Alberta Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides has directed school boards to pause a government order to remove books with explicit sexual content from libraries.On Sept. 2, Nicolaides said in an email to the province’s school divisions and officials that they should pause any development or distribution of lists of books that are to be removed. He said the pause will be in effect until further notice."Until further notice, please pause all implementation efforts outlined in Ministerial Order (#30/2025), including removing materials containing depictions of explicit sexual content from school libraries," the email read."At this time, I ask that school authorities also pause the development and distribution of lists of school library materials."In a post on X, Nicolaides said, "I will be revising the order immediately to ensure that our classic literary works remain in school libraries, while books with graphic pornographic images, such as those depicted below, do not end up in the hands of children.".Smith says she'll help Edmonton school board select books to ban.A draft list from Edmonton Public Schools of books to be removed from libraries was leaked online last week, which contained more than 200 titles, including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which prompted the author to condemn Nicolaides and Premier Danielle Smith on social media over the weekend, saying, “Sorry, kids; your Minister of Education thinks you are stupid babies.”.HANNAFORD: Alberta’s school book ban isn’t a ban at all.The list also included Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and works by Maya Angelou and Alice Munro, as well as the Game of Thrones series by George R.R. Martin.Smith has previously defended the order to ban books with explicit graphic content.“We’re trying to take graphic pornographic images out of elementary schools so that kids are not exposed to age-inappropriate material,” she said at an Aug. 29 press conference.Smith did, however, say the Edmonton school division was too heavy-handed in crafting its list and overreached with the order, such as targeting Atwood’s books and others such as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.“They’ve obviously put books on there that there was never any intention of targeting,” Smith said.She said on Tuesday that, "I’m going to be more explicit than usual so there is no misunderstanding this policy: Get graphic pornographic images out of school libraries. Leave the classics on the shelves.".UPDATED: Alberta government launches initiative to ban pornographic books from school libraries.The pause was criticized by Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi, who said that materials should be age-appropriate for students but that the original ministerial order was poorly thought out."Yet again an attempt by the UCP to distract from their horrific record has backfired," he said. "Of course material must be age appropriate. No one disagrees with that. But instead of funding teacher-librarians and creating common sense guidelines, they wrote a poorly thought-out ministerial order that the minister himself didn't understand when he introduced it.' Nicolaides had previously signed a ministerial order on July 4, laying out new guidelines for school library materials that were set to go into effect on Oct. 1.
