‘Crazy Decision’: Eby Speaks Out After School Board Pulls ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Due to ‘Equity’ Priorities

B.C. Premier David Eby speaks during a news conference in Vancouver, B.C., on Jan. 9, 2024. (The Canadian Press/Ethan Cairns)

B.C. Premier David Eby has called the Surrey school board’s decision to remove “To Kill a Mockingbird” over “equity” concerns a bad idea.

“It’s a profoundly anti-racist book,” Mr. Eby told reporters on Feb. 29. “I think for those who are suggesting that it should be banned, they just need to give it a read to understand the power,”

The Surrey School District has pulled several books from its curriculum reading list, including Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which covers the issues of racism and prejudice through the story of a young girl, her father—a lawyer—and a black man falsely accused of a crime.

“If you take for example ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ that’s not from the experience of a black man, the Surrey school board’s associate director of communications Ratinder Matthew told CBC. “This is the equity lens that we owe to our students and families to use to look carefully at our curriculum,”

Ms. Matthew said the review of the books began a year ago after the school district heard from parents and caregivers, according to the CBC.

“[They] shared lived experiences of their students in situations in classrooms where they didn’t feel safe,” she said.

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The book won a Pulitzer Prize and has been published in over 40 languages.

Mr. Eby described “To Kill A Mockingbird” as “a beautiful book” and said the board should have another look at it.

“It seems like a crazy decision,” he said.

Other books removed from the list include “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck, “In the Heat of the Night” by John Ball, and “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie, media reports say.

The Epoch Times attempted to contact the school board but did not hear back by publication time.

B.C. Opposition Leader Kevin Falcon, who heads the former BC Liberals under its new name BC United, also criticized the move.

“Saddened to see these influential authors removed from the curriculum,” Mr. Falcon said in a Feb. 29 post on social media. “When I hear from parents about the challenges their kids face in BC it’s toxic social media, drugs, & mental health issues. Not the ‘trauma’ of impactful classic literature.”

Book Bans

A number of cases of schools banning books have been in the news lately amid outcries that freedom of speech shouldn’t be suppressed. The issue arose during the 2021 federal election French-language leaders debate when the leaders were asked to comment on an Ontario francophone school board that held a book burning as a symbolic act of reconciliation with indigenous people. All the leaders criticized the burning.

Ontario’s Peel District School Board (PDSB) was criticized in Sept. 2023 after reports that it had directed librarians to remove books published before 2008 over “equity” concerns.

Two students told media outlets that they were concerned after they were informed all books published before 2008 were being removed from the school libraries.

However, the board’s education director said librarians were not instructed to remove the books. It was clarified that a PDSB manual for book “weeding” has a 15-year “weeding date,” which would be 2008.

Tara MacIsaac contributed to this report.