy Matzos. You're listening to Ideas from the Burlington Public Library in Ontario.

We're heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, on World Radio Paris, and in Australia, on ABC Radio National. Stream us around the world at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas and find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Has online porn changed sex forever? What's left to know about Bitcoin?

And why does the Internet suck so much right now? These are the kinds of questions we set out to answer on CBC's Understood, a podcast that I help produce. I'm Joitza Shengupta, and part of my job is to look deeper than the daily headlines and find stories at the intersection of business, technology, and culture. Want to know more? Know it now with Understood. Find the latest season wherever you get your podcasts.

We are back at the Burlington Public Library, ready to continue this conversation about intellectual freedom and democracy. It's part of our cross-country series called Ideas for a Better Canada. Joining me now is Ira Wells. He's a journalist and academic and the author of a new work, a book-length argument, really, called On Book Banning, or how the new censorship consensus trivializes art and undermines democracy. Ira, thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me. We've heard about, book challenges at libraries. How much of a problem is book banning? Well, maybe we should start with just defining what book banning is. Book banning is the removal of a title from the library shelves because someone considers it harmful. That's the definition that comes from the American Library Association that we use here. I first became aware of book banning as something that was happening in the United States. I think many of us might have heard those stories out of places like Pensacola, Florida, or other places in the American South, specifically involving some

parental rights groups. These are groups with names like Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education. They're sometimes called anti-government organizations, and they are particularly concerned with what they describe, their words, as LGBTQ indoctrination in school libraries. They'll just call it child porn to disparage what they find in school libraries. I was very aware of that. That brand of book banning is also happening in Canada. We are seeing LGBTQ books being challenged across the country. Chilowak, BC, there was an RCMP investigation into child porn on the shelves.

Turned out not to be the case. You mentioned Valley View earlier. This is happening in Canada. And it's also happening from the other political perspective in Canada. And we can get into this. But there was a case in Peel region in 2023, where Peel region, the same. school board had pulled thousands of books from their library shelves that removed those titles from the shelves because they were considered harmful. We do live in a very digital world. What is it

about actual books and libraries that upset people on both sides of the political spectrum or all sides of the political spectrum? Yeah, well, it feels like a bit of a paradox, doesn't it? Because it does. There's something called the American Time Use survey where they survey people on how much time they spend doing any given thing. And when you look at the student, the high school student age, so students age 15 to 19. Apparently, the average high school age student spends about nine minutes a day reading versus four and a half hours on their cell phones. So when you take that in, and you might ask yourself, well, why are we so worked up about books? Why wouldn't we be more concerned with the media that they are actually consuming? But I think the answer is that social media,

it feels so chaotic, it feels so ephemeral, it's here, it's gone. If you're upset about it, what do you do? Where do you go? Where do you protest? The school is. library is a stable place. It has physical books that you can remove and fight over. And so it's doing different kinds of work. The people who are agitating for book bans, yes, part of it is about removing the books from the shelves, but there's also this kind of symbolic violence going on, which is to say that it's about coming together against a scapegoat and imagined other, and it's about allowing that political community to cohere through that symbolic violence. as you pointed out very clearly that there are concerns about book banning desires from all political stripes

and I wonder if we considered first sort of the populist right thinking what concerns you most about the desires there with regard to the the populists and the evangelicals they position themselves as saving children from harm what they don't think about is how they are in fact introducing new sources of harm by depriving children from narratives that may have had a positive impact on their life, that may have saved their life, that they may be cutting children off from information, from stories that could have enriched them, that they are teaching children that if you encounter something that bothers you or that you can't, that unsettles you, the solution is to ban it. The solution is to censor it, which is anti-democratic. And they are

