lol, it's OK because Harry Potter was written by you-know-who....
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ ... -1.6964332$1:
Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.
Those are all examples of books Reina Takata says she can no longer find in her public high school library in Mississauga — which she visits on her lunch hour most days.
In May, Takata says the shelves at Erindale Secondary School were full of books, but she noticed that they had gradually started to disappear. When she returned to school this fall, things were more stark.
"This year, I came into my school library and there are rows and rows of empty shelves with absolutely no books," said Takata, who started Grade 10 last week.
She estimates more than 50 per cent of her school's library books are gone.
In the spring, Takata says students were told by staff that "if the shelves look emptier right now it's because we have to remove all books [published] prior to 2008."
Takata is one of several Peel District School Board (PDSB) students, parents and community members CBC Toronto spoke to who are concerned about a seemingly inconsistent approach to a new equity-based book weeding process implemented by the board last spring in response to a provincial directive from the Minister of Education.
They say the new process, intended to ensure library books are inclusive, appears to have led some schools to remove thousands of books solely because they were published in 2008 or earlier.
Parents and students are looking for answers as to why this happened, and what the board plans to do moving forward.
The process of weeding books from a library isn't new.
Libraries across the country follow weeding plans to dispose of damaged, moldy and outdated books and to ensure their collections remain a trusted source of current information.
But Takata, who is of Japanese descent, is concerned weeding by publication date doesn't follow that norm and will erase important history.
"I think that authors who wrote about Japanese internment camps are going to be erased and the entire events that went on historically for Japanese Canadians are going to be removed," she said.
"That worries me a lot."
Libraries not Landfills, a group of parents, retired teachers and community members says it supports standard weeding, but shares Takata's concerns about both fiction and nonfiction books being removed based solely on their publication date.
The group is also concerned about how subjective criteria like inclusivity will be interpreted from school to school in the later stages of the equity-based weeding process.
Tom Ellard, a PDSB parent and the founder of Libraries not Landfills, said teachers reached out to them to help raise awareness about the weeding process.
"Who's the arbiter of what's the right material to go in the library, and who's the arbiter of what's wrong in our libraries? That's unclear," he said. "It's not clear to the teachers who've provided us this material, and it's not clear to me as a parent or as a taxpayer."
Ellard says he's talked to the parent council, his son's principal and his school board trustee. He's also contacted members of the provincial government, but says he hasn't received a substantial response about what happened in the spring and how the process is intended to work.
It's fun when the other side goes to work with a vigour that surpasses the fervour their mortal enemy puts into the exact same task of censoring that which party HQ finds intolerable. Choosing an arbitrary date is an ingenious tactic, like if the right-wing chose to ban everything that was printed after the first bible was circulated.
Ah, well, maybe they needed all that room on the school shelves for the hundreds of copies of Genderqueer, The Hips On The Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish, or How To Use A Strap-On that will soon be required reading. This latest episode of "man, this planet really does deserve to get hit by a big asteroid" can actually be a lot of fun if you let it, gallows-humour wise.....

And yes, I really do believe that a Minister of Education in a Conservative government would be dumb enough to issue a mandate like this and simply be altogether unaware at how excessively thorough the left-wing orcs at the school boards would be at implementing the measures. They're just simpleton politicians who sending out the orders and it can therefore be safely assumed to not be very bright.
