Empire of the Absurd: Our "Human Rights" Mausoleum Keeps Growing Like Gangbusters, All On Our Tab

No matter what its mission statement may say, the real business of any government-funded bureaucracy is to ensure its own survival via constant growth. Case in point: Canada's shrine to victimhood, which is currently in the process of padding its payroll (and feathering its bed):

The beleaguered Canadian Museum for Human Rights — fraught with delays, massive cost-overruns, funding shortfalls and high-ranking resignations — won’t open until 2014 at the earliest.

But that hasn’t stopped museum brass from bulking up its taxpayer-funded workforce, which now stands at 68 employees with an annual payroll of $5 million.

That’s up a net eight staff from December 2011.

Museum officials say it’s important for taxpayers to pay for the facility’s growing payroll in order to be ready for a planned 2014 opening.

“Now that we are able to confirm opening in 2014, we need to ensure that we have staff with specialized skills at this stage of the project,” Christelle Mekoh, the museum’s manager of communications, said by e-mail.

Right, specialized skills like a “communications and public engagement advisor,” two “human resources advisors” and three “research assistants.”

Those positions and 61 others now make up the museum’s ballooning workforce, which has grown from 50 since March 31, 2011. And they’re all paid for by taxpayers.

The museum’s operating costs are covered 100% by the federal government.

The museum is a federal Crown corporation and it’s now taking on the bureaucratic girth that we see in most government agencies. The goal here is not only to build a museum, it’s also to build a bureaucratic empire...

Bureaucratic girth, eh? Can't we put the behemoth on a diet?

A starvation diet.

One needen't be a Nostradamus to predict that throwing away good money on this stupendously silly project will go down in history as the worst decision the Harper Tories ever made.