Tories’ rhetoric a blot on Canada’s rights record

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is a massive, beautiful, glass-wrapped dome that towers over the banks of the Red River. Inside, glowing, ascending pathways criss-cross though a series of exhibits and finish at the Tower of Hope, which provides an unobstructed, 360degree view of downtown Winnipeg, the Forks and St. Boniface. As a piece of architecture, it is jaw-dropping.

As a concept, I admit, I didn’t really get it at first. How could you possibly hope to capture something so fluid, so intangible as human rights?

And yet, as I discovered when I stepped inside for the first time for a few hours last Friday, it is precisely that fluidity that makes the museum so powerful.

It forces us to take stock of where we’ve been and decide where we want to go.

Behind the glass, we feel the pride that comes with Canada’s pioneering on human rights issues — an image of my uncles, who are gay, is tucked in a cluster of lit-up wedding photos — and yet we’re confronted head-on with our own failings.

Canada, we’ve been told during this election campaign (we’ve always been told, really), is the greatest country in the world, a beacon of light and a crusader for rights and freedoms. It’s never quite that simple, though, is it? Steps from the wedding photos sits a reproduction of a ransacked Quebec apartment with a screen recounting the mass arrests and military takeover that accompanied the 1970 October Crisis.

A few steps farther, there’s a short documentary about the legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential School system, including a short clip of a brown-haired Stephen Harper delivering the country’s apology for it in 2008.

A few floors up, surrounded by stories of the Nazis’ ghastly campaign of mass death, a video recounts Canada’s rejection of Jewish refugees aboard the transatlantic liner St. Louis during the Second World War (254 of those refugees would go on to die in concentration camps).

I exited the museum after taking it in at my own pace (usually fast, given the length of my legs) and eased back into one of the Adirondack chairs in the adjacent park to wait for my sauntering family members.

I fired up my phone just in time to catch the breaking news: Zunera Ishaq, the woman who’d fought in court for the right to wear a niqab during her citizenship ceremony, had just sworn her oath while veiled — much to the chagrin of the federal government.

Days earlier, Harper, his hair now a helmet of grey, had mused about extending a niqab ban to the public service — not that it’s clear anyone in the PS actually wears one.

It was all too ironic. There I was, in the shadow of that building, catching the latest on one of the race-driven, dog-whistle wedge issues that have spawned waves of online hate (not to mention the assault against a pregnant Muslim woman on the streets of Montreal) during this campaign.

Certainly, making an example of a new Canadian because she dresses differently than the rest of us is far, far removed from the atrocities of the past, and to suggest they are equal is ludicrous.

Still, what does it say about us when we allow others to so easily foment our fears about other cultures and what “they” will do to “us,” we oldstock Canadians?

As I spotted a young Muslim family leaving the St. Vital Centre Walmart a few days earlier — young boy in a Winnipeg Jets shirt, mom wearing a hijab — I wondered how it must feel to have one’s beliefs, one’s identity, treated like a bargaining chip by utterly shameless politicians. What could I, a white guy of Scottish and French descent, know of it?

Not much, probably. I do know, however, that we’re witnessing an international tsunami of mostly Muslim refugees fleeing war, and our government had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into allowing a still-pitiful number of them to live here.

I know we live in a time of rampant Islamophobia, and our government, via niqab bans and citizenship scares and snitch lines, has harnessed it in an attempt to bolster its electoral prospects.

There are many questions people will be mulling over come Oct. 19, but I’ve already answered the following one for myself:

When it comes to the treatment of minority groups in our society, how would we want our generation to be remembered in a museum?

Not like this.