Globe and Mail, Canada
April 20 2005
CANADIAN MUSEUM FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
‘It’s going to be unique’
By JAMES ADAMS
Wednesday, April 20, 2005 Page R1
The chair of the national advisory committee for the new Canadian
Museum for Human Rights admits that getting a broad base of support
for the Winnipeg-based institution may be “a tough sell” given that
“there has been the perception or myth about it being about the
Holocaust. . . .
“But going forward, it will be about much more than that,” insists
Charlie Coffey, Toronto-based executive vice-president of government
affairs for Royal Bank of Canada who was named chair of the advisory
committee in 2003. “Every ethnic group in this country will be
included. . . . It’s going to be a very transparent process.”
Coffey, 61, made the remarks earlier this week following last
Friday’s announcement that a U.S. architect, Antoine Predock of
Albuquerque, N.M., had submitted the winning design for the museum,
which, upon its completion in spring 2009, is expected to have cost
more than $250-million. The museum, which its supporters hope will be
as “dramatic and inspiring” as Frank Gehry’s Museo Guggenheim in
Spain, has already received commitments totalling $140-million from
the federal, Manitoba and Winnipeg governments. It’s largely the
brainchild of the Asper Foundation, started in 1982 by Izzy Asper,
founder of CanWest Global Communications, who, well before his death
at 71 in 2003, had been pressing for such a museum in his hometown.
Asper, however, was also famous for his passionate support of Israeli
and Jewish causes as well as his aversion to the idea of Palestinian
nationhood. (In 2002, he attacked “the Arab war of extermination of
Israel and the Jewish people,” and described Palestinian protesters
at Concordia University as being like “Adolf Hitler and his Brown
Shirts.”) And this has made some non-Jewish minorities wary of what
the Human Rights museum portends, not least because in 2003, the
Asper Foundation’s third-largest charitable donation, of $184,687,
was to the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem, the Israel Holocaust
centre in Jerusalem. Moreover, in its literature, the Canadian Museum
for Human Rights says its exhibits will explore “six overarching
themes,” the fourth of which is that “the modern idea of human rights
emerged as a response to the Holocaust.” (Indeed, of the “five major
thematic areas” conceived for the museum, the second will be called
“Lessons of the Holocaust.”) And while the 26-person advisory council
that Coffey heads includes representatives from First Nations,
Ukrainian-Canadian, Indian-Canadian, Francophone, Jewish and
Japanese-Canadian organizations, among others, there are no
participants from Arab or Islamic Canadian groups or from the
Caribbean, Africa or Turkish Armenia.
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Coffey said no one should see anything sinister in the composition of
the board, which, among other tasks, will have to establish a
framework to raise more than $60-million from private donors. “We
couldn’t have had a 100-person advisory board,” Coffey explained. “It
certainly would have been more representative,” but it would have
been “unwieldy” as a lobbying and organizational tool. “Going
forward, we have to be much more active with the groups” that don’t
have board representation, “and we will.”
Omar Alghabra, president of the Canadian Arab Federation, said his
organization was “looking forward to the opportunity to participate
in this initiative. . . . If you’re asking me if I’d like to see
Arabic or Muslims or Africans or other minorities included on the
board, the answer is absolutely.”
Coffey agreed that “there’s no shortage of opinion as to what should
be in the museum,” and stressed that no “specific content decisions”
will be made until “an extensive public consultation process” is
completed. This consultation is expected to occur over the next 10 to
12 months, with construction scheduled to start in mid-2006. The
design will take up almost 23,000 square metres and be distinguished
by a 100-metre-high crystalline “Tower of Hope.” Visitors will go on
a 1.5-kilometre-long “journey of experience” that will end in a “Hall
of Commitment.”
Meanwhile, Coffey said he’s not entirely comfortable with calling it
a “museum because that conjures something quite static, and it’s not
going to be like that at all.” The exhibitions are to be designed by
Ralph Applebaum Associates of New York and will have a strong
educational-interactive thrust designed to appeal to young people.
While the museum “will be a great place for storytelling . . . ,”
Coffey said it’s not going to be one atrocity exhibition after
another. Rather, “we’re going to take the high road . . . and use it
as an opportunity to take the multicultural dialogue in this country
to a new level. . . . We’ll, in part, be the conscience of the
nation. It’s going to be unique in the world, quite frankly.”