White elephant in Winnipeg?

Martin Knelman wrote this fawning piece that appeared in the Toronto Star about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, now under construction in Winnipeg.

This $300-million-plus facility is being built with money from three levels of government and private fundraising, which is being led by Gail Asper, daughter of the late CanWest Global media mogul Izzy Asper. He dreamed up the idea shortly before his death in 2003, and she’s carrying it on. It’s slated to open in 2012.

The museum has proven somewhat controversial. Elements within the Ukrainian community, for instance, have objected to the fact the Holocaust will have its own exhibit in the museum, while other genocides such as the Ukrainian Holodomor (the Stalin-induced famine in the 1930s) would be lumped together in a separate gallery. The Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association has argued that all 12 of the museum’s 12 galleries in the publicly funded Canadian Museum for Human Rights should be thematic, comparative and inclusive. No community’s suffering should be elevated above all others, it says.

But leaving aside the question of whether the Holocaust is unique or not (it clearly is, and the Ukrainian complaints have, perhaps unintentionally, offensive undertones), the most controversial part of the project to me is that it will be a national museum.

Knelman writes that convincing  Prime Minister Stephen Harper to extend the designation to the museum after his election in 2006, along with $22 million in annual federal operating funds, was just one of a number of “bumps along the road” in its development. In April 2007, Harper’s government did just that, making it the first national museum to be built in 40 years and the first to be located outside Ottawa.

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It seems obvious to me that awarding this designation was Harper’s way of thanking the Asper family for its support of the National Post and the CanWest Newspaper chain. Like its predecessor chain, Southam, CanWest was solidly behind the unite-the-right movement that saw Harper ultimately combine the Reform-cum-Canadian Alliance party with the old Progressive Conservative party. Izzy Asper bought the Post from its founder, Conrad Black, in stages in 2000-01 and CanWest kept it afloat, absorbing its losses, until the Post and the rest of the chain was sold to new owners last year.

Apart from rewarding the erstwhile Liberal Asper family (Izzy Asper himself was a former leader of the Manitoba Liberal party), there’s really no other reason for the place to be located in Winnipeg. National museums belong in national capitals, which people otherwise have a reason for visiting. Winnipeg is an isolated, mid-sized city of 650,000 with brutal winters and mosquito-filled summers. The museum hopes to attract educational tours, but Winnipeg is hard to get to even from other parts of Western Canada, let alone from anywhere east of the Manitoba border.

It may, in the end, turn out to be a wonderful museum, but there are clear parallels between it and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland (which I’ve visited).  A more fitting location for that hall would have been New York or Los Angeles, or perhaps even Memphis. It’s a great museum, but it’s in Cleveland, which isn’t exactly a tourist mecca.

The Canadian Museum For Human Rights will be built, but will anyone come?