The Legal Cost of Cutting Librarians

On 6 May 2026, Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) announced that it had eliminated 91 positions, including 45 layoffs, in response to a $15 million deficit. The deficit followed a $9.4 million reduction to NSCC’s operating grant by the Province of Nova Scotia earlier in the year and reduced international tuition revenue, due to previous federal and provincial caps on international students. The cuts included student advisers and other professional support workers, but a whopping 25% of those cuts were librarians. All campus librarians were eliminated. NSCC’s campus librarians partner with faculty to facilitate critical information and digital literacy instruction to students across programs. This partnership, in the words of the NSCC libraries, “enhances students’ information and digital literacy skills and fosters lifelong learning.” NSCC is not the only Nova Scotian institution facing these decisions. The Halifax Regional Municipality and the Halifax Regional Centre for Education announced the ratification of a new five-year supplementary education funding agreement on 13 May 2026 that phases out municipal funding for school librarians by August 2031.

Though these Nova Scotian examples spurred this post, in the context of Slaw, the topic is relevant to all Canadian legal professionals. The decision to cut librarians comes at exactly the moment when information reaches us through a wider range of channels and mediums than ever before, each carrying its own evaluative challenges. Cutting librarians who teach critical information and digital literacy skills may have downstream legal consequences. While there are many types of librarians who take on many different roles, most librarians who work in education teach these skills in some capacity.

I teach legal research, a field that requires a high level of critical information and digital literacy. In law, research is focused on the evidentiary value of a source. Lawyers are trained to interrogate authority explicitly. But the concept of information as evidence and the connected skillset is not specific to the legal profession. It is generalist in nature, highly valuable, and can reduce potential legal issues for everyone. The same questions lawyers ask of cases, statutes, and secondary sources are fundamentally the same questions we all must ask of our news, social media, advertising, AI-generated summaries, and more.

Information and digital literacy skills are taught by a range of educators in primary and secondary education, with librarians supporting that learning process. At the post-secondary level, librarians are often the ones leading and coordinating that instruction through one-off sessions, workshops, and curated materials. Librarians teach people how to identify what kind of source they are looking at. How to figure out who created the information and whether they have the standing to make the statement. How to identify the perspective being presented and what it might leave out. How to notice when a citing a source is missing, and how to follow a citation chain. How to flag when information has been removed from its original context. How to avoid plagiarism. How to tell a generated answer from a human one. How to verify sources within a generated output. How to recognize that articulate writing may not be factually correct. Essentially, librarians teach what questions must be asked of information to determine its reliability, or evidentiary weight.

Most people will never take a legal research class, but they will spend their lives encountering situations that require information be applied as evidence (the links in this paragraph are doing some heavy lifting, I recommend viewing them). They will access the news online. They will rent housing, pay utilities, and manage other costs. They will vote, requiring interpretation of competing voices presented via a range of mediums. They will work, often in fields where misinformation carries professional risk. They will navigate health care, and weigh options for treatments and products. They will sign leases, file their taxes, and review insurance policies and financial documents. They will be targeted with advertisements and marketing claims. Each of these involves at least one moment where the decision to act on the information depends on an individual’s ability to evaluate what they are reading, watching, or hearing. Many of those moments have legal stakes even when the person making the decision does not realize it.

Our daily lives are now flooded with plausible sounding but incorrect summaries, fabricated sources, and content in various mediums curated by an algorithm. This affects everyone. A high school student writing a paper on vaccines requires the same basic critical information and digital literacy skills as a law student evaluating a source in their medical negligence course, which is the same evaluative problem as a retiree trying to figure out whether a piece of medical advice is accurate. The skills are the same, and they are taught, deliberately, by librarians whose professional training is rooted in critical information and digital literacy. When librarians are cut, there is no guarantee that this teaching is redistributed elsewhere.

The NSCC libraries’ own framing of their role emphasizes “lifelong learning.” The information environment shifts continuously, and so do the skills required to navigate it. Several Master of Library and Information Studies (MLIS) programs in Canada have become Masters of Information (MI) programs in recent years, the title change emphasizing a focus on connecting people with information. The University of Toronto’s program acknowledges that “information penetrates all aspects of our digitally-mediated society,” creating “an increasing need for information professionals, who know how to handle the myriad forms of information in effective, innovative, and ethical ways, and who also understand the societal consequences of rapidly changing information practices.” Dalhousie’s program names digital and technological literacy, evidence-based practices, and lifelong learning as core competencies. These are precisely the qualifications required to teach critical information and digital literacy in our evolving information society.

Advances in information technologies may improve access to justice for those who cannot afford legal advice or are navigating the system without representation. But whether those gains will balance against the new issues they simultaneously create remains an open question. Those issues may result in an increased need for legal advice, small claims and class actions, and other legal recourse.

Cuts to library staff compound. Individuals who cannot evaluate sources may rely on bad ones, and bad sources, in aggregate, are likely to result in a population more vulnerable to fraud, manipulated content, misinformation, and other information distortions that carry downstream legal consequences. The law assumes a citizenry capable of distinguishing reliable information from unreliable information. Librarians, at every level of the education system, are a professional group continuously working to maintain that capacity at a pivotal time. Critical information and digital literacy are public-interest competencies, and the justice system will absorb some of the consequences if those skills erode. All levels of government and institutions should consider whether the savings, calculated against the librarian positions that are being cut, are savings at all.