Juno News - November 11, 2025Don Cherry was right
Episode Stats
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Summary
Don Cherry wants you to wear a poppy on Remembrance day, and the courts are fighting to ban it. And a British World War II vet says, "The sacrifice wasn't worth the result that it is now. Oh well, I'm sorry."
Transcript
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Hi, Juneau News, Alexander Brown here. Great to see you for another week. I'm the director of
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the National Citizens Coalition. I'm a writer, communicator, campaigner. And while you're here,
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please take advantage of our great discount. For more from Juneau News, that's junownews.com
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slash not sorry for 20% off. It's Remembrance Day and Don Cherry wants you to wear your poppy.
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Are you wearing your poppy? I hope you are because we're seeing poor uptake. We are seeing activist
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courts that are fighting to ban poppies in the courtroom. The poppy is not supposed to be a
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political symbol. We're talking basic human decency and national pride here. It certainly brings to
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mind Don Cherry's infamous, to me, just famous. Infamous implies it's a negative. You people speech
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where he's not just calling out our new Canadians. He's letting everybody know that they should wear
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their poppy. It is an appropriate way to be respectful of our country and the sacrifices
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that were made to found it and to our great veterans. Let's go back and look at that terrific
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speech. You know, I was talking to a veteran. I said, I'm not going to run the poppy thing anymore
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because what's the sense? I live in Mississauga. Nobody wears, very few people wear a poppy.
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Downtown Toronto, forget it. Downtown Toronto, nobody wears a poppy. And I'm not going to, he says,
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wait a minute. How about running it for the people that buy them? Now you go to the small
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cities and you know, you, you know, those, the rows on rows, you people love you. They come here,
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whatever it is. You love our way of life. You love our milk and honey. At least you could pay a couple
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of bucks for poppies or something like that. These guys pay for your way of life that you enjoy in
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Canada. These guys paid the biggest price. Anyhow, I'm going to run it again for you. Great people
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and good Canadians that bought a poppy. I'm still going to run it. Anyhow.
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Wrong. McLean, giving the thumbs up there before knifing him in the back. Now, where did Cherry's
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prescience get him other than being fired for being right too early? And where are we now?
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We showcased this heartbreaking video on Friday that I wanted to revisit, aired on Saturday,
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filmed on Friday. I wanted to revisit this Remembrance Day where British World War II veteran
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Alec Penstone shared heartbreaking remarks that he feels like we've wasted that ultimate sacrifice.
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What does Remembrance Sunday mean for you? What is your message?
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My message is, I can see in my mind's eye, there was rows and rows of white stones of all the hundreds
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of my friends and everybody else that gave their lives for what? A country of today. No, I'm sorry.
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The sacrifice wasn't worth the result that it is now.
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What do you mean by that, though, at this point?
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Well, what we fought for and what we fought for was our freedom. We find that even now it's
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darn sight worse than what it was when I fought for it.
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Oh, Alec, I'm sorry you feel like that because I want you to know that all the generations that
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have come since, including me and my children, are so grateful for your bravery and all that for
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service personnel. And it's our job now, isn't it, to make it the country that you fought for,
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I'm so wonderful to know there are people like you that can spread the word around.
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And that for what, that job to make it worthwhile, it falls to us to make up for the fact that he is
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right. We are wasting this, not just Britain, but Canada, where there is now a beautiful display
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outside the Senate of poppies falling and just a stone's throw away scenes of utter degradation
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at the Rideau Center. Migrants camped out in front of the U.S. Embassy every morning,
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you have gangland activity right down that street. It is a disgrace, and we have allowed it to become
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so. It is, of course, the fault of our cowardly politicians, and that cowardice is as contagious
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as courage. So be courageous. Let's talk to a young conservative thought leader, a terrific columnist,
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Jeff Russ, who's been writing about Remembrance Day and does terrific cultural work. He works with
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the National Post and the resource sector, a publication known as Without Diminishment,
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thank you for joining us for this chat. Jeff Russ joins the show. Jeff is one of Canada's
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most influential opinion columnists. He works in the resource sector, has columns in the National
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Post, Spectator Australia, Modern Age, and is the editor at large and co-founder of Without Diminishment,
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a new publication to which I contribute as well. Jeff, welcome.
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Hey, my pleasure. Now for our audience, and we believe in modeling behavior,
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we're taping this the day before, but how are you spending your Remembrance Day?
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Well, I will be down at the Cenotaph over on the North Shore, and I will be there with
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the vets who are still there and all of their family and friends and the people who wish to
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Wonderful. I think I'm going to join you because my calendar's free. It'd be wonderful to be there,
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to actually practice what you preach. My wife and I went for a trail run this week in North Vancouver.
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We're also in the Lower Mainland along with you. The North Vancouver Cemetery has a beautiful Cenotaph
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display and the crosses row by row. It's wonderful to see. It's important to remember and to commemorate
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I don't know. We're all kind of looking around in public right now, and there's an Ipsos poll from
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2023 that touted that 72% of Canadians claim they're wearing a poppy in the lead up to Remembrance Day.
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Sadly, we know that's a lie. If you were to ballpark that actual number, what would you
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suppose uptake actually looks like now, and how concerned would you be about that?
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I look around the mall. I see one-third of people wearing a poppy. I see less veterans with them.
