Human Rights Defenders Gallery © Canadian Museum for Human Rights
This exhibit features Canadians and others who have contributed significantly to human rights through their work and personal lives.
View samples of my writing for this exhibit.
The killing of Cecil the Lion by big-game hunters in June outraged the world.
Thirteen-year-old Cecil lived in Hwanga National Park, Zimbabwe, where he was a major attraction for wildlife tourists. He may have been lured out of the park prior to being killed.
Yet this is one animal, albeit a charismatic, celebrity critter. Thousands of wildlife crimes occur every year. The World Wildlife Fund estimates, for example, that customs officials intercept ivory from only about 11 per cent of the 50,000 African elephants poached every year.
Here in B.C., officials have helped uncover some wildlife crimes recently. More »
Canadian Museum for Human Rights
In Breaking the Silence, a giant interactive table sits in the centre of the gallery, with points that expand with information when you touch them.
The table explores 19 examples of genocide and mass atrocity from around the world, and breaks each event down into four stages that are common to all genocides and major atrocities:
The interactive display emphasizes the importance of speaking out to protect human rights before human rights violations escalate. More »
Protecting Rights in Canada Gallery
Canadian Museum for Human Rights
The Protecting Rights in Canada exhibit includes a series of interactive stations where visitors watch news clips about, and read arguments for and against, key Canadian court cases that have defined humans rights in Canada—often on very divisive issues.
Visitors are then asked to “vote” for which side they think is correct. After everyone at the station has voted, the results are displayed alongside a running tally of all the ballots people who have cast at the exhibit before them. More »
I recently visited the Jimmy Choo and Christian Laboutin footwear displays in a much-trumpeted Lower Mainland department store.
When a staff person approached me, I expected the usual “Can I help you?” Instead, the young man gestured at the poppy on my lapel. “This is the earliest I’ve ever seen anyone wear one of those,” he said. More »
‘When I play Candy Land with my five-year-old, time creeps,” she says. “A game lasts only 10 minutes, but it feels like two hours to me.”
My friend is describing her experience of subjective time. The clock in her phone steadily marks the minutes, no matter what she does. Yet while she plays Candy Land— a board game that requires no reading, minimal counting skills, and is popular with young children—her brain measures time in a decidedly Dali-esque way. It perceives each second as stretching and warping around the experience of the game. Compared to the experience of time during the game, she finds time compresses and races before and after playing.
“My daughter finds the 10 minutes flash by like lightening.” More »
Social media have democratized publishing. Now, anybody can spontaneously share their thoughts, opinions, photos, witticisms and criticisms, as well as what they ate for breakfast, with the world.
This accessibility has permitted new voices to emerge, quiet voices to be heard, and the previously unspoken to be said. More »
We live in a part of the world many other people envy us for. We have ocean, mountains, beach, forests, a pretty darn awesome year-round climate for a place just south of the 49th parallel, and a number of big-town services and restaurants for what is, in many ways, a small town.
And on one of those perfect summer or fall or spring or even winter days, you just have to stop and say to yourself, “Seriously, why do I live in such a hell-hole? Let’s just stop the clock, and the moon and the stars and sun, and hold this moment. Forever.” More »