treating children as sort of fragile receptacles of toxic information or that if you, if, if children sort of imbibed the wrong books that it's going to somehow break the child, which is the exact, you know, we should be treating children as resilient and strong. So what concerns you at the other end of the political spectrum in terms of desire to ban books? Exactly the same things. So in the, in the case of the Peel region, we don't actually know how many books they banned. They chose this somewhat arbitrary 15-year period where that books that were published more than 15 years ago were ripe to go, publishing within the lifespan of the student, that the books were, the way that they framed it, books were to affirm the identities of the

students, which is something that I understand. It's one good reason to read. And our libraries should be diverse, and they should reflect all identities. There are other reasons that children read to. But I think that the student who actually sort of blew the whistle on this was a young student of Japanese Canadian descent. And she pointed out that books on the Japanese internment would now be gone, that Anne Frank had now been weeded in the name of equity. So I think that we can't whitewash our past. We can't cut students off from history. And we shouldn't be teaching them that the answer is censorship, which is so corrosive to living in a democracy. to understand what it is that brought you to this topic. And there's a story behind this that

involves you and your children and their school. Could you kind of take us to that moment? So there was an email that came from my school's principal, or my children's school's principal, I should say, that said that they were undertaking a library audit, which struck me as a interesting phrase. We'd been hearing about the book banning in Florida. And I wondered if this wasn't just the sort of banal way that a book ban might be smuggled into a Toronto library. And just to be clear, we're talking about a school library here, not a public library. This is a school library. Thank you. So I signed up to join the parent committee just to learn more about it to try and get an understanding of what was happening.

And we were given something called the TDSB Equity Toolkit, and were asked to remove books from the shelves, more or less at random, and then use this toolkit to evaluate them. And it would ask questions like, does this text affirm all student identities? does this text provide students with an opportunity to challenge the status quo? And it's not that any of these questions are necessarily problematic in and of themselves or applied to the entire library, but of course, when you try to think about how does Charlotte's Web teach students to interrupt the status quo, or when you really try and think through how this would work, so it very quickly became clear that to try and use these 17 questions to evaluate an entire library would be, obviously, this wasn't going to work.

And in a moment of exasperation, or what I thought was comedy, the principal said that she wished that we could just get rid of all of the old books. So as someone who's an educator, what went through you? Well, I hoped that she was kidding. I guess I worried, Nala. I, again, I want to be really clear that I understand that we need to listen when people say that reading a book save my life. We need, that has to sink in. I teach literature at a university.

And I also have seen students read for so many different reasons and get so many different kinds of pleasure out of reading. Children's writer, C.S. Lewis said that as humans, we yearn to see through different eyes. to imagine through different imaginations and to feel through different hearts. And I think that's about as close to that sense of self-transcendence as we can get through literature. Students read for entertainment. They read for information. When you read a particularly beautiful sentence, it can literally take your breath away. Scientists call this pilo erection where your body physically changes because you've experienced beauty. All of these are terrific reasons to read.

And there are all reasons that should be respected. Do children and teens in Canada have a right to some form of intellectual freedom in school? That's what's currently up for debate. If you're asking me as a father and as a citizen, absolutely. Children need to be able to exercise that intellectual freedom, which only comes from being able to exercise their judgment, right? Be confronting ideas that they may not be comfortable with. thinking this book is not for me, or coming up with their own reasons as to why that is the case. That is the essence of intellectual freedom. It has to come from judgment. But I think

we are now confronting this. It's true that school libraries are different from public libraries. School libraries support curricula. And if those behind the curricula say only this kind of book will be of service to our curriculum, then that is largely within their domain. So I think that what we really need to do is think carefully about the nature of education, full stop. in this country. The concept of harm on the adult level, back to the bigger question, there's hate speech, discrimination,

someone could deal with that legally if they had to. But there are certain groups that are more vulnerable than others in society and sort of a gradation of harm that could be done. Some could be dealt with by the courts and some cannot. So how do you deal with that on the ground in reality? That's the toughest question that we encounter, and I really respect and value what the last,

