Winnipegs Human Rights Museum

After years of speculation and funding woes, construction of the Canadian Human Rights Museum has finally commenced. The 300 million dollar complex located in the heart of the city will dramaticly change the skyline of our urban center. An urban center which is ironically host to the poorest electoral riding in the country.

The museum boasts and ambitious student program which intends to bring as many as 20, 000 thousand students from across the country to the museum every year, with much of the cost taken care of. When these students arrive they can expect to learn from exhibits on a variety of issues that permeate Canada's history. Issues such as the Chinese head tax, the womens suffrage struggle, residential schools and of course the 1919 General Strike.

Exhibits will obviously not be limited to issues exclusively Canadian, with pieces dedicated to the holocaust, and presumably other serious war crimes and humanitarian crises, such as the violence in Darfur, religious oppression, and a host of other potential topics.

Though it is impossible to predict just what exactly the museum will look like when it opens 3 years from now, it would be safe to assume that the exhibits will focus primarily on the horrors of the past. Those we can denounce as we flip the the back pages of history, with the buffer of time freeing us from the duty to address our roles and responsibilities in many of these injustices.

Take the issue of indigenous rights for example. It is safe to assume that this will at least be touched on in some of the exhibits, as the audacity of omitting it from a museum built at the forks (a meeting place for indigenous people for thousands of years) would rob it of any legitimacy. While the museum will almost certainly touch on residential schools and the brutality of Canada's early settlers, it would be surprising, to see it discuss the fact that the UN has deemed a great number of reserves as on par with third world nations, or that some have been on boil water notices for as long as a decade.

Canada's role in Haiti will most likely be overlooked completely, as our involvement is far too recent to dismiss as the crimes of our forefathers. Haiti is one of the most impoverished nations on the planet and Canada's role in overthrowing the democratically elected Lavalas party in 2004 is known throughout the Caribbean nation. Not the case here at home, where the majority of Canadians are completely unaware of our role in the coup, or the fact that representatives of Canadian garment makers Gildan Activewear - whose clothing is produced in Haiti - sit on the interim government, known as the Provisional Electoral Council . These are the kinds of things that we as Canadians should ALL be learning about.

If the Aspers truly wish for their museum to be a beacon of human rights than it should challenge injustices that are currently unfolding, both locally and abroad. But for most Canadians, a few minutes with any of the the Aspers' Can-West 11 newspapers or their local Global TV affiliate will imply otherwise.

Of course not all human suffering can be documented in one building, but the question is, who determines what's in and what's out. With the Aspers getting the project off the ground, and the Canadian government footing the yearly expenses once the museum opens, what do you expect the museum to look like. What do you think we will or won't see and why. And most importantly, what do you WANT to see? Discuss.