from CBC Fifth Estate "A shadow war on libraries" (Feb. 7, 2025)
..."Valleyview’s library being in the midst of a political storm was new to the town, but is in keeping with Take Back Alberta’s stated aim of creating change by seizing control of the low hanging fruit of democracy, like school and library boards.
"I say this to all of you: Who here feels that horrible things are happening in our libraries?” Take Back Alberta leader Parker said during a 2023 rally outside Calgary city hall.
"The answer right now is that we have to get engaged. Every one of you has to begin participating in their democracy. If you want them to leave your kids alone, you have to be the ones making the decision about how that happens."
Low voter turnout, he said, is the key to victory.
"Albertans and Canadians are apathetic and lazy. They never show up," he said during another October 2023 speech in Calgary. “You could take over every school board in this entire province."
Parker knows a thing or two about political success, having turned Take Back Alberta into a force in Alberta politics.
The group claims responsibility for forcing former Alberta premier Jason Kenney’s resignation in 2022. And when the governing United Conservative Party held elections for its board of directors in 2023, several candidates sought Parker’s endorsement — including Valleyview town Coun. Samantha Steinke.
“We're endorsing Sam,” Parker said in a video in which TBA vetted candidates. Steinke, he said, was the “only TBA person” running for a board position and “was one of the key organizers behind the entire freedom movement here in Alberta.”
Steinke’s UCP connection runs in the family. Her husband, Nathan Steinke, works in the office of Todd Lowen, a UCP member of the provincial legislature and Alberta’s minister of forests and parks. Prior to becoming a town councillor in 2021, Samantha Steinke ran the local UCP constituency association
Samantha Steinke was on the stage at the 2024 UCP annual general meeting in Red Deer, having won her board election, where thousands of party members were in attendance. Parker glad-handed his way through the crowds.
“There are 2,288 people from Take Back Alberta that are here,” Parker told The Fifth Estate in an interview from the floor of the convention. “That is just the people on my list.”
If Parker’s claim is true, Take Back Alberta followers made up nearly 40 per cent of the UCP membership at the meeting. [that is not a majority!]
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith distanced herself from Parker in February 2024 after his social media commentary about federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s marriage. But TBA’s influence in the wider UCP remains.
Parker watched as party members voted on policy resolutions, informed by TBA’s positions, opposing gender affirming care, GSA rules and diversity and inclusion policies
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The politics championed by Take Back Alberta are not limited to Wild Rose Country. There are similar efforts in other provinces.
In 2022 municipal elections in British Columbia and Ontario, for instance, candidates from groups such as "Vote Against The Woke" and "ParentsVoice B.C." ran in school board elections, although they only won a handful of seats
The face of local government is changing as a result of these types of electoral efforts, said Paul McLauchlin, the president of Alberta’s Rural Municipalities Association, who has served five terms in rural municipal politics.
Disinformation campaigns are stirring up voters around fabricated issues, he said, resulting in the election of politicians whose agendas have nothing to do with the often mundane tasks of maintaining roads or passing land use bylaws.
“Undeniably, you can definitely create pretty big armies on wars that may or may not exist,” McLauchlin said. “And I think that you can start to feed people on some concerns that they have and create this bigger enemy; the bigger the enemy you create, the more people that'll join your side.”
And the politics of real or imagined grievances can tear at the fabric of a community.
“I think that when you deal with a small community, that can divide a council. I know people that will never talk to each other ever again over issues like this,” McLauchlin said.
[appointed boards = low hanging fruit]
In Valleyview, the library board is not elected, but chosen by town council. In the past, the library would select prospective board members who applied and present its choices to the town council for approval.
But in 2024, council unilaterally replaced some of the strongest library defenders on the board — including GSA supporter Debbie Stewart — and appointed its own hand-picked members. That resulted in the eight-member board being split down the middle between old and new members.
The town broke the impasse by adding a ninth member to the board - [Nathan Steinke].
A town divided
As the library debate in Valleyview heated up, common ground became increasingly less common, and the teens who found refuge in the GSA felt like they were becoming outcasts.
“My idea of common ground is being able to exist in this community,” said Robertson.
“And I think what [some town residents] think I mean by that is that people like me will suddenly start to control their town and that the rise in acceptance for people like me means that there will be a sudden spike in population of people like me and that we will take over … but that’s not true.”
