Always keen to warn us Yanks what identity politics looks like at its most zealous, last week our neighbors to the north opened the doors of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg.

Jonathan Kay, in the National Post, notes that the museum has been met with something less than enthusiasm from a number of human-rights groups:

These include an aboriginal band that was scheduled to play at Saturday’s public gala, but backed out at the last minute — apparently because its members didn’t like the museum’s portrayal of Canadian indigenous issues. The Manitoba Métis Federation decided to boycott the museum because the gala organizers rejected their suggested Métis musical act. Arab Canadian protestors told National Post reporter Joseph Brean that the museum didn’t have enough information about the Palestinians. (On Sunday, a Quebec man named Pete Kirby was campaigning to have Israel’s war against Hamas included in the museum — because of the suffering endured by Gazan civilians.) James Kafieh, an Ontario lawyer and chair of an anti-museum group called Canadians for Genocide Education is protesting the museum on the basis that it was built on “stolen” (i.e. aboriginal) land, and elevates one atrocity (the Holocaust) over all others, in pursuit of what he calls an “emotionally manipulative indoctrination.” . . .
The response of Canadian identity groups to the museum overall is perhaps best epitomized by a statement put out by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress last year, complaining that the museum’s treatment of Stalin’s forced starvation of millions of Ukrainians was fatally undercut by the fact that a panel on the subject was located too close to the public toilets.

For branding panache, one cannot top the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, a representative of which has called the museum “an Olympics of genocide.”

How to iron out all these complaints in accordance with Canada’s principles of diversity and tolerance? Fear not, Kay has a solution:

The Canadian Human Rights Commission must establish a special human-rights tribunal to address human-rights complaints pertaining to the presentation of human-rights issues at the Canadian Museum For Human Rights.
But why not go further?
If the true goal of the Canadians Museum For Human Rights is to create a “national hub for human rights learning and discovery,” as its web site boasts, shouldn’t visitors to the museum be able to file a human rights complaint at the museum itself?

With any luck, says Kay, the inevitable scores of complaints filed in the museum will provide Canucks shovel-ready jobs in the near future building “the Canadian Human Rights Museum-Related Human Rights Museum.”

With some subjects, if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry, they say. Canada’s backbreaking acquiescence to the pettiest identity politics is surely among those subjects. At least someone is keen to the absurdity of the situation — and still able to find some humor in it.