'On Poppies: Don Cherry Was Right'

Op-ed Column, NCC Director Alexander Brown in The New Westminster Times (click to read in the New West Times)

"I live in Mississauga [Ontario]. Very few people wear the poppy. Downtown Toronto, forget it. Nobody wears the poppy. ... Now you go to the small cities. You people ... 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 bucks for a poppy or something like that. These guys paid for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada. These guys paid the biggest price for that.” -Don Cherry, 2019

For all that can be said about the unvarnished nature of Don Cherry’s 2019 Remembrance Day comments, which finally gave Rogers the excuse to usher out the beloved bygone coach they’d been looking for, perhaps Cherry’s real crime was being right too early.

Five years later, look around. What do you see?

More specifically, what do you not see?

In Cherry’s Mississauga, where spillover from Khalistani-Hindu clashes in Brampton presently rule the roost, poppies are most certainly in short supply. In Downtown Toronto, at the weekly Saturday “post-national” hate-fest, Canadians will catch glimpses of flags of terror, but never our own; and in place of the humble poppy, one of the few Canadian symbols left – keffiyehs by the hundreds.

For every act of tribal warfare that takes place on our streets, every flag burning, every welcomed ISIS combatant, shooting of a synagogue, Khalistani act of gangland intimidation, Eritrean street brawl, what makes Canada, Canada seems to be pushed further to the margins.

What statues we have left – that weren’t felled during “fiery but mostly peaceful” summers of protest – remain covered up, such as John A. Macdonald’s at Queen’s Park.

The embers of hundreds of burned churches have fallen cold; acts considered “understandable” at the time by Trudeau’s disgraced former number two, Gerald Butts.

The crowds to honour our war dead grow smaller and smaller.

On my run in Vancouver this morning, I witnessed more government-enabled addicts than civilians wearing poppies; more human feces than dog.

The barbarization of Canada is not just near, it’s here. And if we can’t do the little things, like remembering we’re a country – and a country means symbols, borders, standards for entry, enforcing laws and contributing to one’s community – what hope do we have to rescue this dominion being so callously wasted?

If Cherry was right to some degree, only five years on, how much more right will he be five years from now?

We have enough evidence now to know that Canada won’t survive Trudeau’s experiment in creating “the world’s first post-national state,” where “there is no core identity.”

We had a core identity. We were made to lose it. But by remembering who we are, holding ourselves and our country to a higher standard, and no longer sleepwalking in idleness, we can still get it back.

That starts by wearing a poppy.

Alexander Brown is a Director with the National Citizens Coalition.