When I was in the first grade, my hometown junior hockey team, the Granby Bisons, played the team from Trois-Rivières. After trailing Trois-Rivières for a while, Granby had finally managed to tie the game. Trois-Rivières decided to change up their goalie and put Mannon Rhéaume in net. 

My little, six-year-old mind was blown. A girl! Playing hockey! With boys! 

Rhéaume played for a bit, though she ultimately had to leave the game with a bloody face after a shot had shattered her mask. It didn’t matter though; my perception of what girls could and couldn’t do was changed forever. 

A year later, Rhéaume would be the first woman to play in an NHL game for the Tampa Bay Lightning. It was a historic moment for hockey and for little girls in Quebec. But not everybody liked the idea. One hockey commentator stood out in particular at the time for his overt disdain calling the whole thing a “PR stunt” and stating that Rhéaume should “stick to women’s hockey.” 

That was the first time I learned who Don Cherry was. 

We often talk about the “two solitudes” that exist in this country between Québec and the rest of English Canada and few subjects represent the two solitudes better than Don Cherry. While Cherry is beloved by much of English Canada, you’d be hard pressed to find a Francophone Quebecker who thinks of Cherry in a positive light. 

Some of Cherry’s greatest hits of anti-Quebec and anti-French commentary include saying “only Europeans and French guys” wear visors (which he implied made them less tough); he referred to decorated Olympic skier Jean-Luc Brassard as “a French guy, some skier that nobody knows about” during the 1998 Winter Olympics where Brassard was a Canadian flag-bearer; said Quebec wasn’t truly Canadian for opposing the Iraq war, while singling out Habs fans for booing the American national anthem, saying, “you have to realize it’s Quebec and it’s French Canadians.” 

So when Conservative MP Andrew Lawton nominated Don Cherry for the Order of Canada, I didn’t really think much of it. A backbench MP from Ontario nominating a very well-known Canadian to the Order of Canada isn’t exactly groundbreaking and despite the long litany of inane sexist or racist comments Cherry would have made over the years, it’s hard to argue that he’s not an incredibly well-known Canadian who should at the very least be considered for the honour. (Though there is certainly a very good argument to be made about politicians needing to stay out of the fray when it comes to the Order of Canada to maintain the non-partisan nature of it.)

It wasn’t until the entire Conservative Party apparatus started to lean into Lawton’s nomination of Cherry that it became clear just how short-sighted the Conservative braintrust is. In addition to Pierre Poilievre and other front-bench Conservative MPs publicly supporting the nomination, the Conservative Party has a link on their official website promoting it as well. 

This was no longer just some backbench MP from Ontario going rogue and nominating someone with a history of denigrating French Canadians, but was seemingly a strategic choice by the CPC to go all-in on Don Cherry. It wasn’t long before Conservative MPs from Quebec started publicly stating their disagreement with their party, including Poilievre’s own Quebec Lieutenant, Pierre Paul Hus, who called the nomination a “bad idea” before plainly stating that he did not support it.

To state the obvious: it is suboptimal to have Quebec MPs break so publicly with the party and the leader at a time when both the Conservatives generally and Poilievre specifically are struggling in the polls, including in Quebec. What makes this even worse is that this is all happening against the backdrop of the Liberals making overtures to disaffected Conservatives who are sick of Poilievre’s leadership style, in the weeks before three by-elections, one of which is in Quebec. 

The perception of Poilievre’s Conservatives as ill-suited to form a government is no longer confined to Liberal and NDP partisans who would never vote Conservative in the first place. Increasingly, polls are showing a widening polling lead for the Liberals and for Carney himself, all while Liberal House Leader Steve Mackinnon has explicitly stated that the government is continuing to have conversations with disaffected MPs from other parties looking to cross. Given that the NDP only has six caucus members while the CPC has 141, one would have to imagine CPC MPs are consistently within the government’s sights for floor-crossing. 

In other words, this is not the time for the Conservatives to be shooting themselves in the foot. 

The Conservatives very likely saw the nomination of Don Cherry as an easy culture war wedge to win. After all, many Canadians love Don Cherry and thought his firing from Sportsnet in 2019 was a prime example of cancel culture when he said during a broadcast that new Canadians don’t wear poppies: “You people that come here, you love our way of life, you love our milk and honey, at least you can pay a couple of bucks for a poppy. These guys paid for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada, these guys paid the biggest price.” 

It never really seemed to matter to the folks decrying it as “cancel culture” that Cherry was given an opportunity to apologize and refused to do so or that the Royal Canadian Legion officially condemned Cherry’s remarks. Cherry’s offensiveness is part of his appeal and the Conservatives are leaning into it. 

Perhaps, however, the Conservatives should have actually read the rules of the nomination process before going all-in on a public mobilization campaign to lobby for Cherry to get the Order of Canada. If they had, they would have eventually come across the part where it says, “Please do not notify the candidate about the nomination or initiate a letter-writing campaign.” But I guess just like wearing visors, reading is also only for Europeans and French guys. 

© National Observer