Rejection or censorship in Baby Boomer and Generation X textbooks; We care, who knows?

When The Royal Commission on Book Publishing published its 1973 report CANADIAN PUBLISHERS & CANDIAN PUBLISHING, the commissioners stated that Canadians wouldn’t accept restriction of their reading materials, as was tolerated in other economic sectors such as dairy.[1]

A regulation that means that certain books must be read instead of other books is entirely different [than in other fields of enterprise]. The intellectual censorship inherent in such restrictions would be rejected by Canadians, as it would be by any other free society. And it would not reassure them to say that “important” world literature would be permitted to enter the country, while controls were imposed on the rest in order to stimulate domestic book production. Just what kind of selective censorship are proponents of this plan calling for? Advocates of such a simplistic solution are reasoning emotionally, not logically, if they are thinking at all.[2]

If Canadians only knew. Intense interactions between booksellers and police into at least the 1990s proved the commissioner’s claim. The Toronto Police Service, to whom I’m personally indebted, employed what was variously called its morality squad or porn police to harass gay and lesbian booksellers and confiscate merchandise.[3] But through local resistance, persecuting Canadians for sharing who they were or fantasized being in print as well as person became less tolerable.

When it came to their children, overworked industrial era parents could care less about how authorities filtered reading material. Public and Catholic school was childcare. It is, in my opinion, incumbent on readers seeking authentic Canadian educational history to recall residential school in comparison, child abduction by a violent aggressor and part of an imperfect or incomplete holocaust? That’s not a request for your guilt.

In any case students were tended to, kept away from seedier street elements while at their desks taking in classroom lessons. Even fewer parents considered how the system chose educational media to convey subject matter. What role did the teacher have in selecting history, geography or law textbooks? Who else was involved? Provincial enforcement officers also roamed schools in search of contraband curricular resources.

The publishing commission was unaware of what would become bureaucratic practice. It was only a little more than a decade since Ontario began permitting schools to offer students additional intellectual diversity by inviting publishers to freely submit publications for Ministry evaluation. I counted only eight titles from the 1960s from the study that were rejected on their way to becoming textbooks.

No more censorship is involved when a provincial authority – or a municipal or a school authority for that matter – exercises its delegated responsibility to approve or not to approve specific books according to their educational worth than when such authorities establish other broad parameters for their selection or exclusion.[4]

With their report, Commissioners Richard Rohmer, Dalton Camp and Marsh Jeanneret concluded that Ontario “would have nothing to do with censorship.”[5] With the benefit of time though we know that most likely hundreds of books were likely excluded after already navigating the “broad parameters for their selection” and winning approval.

Censored textbooks may have discussed a political figure from a “negative” perspective thus nurturing an opinion inconsistent with conventional narratives. Maybe a particular history spilt how truly rotten European colonization of what became Canada was for Indigenous people and some new arrivals. Books that made students aware of their legal rights were a threat.

The risk of censorship was also real, Ray Bradbury assures. The author of dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 is often quoted as having said that “you don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”[6] Accusations of censorship are commonplace today. The remainder of this article discusses a single book, Paula Bourne & John Eisenberg’s 1972 The Law and the Police that I considered censored and another, Frances Henry’s 1973 Forgotten Canadians: The Blacks of Nova Scotia, that was only rejected, in order to depict some Canadian Mockingbird methodology.

The Law and the Police at 112 pages was submitted with OISE‘s other Canadian Critical Issues Series titles. Three chapters were I. THE USE OF FORCE, II. THE RIGHT TO PRIVACY and III. NATIONAL EMERGENCIES. Art & Commodity has discussed the collection previously. According to the book’s forward, series units were trialed in high-school classrooms in Metro Toronto, Belleville and Ottawa.

“The books are intended to be both provocative and informative.” And were, so provoking that the entire collection except Native Survival was covertly censored by the Ministry of Education in 1972, contravening national and international human rights law.

My search did not turn up an evaluation file for The Law and the Police initially, but fortunately another department document had collected notes from the entire troublesome series.[7] One evaluator from Flesherton, Ontario who approved the submission was concerned that if the complete book wasn’t taught in its entirety then a “great bias might result” against law enforcement. A Thunder Bay panelist who recommended The Law and the Police for Circular 14—the individual wanted it to be compulsory reading for Board of Education members, supervisors and principals, to prepare for the “possible onslaught of upset parents” and thought that it “might be good for the education system”—saw a potential anti-establishment bias.