librarians set off the top in terms of dignifying the person who is coming with the complaint, making sure that they are heard. Words can wound. Words can harm. The word harm is not, I'm not a huge fan of the word harm in this context, and I'll try to explain why very briefly. Harm can refer to anything from sort of literal PTSD-style trauma to mild discomfort as it's currently invoked. Harm covers a huge range of issues, a huge range of responses. But I think that when people say that this is a serious offense to my religion or this is an infringement of my rights as a parent or whatnot, we can listen to that, and we should listen to that and affirm that is what they are feeling, while also affirming the fact that intellectual

freedom is non-negotiable. That's the pillar on which the whole edifice stands. A library that does not support intellectual freedom is not one that we could publicly defend in any serious way. Beyond librarians, this whole notion of intellectual freedom is held up by authors, by scholars, by academics, you know, culture critics, what you might call kind of the liberal elite. Why is that? Why is it that not everybody is defending intellectual freedom? That's interesting. I didn't know that the liberal elite were defending intellectual freedom. freedom. I don't think they've been doing a very good job. In fact, I think one of the main problems is that the extremes have been hostile to intellectual freedom and the middle has largely abandoned it. Free speech ideals are liberal ideals. They have their root in people like

John Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Frederick Douglass and others. Liberalism has not always lived up to its own ideals. Liberalism has fallen short. It is absolutely true that there's no hearkening back to some golden age of expressive freedom or everyone had equal free speech rights. LGBTQ writers in Canada were being prosecuted into the 1980s and 90s.

There is no golden age of intellectual freedom and of free speech. But when we abandon it as an ideal, then we are in serious trouble. Okay. So I want to test this with you as you indicated, freedom of expression is sometimes contentious, even among the liberal lead, as we describe them. I want to hear from one person. Her name is Banuzan. She's a poet who moved to Canada from Iran in 2010. And so she knows a little bit about censorship and the cost when freedom of

expression is taken away. She sent us this audio postcard to feed into this conversation. I find it ironic that sometimes writers advocate silencing of other writers, speakers, and thinkers, rejecting writing or speech with a different ideological perspective or ideas that they don't understand. And there is a lot that people in the West don't understand. For example, life in a dictatorship or theocracy or a totalitarian regime. The answer to a poem is another poem. The answer to a book is another book. The answer to an argument is another argument. Our literary scene should be a space where people encounter opposing ideas so that they can learn to reason. The survival of dictators depends on censors. Iranian Canadian poet Banuzan.

Is that the way to deal with this issue, Ira? Is the answer to a book, really another book, or an argument, another argument? It's the precondition for democratic exchange, which is to say that, a good library should have something to offend everyone. I hope there's something in this library that would offend me. We need to be able to remind ourselves, and it's been said tonight, that intellectual freedom and expressive freedom do not come naturally to us.

When we hear people that are saying things that we find offensive, there is something primal in our reptilian brains that wants that person to shut up, that wants to silence them. And then we need to take a step back and relearn the lessons that we've learned the last several hundred years, certainly since the printing press and beyond,

that it is not only your right to say what's on your mind, it is my right to hear it. And that's something that I think needs to be continually reaffirmed. And I take that as the essence of the point that's being made here. I would like to speak about young people in our society, people who are still forming their opinions about some very contentious issues. And so not only are they dealing with these book battles, as we've been describing and talking about,

but they're also growing up in the era of social media and polarization. And you, as an educator, you teach undergraduates, what do you think is the effect, the lasting effect? I think there are two, I'll maybe end with two points on this. One is that I do think it's important to remind young people of the pleasures of reading, that there are such consolations that come from reading from that experience of self-transcendence,

that experience of another human consciousness in your own mind, that there's a depth and a soulfulness to reading that they may find is absent in their scrolling lives. I think we have responsibilities as educators too and as a broader society to distinguish education from indoctrination. And we have alighted that,

