Canada needs a museum to promote peace

By Chris Houston

Over the past year, Canadian Friends Service Committee (CFSC) has partnered with the Canadian Peace Museum, with the dream of seeing it opened to the public. The museum will increase peace education opportunities for everyday people, contributing to CFSC’s long-term goal of educating about how peace needs to be continually built. The museum will also bring increased awareness of nonviolent methods as viable alternatives to war. The following reflections are from the Museum’s Executive Director, Chris Houston.

We’re living through what Uppsala University has described as “a historically high number of [violent] conflicts.”¹ In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. taught that peace means not only an absence of war or fear but “the presence of justice.”² Since then, peace scholars have continued to define positive peace. It includes human health, democracy, equitable and inclusive communities, and good relations with neighbours.

Many compounding factors drive the increasing global levels of violent conflict. The climate crisis raises demand for resources, putting groups in tension and driving more forcible displacement. Increasing wealth inequality, misinformation, and failing systems are enabling and fueling rising authoritarianism, including in the United States. Canada dropped five places in the Global Peace Index in 2025, ranking joint 14th. There has also been an increase in hate crimes and prevalence of xenophobia and anti-refugee sentiment in Canada.

Museums represent a powerful way to get information to people. Most people don’t consider newspapers to be reliable. Only 33% find television credible. Yet, 86% of people in Canada trust museums.³ In times of decreasing trust in institutions, professionally run museums are a rare opportunity to influence positive change. In a hectic world filled with attempts to summarise complexity in one-sentence soundbites, people need museums to help them navigate nuance.

Our responsibilities at the Canadian Peace Museum are to help people understand what drives conflict and what drives peace. We want people to see the links between social justice and peace. We also need to help people understand what they can do to make a more peaceful Canada and a more peaceful world.

The museum is a registered charity that’s currently fundraising to refurbish and fully staff our operations. Thanks to the generosity of our local community, there’s an 8,000 square foot building in Bancroft, Ontario that we fully own. The gift of this two-level building on 1.4 acres of land means we have passed the biggest milestone in the launch of the museum.

Our contracted team has a wealth of experience designing and managing museums on almost every continent. Our exhibits will centre peacemaking, environmentalism, and fair and equal societies. We will highlight the positive and negative contributions that Canada has made to peacefulness. We will inform people about the thousands of years of groups finding ways to resolve differences, peacefully coexist, and collaborate on Turtle Island and elsewhere.

We have a wide range of objects related to local and global peacemaking. Our collection includes hundreds of newspapers and books, as well as artefacts from organizations such as the UN Refugee Agency, PeaceWomen Across the Globe, and Canada Post.

The cost of fully renovating our building to museum standards may take years to fundraise, so we’ll most likely open the space in phases as funding allows. Currently we’re frugally using the funds we have to renovate some of the lower floor.

While not yet functional as a museum, our site already hosts a community food garden. Local nonprofit groups use our building for events and storing food. We host our own events, including our annual Stories of peace award ceremony.

The majority of our board are people with lived experiences relevant to the museum. Our advisory board includes people with strong links to museums, humanitarianism, ethics, and academia. We’ve also benefited from the advice of countless people in the peace movement, and the International Network of Peace Museums.

We’re proud of, and grateful for, the support of CFSC. That support includes advice, plus financial support towards the cost of setting up the museum.

Chris Houston is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Canadian Peace Museum. Chris is a newspaper columnist, and faculty at the University of Toronto’s Global Health Education Initiative. You can learn more at https://CanadianPeaceMuseum.ca.