September 2025 The Nazi book burnings in Germany and Austria in the 1930s targeted books that the German Student Union deemed subversive. In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, the firemen burn subversive books. In 2019, the school district, Conseil scolaire catholique (CSC) Providence, which operates as the French language school board for southwestern Ontario, burned classic books and used the ashes as fertilizer in the “spirit of reconciliation.” In 2025, I was physically banned from my old school, WJ Mouat Secondary, by the Abbotsford School District, because I went there to launch my book, The Scarlet Lesson. The operating principle in the instances above is that books are a danger. But burning books or banishing authors is like shooting the messenger: The message doesn’t perish. As the ancient Greek dramatist Sophocles is often purported to have said,“You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea”. My idea was that Christian teachers didn’t murder students in Indian …
If you want to get an idea of everything that is wrong with Canada today, what has sadly happened to Jim McMurtry is an example. He has been fired and cancelled for telling the truth. Thank God for courageous people like him.