distinction for a while for reasons that we've convinced ourselves are valid, that everyone's just trying to indoctrinate each other all the time, so we just have to play the game too. But I think that when an angry parent or an angry library patron comes in and says, you know, you've been indoctrinating my student, we have to be able to look them in the eye and say, no, we've been educating them. There's a distinction between education and indoctrination. Education is about building up the critical thinking capacities, indoctrination is about breaking them down. Education is about inspiring independent thought in students, and indoctrination is about submission. And I think that our educators and our

teachers and all of us as citizens need to remind ourselves that education comes first, indoctrination is inimical to education. Borrowing from the title, of your final chapter in your book, I'll ask you this. How can we future proof our freedom? All of us our freedom to read. A couple of different ways. One is to give things the names that they deserve. And when we see censorship, to be able to recognize it, call it out, understand censorship is corrosive to art, to democracy itself, do to explain why. And to also understand, that we need to fund our public institutions. Libraries are among the last truly public spaces that we have where we can greet one another as equals to understand that moving libraries

online is not the solution. We need these places to safeguard our intellectual continuity and our intellectual infrastructure. We need to fund them and we need to fund librarians in schools who have responsibility to develop those collections over time and can speak to them and defend them. We need librarians in schools, and we need to pay for it. One last thing I want to ask you is that there are, as mentioned earlier, conspiracy-minded groups, somebody asked that in a question, who use democracy to fight democracy, who get on boards, who get elected, to try to undermine democracy from within. What do you make of that?

and how do we not get cynical about the process of democracy? Frankly, I think we need to learn from what happened south of the border when Steve Bannon and those American populists had made that really concerted effort to go and try and win all those races that aren't so hotly contested, right? Let's try and get ourselves onto the school boards and let's try and get ourselves into municipal politics. It's time for us to do that, too.

It's time for people of every political persuasion to think about what we can do to do. defend these institutions from those kinds of positions and having a voice on those boards getting involved in those ways. But then also recognizing that democracy has to be able to protect space for even anti-democratic views. That too falls under expressive freedom. And as I say, intellectual freedom and free speech, that has to be the non-negotiable. That's the foundation from which all of these exchanges can happen. Thank you so much for taking my questions, Ira. This is a good moment for anyone who wants to ask IRA some questions.

Please go right ahead. Hi there. So I wanted to kind of talk about the right-wing belief that, you know, queer literature, LGBTQ-plus literature, is indoctrinating children without the recognition that right-wing people are often indoctrinating youth in the opposite direction. Do you have any suggestions for personally as an educator or as parents, community members, speaking with people who have opposing political views in that way? Thank you so much for that question. I think that we need to, in the field of education and also in many areas of civil society and across our culture, we need to create a kind of non-political space, which is to say that over the last few years, we have, for understandable reasons, we have, cranked up the rhetoric so that everything is an existential question all the time.

Every election is like the last election or the most important election of our lifetimes, and everything is always to the extreme. And that licenses us to sacrifice our ideals in favor of what we think is the necessary political outcome. In other words, if we don't, if we allow speech that we disagree with, maybe it's questioning our right to exist or it's questioning our group's right to exist, we don't have the luxury of free speech anymore. I think we need to tone it down to remind ourselves of our ideals and to try to live up to them.

In education, I think what this particularly means is, again, reaffirming the idea that we are here to provide children with the building blocks so that they can learn and think critically for themselves and develop their own opinions. We are not going to feed them the opinions. We are here to provide them with the intellectual equipment and the toolkit so that they can see. start to make some judgments for themselves at some stage. We're not just here to intervenously

inject the opinions into them. We have another question here. Yeah, I was just curious because it seems like a theme of your book is sort of this consensus of book banning or censorship between both people on the left and the right. And I was just wondering if you think that there's any sort of damage in equating both sides of the political spectrum as being complicit in this sort of practice, because at least in my experience, I think that there's an inordinate amount of that sort of censorship that's happening from conservatives. And especially you spoke about in the United States with how these supposedly anti-government organizations are now sort of, you know, working with the government to facilitate this sort of censorship. My position on it is that

the real enemies in this equation are the censors and the book banners. And, that without that intellectual freedom, without that expressive freedom as a value, that we lose the ability to have this conversation and to be able to mount the protest that we would want to mount, because when we devise censorship regimes and we devise checklists and we devise ways of this censorship apparatus, it will be turned on us. I think that's the lesson that we're seeing coming from the south of the border. Could I ask you a question, just since you volunteered. You're stuck now.