Robertson said hostility toward the local 2SLGBTQ+ community has become more open. During the 2024 annual town parade, Robertson was part of a Pride float. She was handing out candy to parade goers along the route when one man, in full view of other adults, harshly rebuffed the teen with homophobic slurs.
Roberston said the other adults nearby did nothing.
"I think really that we're kind of forgetting to be human beings and we're kind of just running with the biggest stick we can find," said Valleyview mechanic Ken Hoedl, Robertson’s grandfather.
[loving grandfather loses business]
Other vocal defenders of the library were also victims of malicious smears, including Travis Werklund. Aside from his role at the chamber of commerce, he is an outspoken gay man and was the owner of the Tall Timbers café.
His café was once a hub of activity, even welcoming Premier Smith during a visit in the summer of 2023.
As the library debate raged on through 2023, Werklund says town employees, a core slice of his customer base, stopped coming to the café.
He says the decline in customers was fatal, and by the summer of 2024, Tall Timbers was shuttered.
"It is the end of a dream," said Werklund. "Standing up for what I thought was just and right and loving actually backfired on me."
Shortly afterwards, T.J. Kennedy — the man who tried to get 2SLGBTQ+ books off the library shelves in town — celebrated the Tall Timber’s closing with an X post dripping with damaging false accusations aimed at Werklund. Kennedy is friends with Samantha Steinke, and he said she helped him land a job with local MLA Todd Loewen.
The post included a selfie showing a grinning Kennedy pointing at the cafe's "closed" sign.
"Local groomer's business shut down permanently," wrote Kennedy. "Too bad so sad. FAFO.”
In social media parlance, FAFO is both a warning and victory chant: "F–k around and find out."
“The more times that they say [groomer], the more people that believe it,” said Werklund. “And it's filled with hate…. Those who know me will know that this is about hate.”
Not everyone in town believes the 2SLGBTQ+ community is a target of discrimination, including Rod Perron, the man with the Taking Alberta Back tower.
Valleyview, he says, is an accepting place, but those who support cutting the library budget, which he sees as a purely financial issue, are being unfairly painted as bigots.
“I think the gay thing, it's just like if you're not out there dancing on the street with them, well, then they're saying that there's something wrong with you,” said Perron. “I don't feel that they're discriminated [against] at all in our town. Maybe they just need to focus on something different and they’ll probably fit in just fine.”
The conspiracy no one can see
The hostility toward 2SLGBTQ+ materials and programs in libraries in schools is explicit in Take Back Alberta events and rallies. The Fifth Estate has examined hours of video of these events featuring Parker at the microphone, where the mechanics of a sprawling conspiracy aimed at children are laid out as a clear and present danger to western civilization.
Those videos show that Parker is far from the only influential voice pushing these claims. In October 2023, Parker introduced a guest speaker at two Take Back Alberta events who described the architecture of the conspiracy.
"They turn the children against family. They turn the children against faith, they turn the children against themselves. They're alienating the children from who they are, incapable of understanding who they are," conservative U.S. author James Lindsay said at a TBA event in Calgary.
“You're a parent, you show up to a school board in the United States and you complain about the perverted books they’ve got, you’re a domestic terrorist,” Lindsay said.
Lindsay’s conspiracy theory casts schools and libraries as communist revolutionary hotbeds. This rebellion is so insidious, he claims, that no parents can ever see it in action.
“It'll never show up in the curriculum. They'll never show up in the book. And if you see the homework yourself, you'll never get upset about a single question. You have to see what they're doing in the classroom,” Lindsay told the TBA crowd. “Let me give you a clue. If you show up that day, they won't do it that day.”
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Lindsay’s views are not an aberration in the United States. The Fifth Estate found his rhetoric is a staple of Republican politics, where anti-2SLGBTQ+ sentiment has been turned into law. In several red states, these laws are designed to punish libraries for including 2SLGBTQ+ books in their collections.
“When we say that censorship is the greatest threat to democracy, it is true,” said Sherry Scheline, the director of the library in the small town of Donnelly, Idaho, where state legislation has put the library’s future at risk. “When the politics comes knocking at our door, we have no choice but to become involved. Librarians have to step up and protect the books. That is our job because by protecting the books, protecting speech, we are protecting democracy as a whole.”
