“Erect a Museum and then Buy Some Folks to Visit it”

On April 20, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that the Government of Canada has reached a partnership agreement with the City of Winnipeg, the Friends of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and the Forks Renewal Corporation to establish the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.  The federal commitment of $100 million is contingent on its partners raising $165 million towards the cost of the museum. The vision of the late I.H. “Izzy” Asper, the Museum will be in Winnipeg at the Forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, long renowned as a place where Canada’s diverse First Peoples traditionally met to resolve their differences peacefully. NP

By Lubomyr Luciuk

Once upon a time, I.H. “Izzy” Asper’s clan backed Jean’s gang. Nothing is free, of course, so Izzy expected more than a merci for his media-manipulating magic. He got a promise - if Jean got his prize, then Izzy’s pet, his very own holocaust museum, could drink from the public trough. Alas, Izzy went off to his just reward before squeezing even a drop out of Shawinigan’s petit garзon. Hopeful, nonetheless, his progeny stuck with their papa’s pal, loyal until he was purged. As a spent leader goes quickly dry, they clambered off to court Paul. That didn’t last, since a certain Stephen’s day was about to dawn. So decamp again they did, without much of bye-bye, easy enough when your notion of loyalty is akin to how most of us wear a shirt - chuck when soiled. 

And, lo and behold, their wandering worked. Just the other day the Asper Foundation, then oh-so-Liberal, now oh-so-Conservative, was promised millions, in perpetuity, to erect Izzy’s mausoleum on some Manitoba mud flats. Tactfully, it’s called the “Canadian Museum of Human Rights.”

What’s wrong with that? Won’t this be good for Manitoba? That depends on whether you pay taxes. Most of us do. Unfortunately, this project’s motto is not “Build it and they will come” but “Erect it, then buy some folks to visit.” So millions – your tax dollars at work - will, annually, subsidize the hoi polloi coming out to Winnipeg. Without this welfare, or “operational funding” as the bureaucrats call it, the Asper project could never sustain itself, in part because, frankly, there is no real demand for yet another holocaust museum in North America, nor much genuine support for a facility committed largely to recalling only the horrors that befell one tribe during the Second World War. All this seems to have escaped the attention of this boondoggle’s boosters. In fairness, the shills never claimed to care.

Their scheme has always been controversial. Veterans rejected a holocaust gallery in their new Canadian War Museum, which punted Izzy’s project from the banks of the Ottawa River to those by the Red. And a coalition of Canadian ethnocultural communities, Canadians for a Genocide Museum, has consistently pointed out that the Asper museum would not be inclusive or equitable in its treatment of the many acts of genocide that have befouled human history. To counter that chorus, Canadian Heritage slipped some coins to a lobbyist who cajoled a few of his aboriginal brothers into endorsing the Asper arrangement, a forked tongue tactic if ever there was one.

If our taxes are to underwrite this “national museum” why can’t its backers give straight answers to some simple questions? For example, how much of its permanent exhibit space will be given over to Canada’s “aboriginal holocaust” and will that theme be afforded more, or less, space than the Shoah? And, given their alleged support for this project, how much is the Assembly of First Nations kicking in? Why is a so-called “Canadian Museum of Human Rights” not focused primarily on Canadian issues? Precisely how much of its area will recall those caught up in the Residential Schools, the plight of the Acadians, the injustices of the Chinese Head Tax or what happened to Ukrainians (and others) during Canada’s first national internment operations? While tragedies like the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine, arguably the greatest act of genocide to occur in 20^th century Europe, deserve mention, shouldn’t essentially non-Canadian stories be treated elsewhere, in this case in a museum in Ukraine? And since no one but a nut would deny the holocaust, why is more than a quarter of the Asper project’s total space dedicated to that horror, already well treated in dozens of centres around North America and, of course, in Israel? If an international dimension is required why not be unique and concentrate on the far less known crimes of Communism? The greatest slaughter of humans in the modern period occurred in Red China under Mao Tse Tung, greater than in Europe under Stalin or Hitler.

Very few cultural institutions can sustain themselves without some assistance. In a country as large as Canada, it may even make sense to have “national museums” outside Ottawa, provided the government can amend the Museums Act to allow for that, and then ensures that management forever rests in the hands of professionals, not partisans. Only strict governance rules can keep such facilities from becoming taxpayer-funded vehicles for the promotion of the pet peeves or prejudices of special interest groups. But some politicians are so intent on playing up to media moguls that they don’t hesitate in throwing your tax money around, hoping to get themselves re-elected for long service. Parliament Hill seems adolescently oblivious to a fundamental truth: the fidelity of a courtesan swirls like a skirt in a Calgary chinook.

Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk is a professor and writer who lives in Kingston, Ontario