Try to ban The Handmaid’s Tale and you’ll face the literary scorn of Margaret Atwood. Alberta’s government has learned as much from its now paused censorship measure.
In a short story published online this past weekend, Atwood slammed MAGA-ish Premier Danielle Smith, “selfish rapacious capitalism,” Ayn Rand fanboys, and the hypocrisy of paying “no attention to what Jesus actually said about the poor and the Good Samaritan and forgiving your enemies.” For former radio host Smith, Atwood saved a special bit of Serena Joy (if you’ve seen the Emmy winning Hulu series that ran from 2017 to 2025, you’ll get it): “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.”
Proving you should never doubt the power of the pen (or in this case, the post), and that most bullies can’t take a punch, Premier Smith’s government today announced via an email to school boards the ban was being halted “until further notice.” Education and Childcare Minister Demetrios Nicolaides stated that more info about the ban/not ban would become clear over the next week or so.
While widely-acclaimed, The Handmaid’s Tale was among the 200 books slated to be pulled from the school shelves in the oil-rich Canadian province because of alleged sexually explicit material.
In July, the Education and Childcare Ministry of Smith’s government ordered local school boards to institute the policy (read the original NSFW Ministerial Order here) by October, a month into the school year. Under the policy, ninth graders and below wouldn’t be allowed any access to such books, while those in Grade 10 and up would only be allowed to read such material if it was deemed educationally appropriate.
The often-explicit Bible was exempt, but along with Atwood’s 1985 novel on a theocratic takeover of the USA , Aldous Huxley’s classic Brave New World and Maya Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings were among the 200 books the Edmonton Public School board said last week were going under lock and key because of the new provincial policy.
That just wasn’t on with Margaret Atwood.
The prolific 85-year-old scribe took to social media on August 31 to offer 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.)”
That prologue of sorts might be the most blunt, literally and figuratively part of the 196-word yarn, which was picked up, reposted and liked all over the globe. You can read it here:
Not long after her government walked back its book ban measure, for now, Premier Smith Tuesday said the revamped goal was to take books with pornographic images out of the libraries and to leave the classics alone.”
On this side of the border, the classics and soon to be classics are not being left alone, in a potentially good way.
Handmaid’s Tale star and EP Elisabeth Moss will executive produce a sequel based on Atwood’s 2019 book The Testaments alongside THT collaborators Bruce Miller and Warren Littlefield. Hulu hasn’t given a release date yet for the series, but production on Season 1 started back in April.
Wonder if a certain Western Canadian politician may be making an inadvertent cameo?
