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Mr. Palacio’s release, on the other hand, argued that popular magazines and DVDs “are not even peripherally related to literacy and library purposes.”

When it comes to magazines, he’s just out to lunch. What kind of library doesn’t stock Chatelaine on principle? Or Seventeen or Vogue or Us Weekly, for that matter? If the goal of libraries is to promote reading and literacy, wouldn’t it make more sense to cancel the “popular” titles last, rather than first? And if you did want to wage war on trash, why would you stop at magazines? Why not burn all the Jackie Collins?

Presumably if a library was on fire, your average librarian would save the books first. But once you move beyond which media libraries should stock and start debating individual titles, you get hopelessly bogged down in irreconcilable personal prejudices. One man’s turd is another man’s classic.

Admittedly, I am somewhat appalled to learn that Toronto’s libraries maintain 46 DVD copies of the 2006 Matthew McConaughey vehicle Failure to Launch, but just a single VHS copy of Jean-Claude Lauzon’s 1992 Canadian masterpiece Léolo, about a Montreal boy’s transcendental escape from and descent into mental illness. I am even more appalled that, as I write this, 27 copies of Failure to Launch are out of the library. But who the hell am I to tell people to watch a tough, subtitled art film from Quebec instead of a breezy rom-com? Or to read Margaret Atwood instead of Stephen King, or Harper’s instead of Entertainment Weekly?

It’s one thing to demand the libraries outsource their cleaning, or close a little-used branch, or violently weed out inefficiencies. I’m all for it. But to criticize a repository of free culture for lending out ever more things every year that people want to read, watch and listen to is to punish success. Grown-up societies trust the experts in charge of their important, successful institutions. In Toronto, too many of us still just hurl our preferences at each other and call it virtue.

National Post