My teenage daughter makes lists. They are her way of keeping hold of a world that slips so easily through young fingers. Where once the glamour of fashion was a flicker on a weekly television program or a contraband magazine smuggled beneath a pillow, it now floods every waking moment, shimmering across every screen.
She lists her favourite Taylor Swift albums and reorders them as her moods change, as though tracking her own growth by melody. She lists the places she’s been and the places she longs to see. She even lists the names of every fish in her tank, as though life might be catalogued into something more manageable, more permanent.
But one list, above all, has always stirred a certain pride in me. It was her invention entirely, and it grows and shifts like she does. One day she came to me, a little triumphant, and announced she had crossed another item off. I thought, for a moment, of her Amazon wish list. She rolled her eyes. “No,” she said, “it’s another book from Florida’s banned book list.”
Florida? What claim could Florida possibly have on her imagination? She is bicultural, Canadian and Spanish, raised in Europe. Edmonton ties us still, yes, but DeSantis’s delusions? They ought to have been galaxies away, the stuff of headlines filed under “Only in America and Afghanistan.” Both sides of her heritage had known better. From Spain she inherited the dark memory of Franco, who managed to die peacefully in bed clutching a saint’s mummified severed hand like some grotesque bedtime teddy bear. From Canada she inherited a nation where the very idea of banning books seemed as laughable as outlawing hockey or dousing paella with maple syrup. Surely, surely, we had evolved past such medieval pageantry of fear.
Yet in Canada? Well. Until recently, I would have told my daughter she could keep her project safely American — Florida, Texas, South Carolina, whichever red state where the fever of moral panic burned hottest. Those lists were meant as distractions, after all: to smudge away the rapists’ names on Epstein’s lists, or to disguise the ever-growing lists of the megawealthy cashing in on their beautiful billionaire bills.
My own province, not content to be left off the guest list of global regress, eagerly scribbled its name alongside Florida, Texas, and the usual suspects. As if censorship were suddenly the velvet rope into respectability. Alberta, the place that taught me the value of free inquiry, of wide prairie skies and wider possibilities, now reduced to scribbling its name on a ledger of repression. Suddenly it was Alberta politicians, our politicians, dictating which stories could be read, and which must be erased.
And herein lies the truth about lists. They can be whimsical, open, like my daughter’s, scaffolds for curiosity, doorways to freedom. Or they can be fearful, restrictive, like Alberta’s, inventories of exclusion. And those who keep such lists rarely preside over flourishing cultures. The societies that censor books tend also to rank high on other, grimmer indices: infant mortality, teenage pregnancy, addiction, suicide… These are the lists that should haunt our politics, but they are harder to wave in front of a camera.
Alberta, like so much of North America, is already faltering under the weight of despair, children waiting months for psychiatric care, parents waiting in food bank lines, families waiting for answers that never come. Adding ourselves to the book-ban list shortens none of those queues. It simply adds another item to a catalogue of distractions, designed to pull our eyes from the real accounting of whether a society is succeeding or failing.
When my daughter crosses off a book, she is claiming freedom, the freedom to explore, to test herself against stories that make her uneasy, to hold a mirror to her own becoming. Alberta’s new list denies that birthright. It shrinks her shelves and narrows her future. If we are to protect children, let us attend instead to the lists that matter: the numbers on mental health wait times, the rising tally of teen suicides, the stark statistics on poverty and despair. These are the true ledgers of our success.
My daughter’s list grows longer each week, her world widening with every page. Alberta, tragically, has chosen the wrong list.
Support rabble today!
We’re so glad you stopped by! Thanks for consuming rabble content this year.
rabble.ca is 100% reader and donor funded, so as an avid reader of our content, we hope you will consider gifting rabble with a donation during our summer fundraiser today.
Nick Seebruch, editor
Whether it be a one-time donation or a small monthly contribution, your support is critical to keep rabble writers producing the work you’ve come to rely on as a part of a healthy media diet.
Become a rabble rouser — donate to rabble.ca today.
Nick Seebruch, editor
