Opinion: Rarely was so little done with so much by so many

Update: An earlier version of this story contained inaccurate information.

Alberta hosted more German prisoners of war than anywhere else in North America, and once had to put down a mini rebellion of Nazi zealots murdering fellow prisoners they saw as disloyal to Hitler. It’s a dramatic story, although you wouldn’t know it from the rusty machine gun and sprig of barbed wire on display.

Distroscale

The explosive winning streak of the Edmonton Oilers so stirred the hearts of a recession-plagued Alberta that there are Edmontonians who still can’t fully talk about the day Wayne Gretzky was traded to Los Angeles. The excitement and emotions of those times don’t really come through in two small glass cases jammed with cheap Oilers souvenirs.

It was once thought to be impossible to remove oil from sand, but Alberta engineers cracked the code of how to do it and unlocked one of the single most valuable oil windfalls in history. This epic feat of innovation is not mentioned, but there is a display filled with $15 worth of Newfoundland junk food.

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Welcome to the new $375.5 million Royal Alberta Museum, a place where one of Canada’s most dynamic provinces is presented to the world as an anarchic flea market of tacky kitsch, random antiques and straight-up garbage.

Edmonton–raised aviator Wop May lived a life of near constant adventure that included helping to bring down the Red Baron. Most modern museums would have immortalized his story with a life–sized diorama or audio–visual display. The Royal Alberta Museum simply nailed up his flight suit and hung up his plane in the lobby, but provide little to no colour as to why they are there.

Among the small number of artifacts chosen to represent the province’s gut-wrenching history of residential schools, one of them is literally a pile of the bricks used to build one of the schools. It’s not the only artifact on display, but it’s telling that bricks made the cut. It’s like representing a gulag by simply displaying a bunch of plates and saying “here are the plates that gulag prisoners used.”

The whole point of a provincial museum is to highlight the things that make Alberta special. Instead, most of the square footage is devoted towards cataloguing quotidian aspects of Alberta life that existed pretty much everywhere.

There is a tribute to canning. A case filled with old radios (we listen to the radio in Alberta, you see). A bench from a train station. Some Ukrainian macramé. A restored 1966 Mercury M100 pickup whose only distinction is that a single Alberta family owned it for 50 years.

This kind of curation is fine if you’re one of the many small town museums dotting Western Canada. Some of the country’s most charming roadside attractions are random collections of old ploughs and captured German pickelhaubes stored in the basement of a town hall.

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But those museums didn’t cost $375.5 million. For even half that price it would have been possible to pull off an awe-inspiring epic of interactive exhibits, holographic theatres and immersive dioramas. Visitors could have experienced the sounds and smells of being inside a haul truck on the Great Canadian Oil Sands Mine. They could have looked from the palisades of an HBC fort at prairies still swept with rippling oceans of bison. And they could have gazed in horror at a scene of a Cree village plunged into famine when those bison disappeared.

But instead, Albertans basically just got an endless landscape of glass cases stuffed with so-so artifacts and stripped of any theme, structure or imagination. There are Edmonton garage sales with more compelling collections.Ottawa’s Canadian War Museum was less than half as expensive as the Royal Alberta Museum, with a final price tag of an inflation-adjusted $176 million. And unlike the RAM, it’s chock full of immersive displays such as a section in which visitors can walk over the duckboards of the Passchendaele battlefield.

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois has come under criticism for being too cinematic with its elaborate walkthrough of full-sized displays depicting key moments in Lincoln’s life. It was built in 2008 for the equivalent of about CDN$200 million.

Even the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, an attraction notorious for its cost overruns, was pulled off for $350 million. And unlike the RAM, that museum didn’t have a massive, pre-existing collection to work with.

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The official website of the Royal Alberta Museum claims it is the “largest museum in western Canada,” which may come as a surprise to visitors who have blown through their exhibit space in fewer than 90 minutes. But vast portions of the building are taken up by office space. One disillusioned visitor called the new museum “a super nice office space with some exhibits.”

One of the most tragic aspects of the new Royal Alberta Museum is that while curators were celebrating the mundane, they left out some of the province’s most compelling stories.

Women’s rights pioneer Nellie McClung, the Siksika runner Deerfoot, longtime premier Peter Lougheed, the Hart professional wrestling family; if these figures are mentioned, their names are easily missed.

Alberta is still the world’s major habitable area to keep itself entirely rat-free, and it did so by waging a all-out war on rodents in the 1950s. I couldn’t find a single mention of Alberta’s famed war on the rat, although the Royal Alberta Museum had plenty of space for displays on beekeeping.

Alberta is built atop the lands of people who narrowly survived waves of apocalyptic European disease far worse than anything seen during the Black Plague. It’s one of the most dramatic human stories of the last 1,000 years, but you can’t really appreciate it while scanning display case after display case of dryly labeled arrowheads.

Four Iranian-born brothers not only built the world’s largest mall, but they did it in a place that even Canadians would consider middle-of-nowhere. But instead of mentioning the hubristic origins of West Edmonton Mall, there is instead a forgettable tribute to what Alberta grocery stores used to look like (about the same as everywhere else, it turns out).

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The political history of Alberta alone could merit its own museum. This is where the NDP was founded and where the Reform Party plotted its shattering reprogramming of eastern conservatism. This was the home of the Famous Five, McClung included, who led a landmark legal case for Canadian women to be recognized as legal “persons.” This was the only corner of the British Empire to elect a government promising the fringe doctrine of social credit, the idea that the Great Depression could be ended by the mere printing of money (they also openly threatened to murder their political opponents).

But in the handful of dry display cases mentioning politics, the best you get are some buttons, pennants and the motorcycle that Reform Party MP Deborah Grey rode while campaigning. With no offence to the inimitable Grey, I think she would be the first to agree that her Honda may not be the most comprehensive centrepiece to 100 years of Albertans annoying Ottawa.

Tourists, diplomats, investors and waves of new Albertans will all be visiting this museum to get a primer on what this province is all about. It would be entirely reasonable for them to step away thinking that Alberta is a milquetoast backwater that has contributed nothing of particular note to human history.

And it’s not like Royal Alberta Museum curators have an excuse. Alberta is actually quite good at museums. Drumheller’s Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology is one of the world’s leading dinosaur attractions. The Reynolds-Alberta Museum, located just an hour south of Edmonton, often ranks as one of the continent’s best auto museums. Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Even the RAM’s Natural History gallery, located on the second floor, steps up its game with a handful of dramatic nature dioramas.

When plans for the new Royal Alberta Museum emerged seven years ago after a prolonged fight over funding, it was touted as a home where the stories and grandeur of Alberta could live forever.

Instead, it’s become a monument to many of Alberta’s worst traits: Complacency, bureaucratic incompetence and an uncanny ability to squander money. We should all hope that it was all merely a terrible mistake.