Welcome to a special series of Cantastic Authorpalooza posts in honour of Freedom to Read Week 2026. Today’s guests are Robin Stevenson and Julie McLaughlin, author and illustrator of the picture book, Pride Puppy. They are also two of the founding members of Canadian Authors and Illustrators Against Book Bans.
Robin: In July 2025, Alberta’s education minister, Demetrios Nicolaides, issued a ministerial order that threatened to ban hundreds of books from the shelves of school libraries here in Canada. For Julie and I, the alarm bells went off immediately—we had just spent the previous six months entangled in American book bans, and now the language and tactics being used by Alberta’s provincial government sounded disturbingly similar.
Julie: Since January 2025, our book Pride Puppy had been at the center of a US Supreme Court case, and the amount of misrepresentation, disinformation, and straight up lies about it was both astonishing and horrifying. Of course there were people online making awful, homophobic comments, but blatant misrepresentation of our book was also widely repeated in right wing and mainstream media. Eventually, in the most shocking moment of the whole experience, one of the Supreme Court justices made the bizarre claim (on the record! livestreamed from the courtroom, as we listened!) that our alphabet book was about bondage and sex workers. Fox News and other right-wing media jumped on the opportunity to further spread lies about our book, claiming that it was sexually explicit and misrepresenting it in ways intended to stir up fear and provoke outrage among more conservative audiences. I wrote extensively about it in a post on my website.
One especially absurd example of the misrepresentation about Pride Puppy, from the Catholic News Agency. Here’s the actual zipper they objected to children seeing: a kid’s sweater.
An American podcaster who went the extra mile and didn’t just misrepresent the book, but fully lied about it. The Dispatch has since acquired SCOTUSblog, the #1 source covering Supreme Court cases, and she’s at the helm. (For the record, there is no sex in the book, C was for car and Chevrolet, D was for dog, and not even one person was wearing leather chaps!).
The actual “C” page in Pride Puppy.
Supreme Court justice speaking about Pride Puppy during the Apr. 22 hearing. We have no idea what he was thinking—maybe he was confused by the dog being on a leash?
Robin: When Alberta’s government started talking about banning books, Julie and I were concerned that we were seeing the epidemic of book bans in the US spreading to Canada. And when they spoke of targeting “sexually explicit” books, we recognized language that is often weaponized against books with LGBTQ+ characters. Books like ours–books about families with two moms or two dads—are frequently labelled as “sexual content” or classified as “sex ed” in a way that books about families with a mother and father are not. Books about 2SLGBTQ+ characters and themes are among the most likely to be challenged and banned.
Julie: Canadians like to boast about how different we are from the US, but right here in front of us, the Alberta government had been meeting with far-right Christian nationalist groups and taking pages directly from the American book banning playbook. They used PEN America’s database of banned books to target specific titles for removal, and as with book banners in the US, they decontextualized the work, presenting a handful of images detached from the book as a whole, in an attempt to stir up outrage and gain support. Being from Alberta myself, this was especially upsetting to see.
The groups behind these fringe movements, like Action4Canada and Parents for Choice in Education, were fanning the flames of bigotry and book bans—and having just had a front row seat to both in the US, we couldn’t do nothing. And so, along with BC author Kari Jones, we formed Canadian Authors & Illustrators Against Book Bans. (If you’re a published author or illustrator, you can join here and help fight back!)
As we’ve seen in Alberta, book banning does not stop at the border and we are far from immune to the insidious influence of far-right groups.
Robin: When we were dealing with the SCOTUS case and the online hate that went with it, there were definitely moments when I wasn’t sure how all of this would affect my future writing: self-censorship is a very real consequence of book bans, and I think it is probably a goal rather than a side effect. But one of the silver linings of 2025 was that Julie and I had some wonderful opportunities to speak with kids and families who loved Pride Puppy—which reminded us of why we wrote this book, and who we wrote it for, and why inclusive books like this one are needed. And so we decided to write another picture book together! Orca, our fabulous publisher who has always been a strong defender of young people’s right to read, will publish PRIDE PUPPY COUNTDOWN in spring of 2027.
Lindsey: Thank you so much, Robin and Julie, for everything you continue doing to support children’s right to read.
It’s the first day of Freedom to Read Week, and there’s a lot we can do to protect access to books and information in Canada. Read a banned book. Speak up at school board meetings. Write our MPs and MLAs to tell them we believe in the right to read freely. Visit Freedom to Read Week for more ideas – and if you’re a published author or illustrator, join Canadian Authors and Illustrators Against Book Bans today.