Governing Difficult Knowledge: The Canadian Museum for Human Rights and Its Publics

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the editors of this special issue for their invaluable feedback and support throughout the drafting of this article. I am also grateful to the Journal's anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and Lauren Bosc for her careful copyediting.

Notes

Barrett drew upon Habermas’ critics, including Nancy Fraser, to note the limitations inherent in his construction of the public sphere, including his reliance upon “rationality” and the ways this limits diversity and cultural difference in the public sphere (2011, 19).

The rhetoric of “darkness and light” is not only found in Predock's description of the museum site; it is also reiterated by the Friends of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the institution's “exclusive fundraising arm,” in their description of the museum site (“The Architecture” 2014). In addition, the “slogan” can be found in CMHR's 2009/10 (CMHR 2010) and 2010/2011 annual reports (CMHR 2011).

It is worth noting that the speech was delivered in English, which combined with Murray's universalizing discourse serves to reinforce the hegemony of English as the language of human rights and modernity.

Murray's reference to human rights violations in “our own backyard” is noteworthy given the relation between private property, dispossession, colonialism and genocide in Canadian history. As such, his rhetorical quip elides the technologies that made possible the genocidal and colonial practices he seeks to engage dialogically.

According to Strong-Boag and media accounts, the CMHR construed the following statement in her blog post as partisan and contentious: “[I]n 2014 Canada's Conservative government left its anti-woman record unmentioned (which included withdrawal of plans for a national child care program and major cuts to Status of Women Canada [2006], the prohibition of civil servants taking pay equity complaints to the Human Rights Commission [2009], the denial of international funding for abortion [2010], and major cuts to public services that employ and serve significant numbers of women) as it dedicated IWD week to the ‘valuable contribution of women entrepreneurs'” (Strong-Boag 2014).

Scholars Jennifer Orange and Jennifer Carter highlighted this potential risk in the CMHR. In their article “Contentious Terrain: Defining a Human Rights Museology,” the authors noted “a more serious concern about the unique position of the museum is whether the human rights based museum is actually situated to promote human rights, with its doors open to the public, but its walls supported by the state. Is the state-funded museum able to freely criticize state actions and policies, including those of its present-day government? And if it does not, is it in effect producing propaganda that entrenches power in a government that violates human rights?” (2011, 123).

Currently, Canada has a number of national museums and galleries, all structured as Crown Corporations or Crown Corporation subsidiaries. Although most museums fall under Section X of the Financial Administration Act, others are subject to particular exemptions from all of the accountability requirements required by these types of Crown Corporations.

The 2014/2015 forecast of total expenditures by “standard object” includes the Government of Canada's total contribution to the CMHR as a “other subsidiary or payment” amounting to 21.7 million (Treasury Board Secretariat 2014).

As noted in the Treasury Board Secretariat's “Crown Corporation Issue Note,” “Depending on ministerial preference, the letter of expectations may be referred to by different names, e.g., “priority letters”, “performance expectations” or, as included in the recommendations of the 2005 Review of the Governance Framework for Canada's Crown Corporations, “statement of priorities.” Regardless of the name used, the purpose of these documents remains the same: to communicate governmental priorities from the minister to the Crown Corporation.

Specifically, those structured with agent status under Canada's Financial Administration Act.

At its 2012 annual meeting, the CMHR was asked whether a member of parliament or federal department has “brought pressure to bear with respect to desired content,” to which the museum responded “no” (CMHR 2014a). Museum officials also clarified that there has not been “interference” with respect to museum content (CMHR 2014a).

It is important to note that the decision of the CMHR to not identify Canada's treatment of indigenous peoples as genocide was not an example of its conformity with official state policy, but rather its decision to conform to a lack of policy decision by government.

Although I have learned informally from colleagues that they have participated in advisory committees or meetings with the Museum, to my knowledge, the names and membership of the museum's committees is not being publicly reported.

In the Treasury Board Secretariat's “Crown Corporation Guidance—Annual Public Meetings and Outreach” policy statement, the government agency advises all Crown Corporations and wholly-owned subsidiaries to hold annual meetings to share information and obtain feedback from the public (Treasury Board Secretariat 2008).