During the First World War, Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek created Švejk in The Good Soldier Švejk, a character who followed military orders so literally that he paralyzed the Austrian war effort. The novel became a celebrated satire of military authority, later banned in several countries for its subversive power.
What made Švejk so threatening wasn’t rebellion. It was his enthusiastic embrace of military logic taken to its absurd conclusion. When ordered to advance, he advanced so zealously he got lost. When told to be patriotic, he became so effusive that officers suspected mockery. Austrian military authorities couldn’t punish perfect obedience, but they couldn’t ignore its devastating effects.
That same uncertainty just surfaced in Alberta, where Edmonton Public Schools’ response to Premier Danielle Smith’s book removal directive created something rare in today’s polarized climate: where perfect compliance looked exactly like perfect resistance.
Smith instructed schools to remove books with sexual content from their libraries. The order was broad enough to sound straightforward, yet vague enough to complicate enforcement.
The board had options. It could have staged a public fight, positioning itself as a defender of literature against government censorship. Instead, it complied. Completely.
The resulting list contained more than 200 titles, including not only graphic novels but also works studied in classrooms around the world: 1984, The Great Gatsby, The Fountainhead, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Was this deliberate “malicious compliance” or careful bureaucratic implementation? The evidence supports both interpretations without resolving either.
Board chair Julie Kusiek’s statements emphasized bureaucratic compliance: staff, she said, had ensured “only books that directly met the criteria in the ministerial order” were removed. When controversy mounted, she directed complaints to Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides. Sophisticated deflection – or simply civil servants covering themselves by following policy to the letter?
Smith’s response revealed the policy’s weakness. She accused the board of “vicious compliance,” coining her own term for what is more commonly called “malicious compliance” – the practice of following rules so literally that their flaws become impossible to ignore. Her clarification that there was “never any intention” to target these classics underscored the central problem: the directive was too vague to implement without unintended consequences.
Even critics disagreed on interpretation. John Hilton-O’Brien of Parents for Choice in Education accused the board of acting in “bad faith,” deliberately embarrassing the government. The board countered that it was “executing government instructions faithfully.” Both claims coexist, unresolved.
The result, however, was unmistakable. When The Handmaid’s Tale – a staple of high school curricula – made the list, author Margaret Atwood took to X to fan the flames: “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.”
We expect institutions to either resist or submit. Edmonton Public Schools did something more unsettling: they made it impossible to tell which. Like Hašek’s soldier, they revealed that sometimes the most subversive response is to do exactly what you’re told.