Final printed page of The Law and the Police, 1972

At the Minister of Education’s request another administration officer who hadn’t been involved in the evaluation so far was asked to participate. This individual reported back on some of their reservations. That officer realized “things have changed” since he’d been either a student or teacher, but thought “the books should be restricted to the senior division,” if used. Department notes document that most booklets were excluded on a technicality. Series editor Dr. Malcolm Levin was “a landed immigrant but not fully Canadian,” a triviality that had been resorted to elsewhere when absolutely necessary (see Nellie McClung).

German born Frances Henry left the Nazi state for New York with her Jewish parents in 1939 just as fleeing was becoming impossible, according to her recollections. Now a renowned scholar winding down her academic career investigating human diversity, sharing her findings with readers, students and academic colleagues.

Henry’s Forgotten Canadians, published by Longman Canada, is one of the retired York University professor’s earlier studies. My copy of the 215 page, 9 chapter softcover was purchased used from an online retailer after launching into my inquiry of the textbook scandal. As a Black Canadian the book piqued my interest.[8] I wanted Forgotten Canadiansdespite it being beyond the edge of my criteria for censored texts. Readers of Canadian Mockingbird: Exposing Censorship and Textbook-Mediated Social Engineering will note its absence. However alter my criteria slightly and it would have been included, instead of being merely “rejected.”[9]

For my purposes Forgotten Canadians was practical not only because the aptitudes and attitudes it encountered traveling through Ontario’s education bureaucracy were those impacting other texts on record as censored, but because of the void of period texts about Black Canadians. Henry’s title expressed this sentiment.

Example image from Values Picture Test

Three reviewers approved and another three rejected, including at least one Ministry employee assigned to the panel.[10]One disapproving reviewer didn’t see Forgotten Canadians as a textbook,[11] more of an ethnography, that should still be available for Man and Society or History classes to reference. This was essentially same reason shared with publisher Longman in the rejection letter, written at a university level.

The bias reviewer, set apart from in duty others for a time, found Forgotten Canadians “scholarly but very readable. It is intended to be read by sociology students who understand the use of such terms as lower and middle class which are often applied to the Blacks who are the subject of the study.”[12] Henry had been careful in her use of the words such as “appear” when making observations, that she reported with sensitivity to her subject. Another reviewer though was specifically concerned with the author’s “value-laden” bias and what might have been an American frame of reference.[13]

Notes

[1] Thomas Elliot, Benjamin Goldstein, Sylvain Charlebois, “Over 6 billion liters of Canadian milk wasted since 2012,” Ecological Economics, v. 227, Jan. 2025.
[2] Ministry of the Attorney General of the Government of Ontario, CANADIAN PUBLISHERS & CANDIAN PUBLISHING, p. 52, 1973.
[3] Elaine Carole, “Porn police a Canadian Inquisition,” The Toronto Star, L3, February 12, 1994.
[4] CANADIAN PUBLISHERS & CANADIAN PUBLISHING, p. 75-76.
[5] Ibid., 252.
[6] Another real threat to culture and literacy is that a declining percent of people are reading books. More of the 1993 Bradbury quote, according to Facebook “Classic Literature” profile was the “problem in our country isn’t with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us — it’s all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. … You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
[7] In a file labeled Canadian Critical Issues Series, Eisenberg/MacQueen, General Publishing.
[8] African American and Irish Canadian as well, with Italian Canadian affines. I may use the term mulatto when shrinking into labels for the sake of clarity, adulterating a blissfully less aware childhood.
[9] Distinguishing terms can assist with rational discussion. To assist with that goal, let me explain that texts categorized as censored are those the Ministry of Education, or Premier’s Office, refused to list in spite of its own publicly shared rules. Rejected texts are those submitted for evaluation yet not included in the annual Circular 14, for whatever reason. Censored texts are also rejected but not necessarily the reverse. If books were refused in alignment with established and shared criteria, then they were simply rejected.
[10] I sought majorities.
[11] February 24, 1975.
[12] February 28, 1975.
[13] February 14, 1975.
[14] This post’s cover image is page 174 of CANADIAN PUBLISHERS & CANADIAN PUBLISHING depicting an optimistic curve for readers and reading.

Jeremy Tompkins’  Canadian Mockingbird: Exposing Censorship and Textbook-Mediated Social Engineering, the 223-page nonfiction book describing a program of covert public, Catholic, and residential school textbook censorship during Baby Boomer and Generation X eras is now available. The program regularly ignored the panel consensus of paid subject specialists, defying domestic and international protections.