The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, rising slowly from the frozen ground in the prairie city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, is the posthumous realization of a dream for the late media mogul and billionaire Izzy Asper.
Izzy, the son of immigrants from the Ukraine, was a self-made man who would eventually own the Global Television Network and purchase Conrad Black's vast newspaper holdings making him one of the richest men in Canada.
Izzy's daughter, Gail, who made her father's dream her own after his death in 2003, has worked tirelessly to get the project off the ground. Privately raised monies fell far short for the ambitious venture that will likely boast a price tag close to half a billon dollars when the construction dust settles around architect Antoine Predock's 260,000 square foot soaring glass castle.
Not to be denied, Ms. Asper did what many wealthy people do when they want something but don't want to pay for it; they call in their political markers, pull up a seat to the government trough and make their once-private endeavor public.
Three levels of government have pledged hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for initial construction and to supplement the projected $20 million annual operating budget.
(Keeping it in the family: Gail's brother David Asper has also convinced those three levels of government to kick in millions of public funds for another cultural construction project: a football stadium.)
There has been virtually no public criticism or debate surrounding what is already becoming a money pit. Ground was broken in April 2009 and was $45 million over budget just three months later. Detractors have been silenced and the Winnipeg Free Press has abandoned the roll of critical newspaper to become the museum's booster club.
Recent polls suggest that Canadians are split on building the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. More telling is the near impossibility to articulate what the CMHR is or what it will do.
Even the CMHR's own written mandate reads like a paragraph from a grammatically challenged middle school student who's padded the word count: To explore the subject of human rights, with special but not exclusive reference to Canada, in order to enhance the public's understanding of human rights, to promote respect for others, and to encourage reflection and dialogue.
What's particularly revealing about the paragraph is how generic, nonspecific and banal it is. Using such broad phrasing shades the CMHR from the light of criticism and keeps the staggering elitism and hypocrisies associated with the CMHR safely in the shadows.
Izzy Asper was a liberal (he was elected to and led the provincial party but was actually a right/libertarian) who once fired Russell Mills, the editor of the Asper-owned newspaper, The Ottawa Citizen, for editorializing that the former Prime Minister of Canada and Asper's friend, Jean Chretien, should hand in his resignation.
Izzy's despotic act rode roughshod over the basic human right of freedom of speech while simultaneously embodying A.J. Liebling's maxim, "Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one."
It was the conservative government, however, that finally acquiesced to the expensive museum and signed off on the generous funding. Led by a right-leaning Prime Minister, the government appointed the CMHR board of trustees including Chairperson Arni C. Thorsteinson, and Vice-Chair Eric Hughes.
Thorsteinson is the president of "Shelter Corporation," a real estate developer/property management company valued at 2.5 billion dollars. Hughes, a seemingly ambitious man, is the CFO of Wave Energy, a company specializing in the exploration and development of crude oil and natural gas.
Wealthy land barons and oil tycoons don't often spring to mind when talking about human rights and the appointments could be viewed with a little less skepticism if there were more than one non-Caucasian on the 10-member board that represents a country claiming to be one of the most culturally diverse nations on the planet.
Considering Canada's shameful human rights record regarding the tyrannical oppression of the country's aboriginals who were stripped of their humanity and dispossessed by land barons, oil companies and government, it's difficult not to see the unfolding story of the CMHR as Swiftian irony.
While governments are spending hundreds of millions on an "idea" museum to promote human rights -- with the arrogant, erroneous, implication that Canada is bereft of human rights violations -- some of Canada's poor are lined up at a mission located blocks from the building site.
If appointing a lone minority to the board of an entity claiming to promote the sanctity of human rights doesn't raise any red flags, the appointment of conservative toady and career bureaucrat Stuart Murray to the position of the CMHR'S CEO should set off a figurative running of the bulls.
Murray, an unimpressive man whose family owns a chain of gas stations, once ran for Premier of Manitoba as a conservative on a platform of reintroducing "workfare" programs and proposing the adoption of "right to work" anti-union legislation. (In one provincial election, Izzy also advocated for the elimination of the welfare state.)
Before Canada had legalized gay marriage, Murray, who at the time was a provincial member of parliament, voted to deny pension rights to same-sex couples.
Murray ostensibly blamed the poor and the working man for the government's fiscal problems and voted against protecting a minority group; tenets of the "right" but certainly not of "human rights."
See Murray's stammering attempt at explaining his anti-gay position here.
Whether or not the obvious hypocrisies that surround the CMHR are ominous remains to be seen. What can be stated with absolute certainty is that the violation of human rights are always committed by the powerful, sanctioned and even instituted by government (democratic or otherwise) and, that human rights movements are always forged from oppressed groups being discriminated against to the breaking point.
Ghandi, Jesus, Martin Luther King, Mother Jones and countless anonymous human beings gained purchase during violent interminable, uphill climbs by fighting the power structure.
They were humble, courageous women and men of meager means who created change by speaking the truth and leading by example. They weren't politically connected multi-millionaires who built towering monuments to themselves.
