Canadian Sports Icon Don Cherry FIRED For Asking Immigrants To Show Respect To Canada's War Dead On Remembrance Day
11/11/2019
A+
|
a-
Print Friendly and PDF

Broadcaster Don Cherry, born 1934, and thus not a Boomer, is a Canadian sports icon. He's also a Canadian patriot, and while not a veteran himself, is a longtime member of the Royal Canadian Legion, which is very much like the American Legion...except, obviously, for being Royal, and Canadian.

Two paragraphs on Cherrry from Wikipedia explain this:

  • Cherry was born in Kingston, Ontario to Delmar (Del) and Maude Cherry. His paternal grandfather, Sub/Cst. John T. (Jack) Cherry, was an original member of the North West Mounted Police (now Royal Canadian Mounted Police), and a Great Lakes ship captain. His maternal grandfather, Richard Palamountain, was a British orphan of Cornish parentage who was emigrated to Canada as one of the Home Children. The name Palamountain is a corruption of the Cornish language "pol-mun-tyr" meaning "pool by the mineral land". Palamountain was also a veteran of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Cherry's father Del was an amateur athlete and worked as an electrician with the Canadian Steamship Lines.
  • On November 14, 2005, Cherry was granted honorary membership of the Police Association of Ontario. Once an aspiring police officer, Cherry has been a longtime supporter of the police services. In his own words, "This is the best thing I've ever had." In June 2007, Cherry was made a Dominion Command Honorary Life Member of the Royal Canadian Legion in recognition of "his longstanding and unswerving support of ... Canadians in uniform". In February 2008, Cherry was awarded the Canadian Forces Medallion for Distinguished Service for 'unwavering support to men and women of the Canadian Forces, honouring fallen soldiers on his CBC broadcast during 'Coach's Corner' a segment of Hockey Night in Canada'.

It's a fairly well-known complaint of the old—a true and legitimate complaint—that the younger generation doesn't respect war veterans and the Armed Forces as they used to. Cherry takes this personally, because the Canadian War Dead are his dead.

On Remembrance Day in Canada, almost everyone has traditionally worn the poppy in their lapel. (In the image above the headline, and in the video below, Cherry and his sidekick are both wearing them, and Cherry is wearing a Royal Canadian Legion blazer.)

So during a pre-Remembrance Day broadcast, he took the opportunity to give

thanks to the veterans and fallen to lament how few now wear poppies.

“I live in Mississauga, where nobody wears one,” he said on Coach’s Corner.

“Downtown Toronto, forget it . . . Nobody wears a poppy.”

Just before playing his taped poppy appeal standing next to his great uncle Sgt. Thomas William Mackenzie’s grave in France, Cherry said: “You people love, that come here, whatever it is, you love our way of life. You love our milk and honey. At least you can pay a couple of bucks for a poppy or something like that. These guys paid for your way life that you enjoy in Canada, these guys paid the biggest price.”

Social media is calling for Cherry’s head.

WARMINGTON: No apology from Don Cherry on Hockey Night in Canada poppy comments

November 11, 2019 10:39 AM

I don't usually put the time-stamp in the dateline, above, but it's not yet 4 PM and Cherry's been fired.

I said below that Remembrance Day ceremony is an implicitly white event. There were contingents of non-white troops on both sides of World War I, but it was white people fighting white people that made the war. I think the people who fired Cherry were, in effect, conceding that.

Print Friendly and PDF