Ira Wells wrote an article recently in a magazine. This is the question that he put to all of us, and so I'd like to put it to you. Can we imagine a Canada that strengthens its schools, universities, and public media, and just for transparency, Ira does plug the CBC in this article, but that's not why I'm reading it. But can we imagine a Canada that strengthens its schools, universities, and public media, the intellectual infrastructure that informs, inspires, and educate citizens within our liberal democracy. Can you imagine what that infrastructure might look like? What's the first step? Like the first thing that comes to your mind? Well, I think the first step would be strengthening

places like this. I mean, as a lot of the people that have spoken on this panel have said, this is sort of one of the last public spaces where people can engage in conversations and have this sort of a freedom of information without having an algorithm, you know, dictate what you were seeing and sort of living in this echo chamber. I think that there's such an emphasis nowadays on, you know, austerity within government. And, you know, you see it in the United States with this, you know, the doge and the whole fraud waste and abuse thing. And a lot of the things that are being cut are under that pretext. But a lot of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, The stuff that is being cut is stuff that is vital to our democracy and conversations that need to be held are being held in these sort of public spaces.

And so I think that strengthening the publicly funded organizations that exist in this country that value that sort of freedom of freedom of discussion and expression would be sort of how I envision. So, you know, more funding, you know, fund libraries and anything like that. Thank you. I see another question or at the microphone. From the first question that was asked this evening to the remarks that were just made is sort of pulling together what I was coming from. And we're talking about threats to democracy. I hope there are some municipal counselors here this evening.

I hope there is an MPP here this evening. And I really ask them to acknowledge what libraries can do when it comes to freedom of information, when it comes to intellectual freedom, and when it comes to more than ever now, misinformation. I think libraries, public libraries, are a wonderful place to bring people together, maybe on a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly basis,

to talk about the misinformation we've been presented with this week or two weeks ago or whatever. Because most of us came to this country to get away from, or to make a better life. Democracy is part of what that has been. And it's really nice. nice to say, yes, we live in a democracy, but we have to understand, or more of us have to understand, what that really means. And so we know when it's being challenged, and so we acknowledge

what our individual responsibility is to be a participant in a democracy. Thank you so much. I was going to say that is a perfect segue into when you had asked the question about what would make a better Canada. And I think to the point of the screens and the detachment that we all have and the separation where we become more isolated, we need to get more engaged. The lack of civics and understanding what democracy means and when it's gone, it's gone. Could I ask you a question? So beyond voting, what does that look like? To your, to further on the point of funding, our local news is in,

crisis. You need that local news. You need the people who are holding our politicians to account. You need people who are combating that misinformation and it needs to be funded. So I encourage everybody to subscribe to if they can afford it, to subscribe

to a local source of news. And I think that's crucial. Perfect. Thank you. to our guests, Ira Wells. His book is called on book banning, and to Leta Berry and Meg Yutangi Matzos of the Burlington Public Library. Much gratitude to Parenthood Kanuga, Krista Schwab, Elise Copse, and the rest of the wonderful staff of the BPL Central Branch for hosting and facilitating this event.

This marks the end of our four-part series, Ideas for a Better Canada. Stay tuned for our final episode, pulling together all the lessons we learned along the way. Let's keep the conversation going. Drop us a line with your ideas at ideas at cbc.ca. Ideas for a Better Canada was a partnership with the Samara Center for Democracy. It was made possible by that Collab Fund at CBC. Special thanks to Ideas for our Better Canada producers, Nicola Luxchich, Lisa Godfrey, and Matthew Lazen Rider. I'm Nala Ayed.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.