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Opinion: Bill 28 puts Alberta libraries at risk of government censorship

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Buried in an omnibus bill introduced on the day before the Easter long weekend, the Alberta government has taken aim at the most popular public institution in the province — its public libraries.

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A January 2026 poll by Janet Brown Opinion Research has shown that 82 per cent of Albertans trust their local public library to make appropriate decisions about what materials should be available, and that fully 70 per cent of Albertans use public libraries at least a few times a year.

Alberta public libraries are recognized across Canada as models of what public libraries should be: governed by competent locally appointed library boards, funded primarily by their local municipalities, and admirably serving the diverse interests and needs of the residents of their communities according to policies set by each library’s board.

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Alberta’s public libraries have a firm commitment to the right of every Albertan, in the words of the Library Association of Alberta’s Statement on Intellectual Freedom, “to have access to all expressions of knowledge, creativity and intellectual activity … [respecting] the right of each Albertan to judge individually on questions of politics, religion and morality. Parents have the responsibility for determining their children’s access to all library materials.”

Now, all of that is threatened by the government’s proposed amendments to the Libraries Act. Bogged down with allegations of corruption in Alberta Health Services; a minority but loud separatist movement; and a projected $9.4-billion deficit for the 2026–27 fiscal year, it appears the government is trying to create diversions that will appeal to its political base.

On March 31, it introduced Bill 25 to counter what it called politics and ideology in Alberta’s public schools, a strange and bogus claim about its schools in which the curriculum is already determined by Alberta’s own department of education and by locally elected school boards.

The government followed up on April 2, with Bill 28 to, among many other things, undermine its remarkable, locally controlled system of public libraries. The bill gives the minister of Municipal Affairs the right to exert virtually total control over every public library, at the expense of the municipal and regional library boards that currently govern public libraries and of the professional library staff that run the libraries according to library board policies.

The bill, if passed, replaces the minister’s current limited right to “inspect the records of a board” with unlimited rights over public libraries and their boards. Minister-appointed inspectors would have wide-ranging authority to examine everything the library has or does, to require library employees to answer any question or provide any information the inspector deems relevant.

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The inspector then submits a report to the minister. After receiving an inspector’s report, the minister has the power “to make any order that the minister considers appropriate.”

This allows the minister to override any decision or policy of a municipal or regional library board, thereby transferring final authority over every public library in Alberta to the political wishes of whoever is minister of Municipal Affairs.

The current minister, Dan Williams, has signalled he will use this authority to restrict access to all sexually explicit graphic materials — primarily young adult graphic novels and books on sex education for young people — that public libraries have found suitable. But he, or his successor, could just as easily use this unprecedented power to restrict access to all books that are LGBTQ+ friendly, or that call for the end of the use of fossil fuel, or on any other subject, viewpoint, or perspective the minister feels is contrary to that of the government.

The very trust that Albertans have in their public libraries will rightly disappear if they can, as Bill 28 allows, be harnessed to a current government’s political preferences or ideological viewpoints.

James L. Turk is director of the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is inaugural recipient in 2024 of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations’ inaugural Intellectual Freedom Award for outstanding contributions to intellectual freedom in Canada.

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