Becoming a white elephant sooner than expected
The number of people walking through the doors of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights continues to drop, falling another 7.8% in the first half of 2017-18 compared to the same period the year before.
Not even the influx of visitors and athletes to Winnipeg from this year’s Canada Games, held from July 28 to Aug. 13, was enough to bolster sagging numbers at the museum.
From April 1 to Sept. 30, the CMHR attracted a total of 178,752 people, including paying and non-paying visitors, as well as those purchasing rental space at the facility or visiting the museum’s gift shop or restaurant. That’s down from 193,907 visitors for the same period last year.
It’s the second year in a row that visitation numbers have fallen at the museum. Total visitors at the CMHR were 203,666 in the first half of 2015-16 – the museum’s first full year of operation after it opened in September 2014. That translates into a 12.2% drop in the first half of this year compared to the first half of 2015-16.
Trying to do apples-to-apples comparison of CMHR admission numbers continues to be a struggle. Museum brass change how the numbers are presented not only from year to year, but even from quarter to quarter.
For example, the museum had, until this year, separated out the number of paying and non-paying admissions. Not all people who visit the museum are paying customers. And not all of them are even visiting the museum’s galleries. Yet they’re all included as museum patrons when the facility releases its official admission numbers.
For the first time this year, the museum is no longer separating out its paying and non-paying ticketed admission. They’ve lumped them together, making it impossible to compare paid ticketed admission with non-paying ones. The only caveat is they provided one figure in a footnote that shows the number of complimentary admissions for free admission nights (the first Wednesday of every month), but no figures for other free admissions, including Indigenous visitors, kids under 7, Cultural Access Pass visitors, familiarization tours and other selected freebies. I suspect they’ve lumped them together because they don’t want the public to know the extent to which they’re bleeding paying customers.
in April that the number of paying visitors at the museum dropped by 8.8% in 2016-17 compared to the year before. Since then, the museum stopped releasing the number of paid ticketed admissions.
In its second-quarter admissions release, the museum lists 49,488 individual admissions under the heading of “paid ticketed admission,” yet a footnote says the number includes non-paying admissions. Go figure.
The reality is, once you take out the free admissions, subtract the people who visit the gift shop or restaurant but who don’t visit the galleries, and exclude the number of people renting one of the halls that compete with similar halls already available in the private sector, there’s not much left. The museum does its level best to try to hide that reality. The number of people visiting this place is dwindling. But CMHR officials don’t widely advertise that fact.
http://winnipegsun.com/opinion/colum...-rights-museum