Margaret Atwood skewers Alberta Premier Danielle Smith's failed foray into fascist-style book banning
'Sorry kids, your Minister of Education thinks you are stupid babies' Atwood says while sharing a satirical piece of 'literature'
There is a certain irony in the fact that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith's impetuous response to the Edmonton Public School Board doing exactly as they were told to do included a malapropism.
Smith used the wrong words while ranting about books with words she doesn't like.
“Edmonton Public [School Board] is clearly doing a little vicious compliance over what the direction is,” Smith said at an unrelated news conference last Friday.
‘Vicious compliance’? Mmm, that isn’t a thing. Either Smith was making up a new expression (which I actually love) or what she meant was “malicious compliance,” a term describing the passive-aggressive act of following rules so literally as to overlook the intent resulting in an unintended outcome.
You know, like if a parent took a nap and told their kid not wake her up. And then the kid didn’t wake her up even though the house was on fire.
Long story short, the Alberta government told public school boards to remove books from libraries with “sexually explicit” content. The Edmonton Public School Board, according to several librarians interviewed in different media outlets, did as it was ordered to do and librarians and teachers removed thousands of books from school shelves, including classics and books clearly not intended to be banned such as The Great Gatsby, 1984, The Godfather, and Margaret Atwood’s classic, The Handmaid’s Tale.
This wasn’t ‘vicious compliance’ or even ‘malicious compliance.’ This is what the governmental order, ordered.
Alberta's Alabama aspirations
“Hi kids .. #HandmaidsTale (the book not the series!) has just been banned in #Edmonton…don’t read it, your hair will catch on fire! Get one now before they have public book burnings of it,” Atwood said on Twitter/X the day the list of banned books came out.
Four days after that, this legend of Canadian letters posted a clever and skewering “piece of literature” that she said was OK for kids to read even though The Handmaid’s Tale was deemed not.
On her Substack, entitled In The Writing Burrow, Atwood said that she’s been asked to comment on the Alberta book banning by “everyone and their pet canary” but that she couldn’t comment because she didn’t know why it was banned.
“For describing what an American theological dictatorship could look like?” she posited. “Because it portrays evil? Is it evil to portray evil? If so, bye-bye Bible and Shakespeare. Because, as part of a power play, it perverts Christianity and rewrites the Bible , unlike anyone else, ever? Because lots of other places have banned this book and Alberta didn’t want to be left out? Because it has sex in it, even though it’s not sexy sex and anyone in Gilead of sane mind would run a mile before having any actual enjoyable sex?”
She then posted a 163-word “piece of literature” on Twitter, “a nice, clean little story... that can hardly be accused of being pornographic.”
Here's a piece of literature by me, suitable for seventeen-year-olds in Alberta schools, unlike -- we are told -- The Handmaid's Tale. (Sorry, kids; your Minister of Education thinks you are stupid babies.)
— Margaret E Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) August 31, 2025
John and Mary were both very, very good children. They never picked…
Her story:
"John and Mary were both very, very good children. They never picked their noses or had bowel movements or zits. They grew up and married each other, and produced five perfect children without ever having sex. Although they claimed to be Christian, they paid no attention to what Jesus actually said about the poor and the Good Samaritan and forgiving your enemies and such; instead, they practised selfish rapacious capitalism, because they worshipped Ayn Rand. (Though they ignored the scene in The Fountainhead where “welcomed rape” is advocated, because who wants to dwell, and also that would have involved sex and would de facto be pornographic. Well, it kind of is, eh?) Oh, and they never died, because who wants to dwell on, you know, death and corpses and yuk? So they lived happily ever after. But while they were doing that The Handmaid’s Tale came true and Danielle Smith found herself with a nice new blue dress but no job. The end."
'Vicious compliance' boosts sales
Smith announced Tuesday the order was being rewritten to ban only books with sexually explicit images.
Telling children or adults or anyone they shouldn’t read or look at or do something makes them want to read and look at and do those things even more. One book store owner in Edmonton told CBC that people were coming in to ask to see the “vicious compliance section.”
Another bookstore owner, Laurel Dziuba said whenever there is a bout of book-banning, even if it is in the U.S., it ramps up demand for the books at her shop.
A third, Kelly Dyer with Audreys Books in Edmonton, said the store saw an increase in sales since July when the book bans were first announced by the Smith government.
The good news for Atwood and the bad news for people like Smith – or Chilliwack North MLA Heather Maahs who doesn’t like books or John Hilton O’Brien, the man behind the Alberta book-banning histrionics – is that The Handmaid’s Tale is flying off shelves.
"Many people respect Margaret Atwood and her writing and that sort of thing, and I think it's just the pure curiosity as to why this book would end up on a list like this," Dyer said.
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Paul J. Henderson
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