In Idaho, for example, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed Bill 710 last year, allowing anyone who finds a library book with content “harmful to minors” — which includes “homosexuality” — to sue the library for damages. If someone complains about a book, the law obligates a library to move it out of reach of minors or face a lawsuit with an automatic fine of $250, plus damages awarded in a civil court.
In Donnelly, the library has tried to preserve its collection and programs within the law by becoming “adults only.” Children can only visit with a parent or if a parent has signed a consent waiver.
“There's no harm on my shelves,” Scheline said. “Our teen LGBTQ community is the most hurt by this legislation…. And they deserve to see themselves reflected in literature.”
These anti-library laws are the latest manifestation of a current of anti-transgender sentiment roiling through Republican politics for years, said Madison Pauly, an investigative journalist with Mother Jones magazine in California.
Pauly said some Christian nationalist groups and politicians were looking for an issue to engage their base after gay marriage became legal and broadly socially acceptable.
America’s small transgender population — less than one per cent of adult Americans, according to the Williams Institute at the University of California — became the target.
“People don’t know a lot about transgender rights, this might seem very outside of their experience, so maybe it's something they can’t relate to,” said Pauly of the rationale used by some social conservatives that she uncovered in her reporting on the movement.
“Let’s try to spread misinformation about it and turn this into a political issue that can motivate voters.”
It began with stoking fears about transgender people in female bathrooms and sports, and eventually morphed into an attack on schools, libraries and 2SLGBTQ+ books.
“It's been an incremental approach that at this point in the U.S. has become an all-out attack on trans people, their existence, their lives, their ability to live fully as themselves and publicly,” said Pauly.
The end of an era [for an independent library]
The die was cast. The defenders of Valleyview’s library tried to make their voices heard, but they were unable to prevent what was coming.
At a library board meeting on Jan. 29, the final decision was made. In a video of the meeting obtained by The Fifth Estate, the five town-picked members of the library board are seen outvoting the other four and deciding that the library would close in its current location and be moved to the new school complex. Like the meetings that preceded it, the deep divisions in Valleyview were on display.
“It is clear to me that a lot of private discussions and decisions have been made,” said longtime board member Kelli Reimer when the motion to close the library was debated.
“Excuse me,” said Tina Caron, the new board chair. “We are going to stick to the motion laid on the table. We don’t need interjections of accusations…. So I need you to stick to the motion.”
“I feel that you are not allowing me to speak my opinion or my comments on this matter,” Reimer said.
Another board member said Caron was out of order by shutting Reimer down, but after conferring with a new face at the board table seated beside her, Caron dismissed the accusation. The person she spoke with was the newly appointed board record keeper, Nathan Steinke, Samantha Steinke’s husband.
Samantha Steinke did not reply to several interview requests from The Fifth Estate. An interview request sent to the office of Loewen, the local member of the provincial legislature, went unanswered.
In the audience was T.J Kennedy, who told The Fifth Estate in an emailed statement he sometimes escorts some board members to their cars after meetings to make sure they are safe.
The school board’s proposed floor plan shows the library will be moved into a community space about half the size of the current library building.
In a recording of the meeting obtained by The Fifth Estate, library directors were told the school board — which is chaired by Samantha Steinke’s father-in-law — will control the space.
A library in a school has a different character than a public one, said Lauzon of the Airdrie library.
“Public libraries "collect a wide array of material for everybody on all different topics. We rely on parents to choose materials for their children whereas in schools they act in more of a parental capacity that way,” she said. “And so the collections policies are quite different from a school to a library.”
On Feb. 1, library board chair Caron lauded the decision to move the library in a Facebook post, saying it would be a “model of success and innovation.”
[Tale of two stories]
“I must stress that the school will not, and cannot under Alberta law, have control of the public library,” Caron wrote.
[but maybe the school board will?!?]
The debate about the decision continued in the post’s comment section.
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For Theo Robertson, the decision is a defeat. She will be leaving town for university in August, and does not expect to return.
"I used to think that maybe after I was educated and I had seen the world that I would come back here. Now I don't ever feel like that,” she said. “I know how hard it was before. I can't even bear to think about how hard it's going to be to change things now.”
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