In museum exhibit curation, as in life, timing is everything.
This week, Love in Dangerous Times: Canada’s LGBT Purge opens at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The exhibit is a powerful and unflinching examination of how the federal government persecuted LGBTTQ+ employees in the Canadian Armed Forces, RCMP and federal public service.
By the end of the purge — which ran from the 1950s to the early 1990s — more than 9,000 federal public servants had been harassed, investigated and fired.
RUTH BONNEVILLE / FREE PRESS FILES
The exhibit Love in Dangerous Times: Canada’s LGBT Purge at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights includes a simulated interrogation room used during the purge.
If you believe society becomes stronger and more resilient through exhibits and study that acknowledges our past mistakes, you better move fast. This exhibit, and ones like it, may become a thing of the past in the very near future.
The man who would be prime minister, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, is on a self-described mission to rid the federal government and its associated institutions of “woke” culture. Along with being deeply profound and intensely poignant, Love in a Dangerous Time is most definitely woke, in the best sense of the word.
In a recent interview with the Winnipeg Jewish Review, Poilievre talked in graphic terms about the steps he would take to “fire” anyone in the federal government associated with “a woke anti-Semitic agenda.”
Poilievre also said he would hold the CMHR to the same standards as the federal civil service. “The museum will be there to honour our history and to tell our stories, not to impose toxic woke ideologies against our people.”
Now, it’s entirely possible Poilievre was limiting his use of “woke” to the concerns about the anti-Israel backlash that has flared around the world during the war against Hamas. However, Poilievre has increasingly made statements that have alarmed the LGBTTQ+ community and its allies.
In a recent interview, Poilievre was asked about U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to issue an executive order declaring America is a country of only two genders, and that they are “unchangeable.” Poilievre said that he was only “aware of two, and as far as I’m concerned, we should have a government that minds its own damn business and leaves people alone.”
One could interpret that quote as an assurance Poilievre would not become embroiled in gender identity politics. However, many within the LGBTTQ+ community have already grown concerned that as the public becomes less tolerant about gender identity and sexual orientation, he will roll those issues into his anti-woke campaign.
It begs the question: could a Conservative government led by Poilievre lead to the closure of Love in a Dangerous Time? Poilievre certainly has the motive, and the opportunity: the exhibit is scheduled to run for the next year and if the political calendar unfolds as everyone thinks it will, Poilievre will be prime minister long before the exhibit has run its course.
It will be very difficult to anticipate how serious Poilievre is about a purge on woke culture because woke is a term of such vague and constantly evolving meaning.
Tired of complaints about systemic racism or gender-based discrimination? Label programs designed to combat both issues as “woke” and then cancel the funding. And if someone objects, tell them you’re anti-woke, not racist or sexist.
That is literally the strategy used by some of the superstars of the anti-woke crusade, like academic Jordan Peterson. In an extraordinarily long commentary in the National Post last February, Peterson applauded the woke “counter-offensive” being waged by politicians like Poilievre and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
How did Peterson define woke? Despite spewing thousands of words onto the pages of the Post, he did not offer a definition — which graphically demonstrates the value of the word “woke” to the intolerant.
If Poilievre wants to unleash a wholesale anti-woke crusade, he will no doubt benefit from the efforts of Trump, who has made anti-woke official government policy. At the very least, he will be able to see from Trump’s efforts just how far he can push the anti-woke agenda.
Right now, Trump is aiming high.
In the first three weeks of his new term in office, Trump has issued executive orders to combat woke culture by ending diversity and equity programs and threatening to withdraw federal funding from any school that teaches “critical race theory, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.”
That is a long list of grievances. But in that list is the true power of the word “woke.” It is the all-purpose, easily manipulated and endlessly vague term that can be used to disparage anything or anyone at any time.
The CMHR should be applauded for not only documenting love in a dangerous time, but also forging ahead with an exhibit that is running against the grain of populist politics in a dangerous time.
One can only hope that it is allowed to run its course. Woke or not.
dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca
Dan Lett
Columnist
Dan Lett is a columnist for the Free Press, providing opinion and commentary on politics in Winnipeg and beyond. Born and raised in Toronto, Dan joined the Free Press in 1986. Read more about Dan.
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