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I have heard that the lack of a tap machine has also contributed to people not being able to
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purchase the poppies or make a donation. I don't think that's true because I do see the
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tap machines with every single basket, so I'm not sure I buy that. I think people are simply complacent.
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Now, in fairness, some people don't want to put a pin through their
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acrylic or polyester coat. I understand. Sometimes people come back from the gym,
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they don't have one, but I think both of us wear poppies to the gym, so maybe that's not a good
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excuse either. But either way, it is complacency. It is forgetting and laziness overall. And
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do we blame the people? No, I don't think so. But I think the institutions that we rely on to keep
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this memory alive have not done a good job of holding it.
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Paul Jay Yeah. No, we obviously forgot ourselves. We're in the same camp when it comes to national
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identity and symbols and defending as such, where if you can take down a John A. McDonald statue for
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a few years or board it up, it stands to reason that perhaps the poppy would become less important
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to the public as well. We are modeling a behavior that is inconsistent with our former values. We
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have museums that seek to teach about decolonization and not our history.
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I think today about Don Cherry. I think you're a fellow Don Cherry aficionado. I think it's safe to
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say he was right. And perhaps the crime he committed and no crime at all was being right too early,
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even if they were just looking for an excuse to fire him. Off the top of the episode, we showcased
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his famous or infamous, you people speech. It was spun as expressly bigoted as an excuse to fire him,
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but we know that he was correct, seemingly about the lack of buy-in and integration when we shared
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these remarks and he's being proven more right by the year. What's it going to take to reverse some
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of that trend among new Canadians and even our apathetic citizens, as you pointed out?
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I hate to say it, but when people talk about politicizing Remembrance Day, it's already been
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politicized. Let's get that out of the way. You had the mayor of Calgary, the former mayor,
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I should say, thankfully ejected in last year's election, Jyoti Gondek, last year going on a big
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tirade about settlers, colonization and all that nonsense on the Remembrance Day ceremony itself,
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which completely subverts the occasion. You had officials of the city of Toronto on the same year
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doing the perform the exact same routine. So it does get away from the root of which is
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remembrance and these are very and it puts it into a very divisive territory. These topics like
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decolonization are not in any way, shape or form universally accepted. I would say more people
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than perhaps current governments would like to imagine, they do reject them. And so when you
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do that, the holiday, well, I don't know if it's appropriate to call it a holiday, this day of
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remembrance simply loses its meaning. There's something unifying about remembering. And when
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you insert what are effectively culture war topics, then it destroys that. And so I would say it's already
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been politicized. And if you want to defend a Remembrance Day, you have to engage in that politicized
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process. And that means actively telling people to wear a poppy, why you should wear it, and maybe there's a bit of
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shame involved in that too. Shame in those who don't wear them.
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I'm okay with shame. I think maybe we forgot the power of shame the last 10 years. I think there's
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even an argument that maybe we always needed the Karen. Maybe we needed a cultural bulwark
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to remind people that you're supposed to return the shopping cart. These little acts, they add up to what
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is culture. On that North Vancouver trail run my wife and I were on over the weekend, you see this
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beautiful cenotaph, but it's tucked away. It's a gorgeous cemetery, but we were the only ones there.
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And there was a sadness to that beyond just mourning our dead and their sacrifice. And then you get back
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onto the main trail and you're just passing hundreds of people where you wouldn't know that Remembrance
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Day was going on if you didn't look down and notice it on your own lapel. And so I'm okay with shaming
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these people. I'm okay with shaming some of the elbows up crowd who lowered the flag for so long and
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are now seemingly buying new flags on Timu or Amazon because it's politically convenient for them to do so.
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This is not supposed to be political. It is supposed to be, you know, this is a thing for us to be proud
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of. This is just this basic buy-in, this basic expectation. I completely agree with you. And
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again, old Canadian, new Canadian, I don't see the poppy on either group. If they can be called two
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groups to begin with, it seems to be a fairly universal decline. The only consistency I would say
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is among the elderly tend to wear them in much greater proportion from my own observations.
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Yeah. People in uniform tend to wear them. People in the downtown business district tend to wear them
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a little bit more, but I wonder if they wear them when they're off working at the pub.
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That is a good question. No, but it's true. It's not just a you people as in a new people.
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It is, you know, we're seeing Gen Z, we're seeing younger millennials, guys, step it up,
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talk to your friends, shame them, guilt them. They should feel guilt over this. Now,
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Jeff, you're making waves as a young common sense voice in Canadian politics. This is going to be me
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putting you over for a second as I tend to do as we're collaborators and co-conspirators
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in our common sense work. You were recently even listed by a popular conservative influencer on
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Twitter as the number one guy to follow and folks can do so at JeffRuss3 on Twitter. For the record,
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I finished second. Surely there's no shame losing out to you because you're great at what you do and
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I'm proud of you. But I wanted to highlight that expanding influence for our audience of your work.
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Tell me about your recent powerful Remembrance Day piece you wrote for Without Diminishment,
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which has been shared by so many in the Canadian political sphere,
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and then let our audience know a bit more about that project.
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Well, the Remembrance Day piece I wrote in reaction to the memory of
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GOTYONDEC, like I said, that whole process of bastardizing the Day of Remembrance to suit
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fashionable, but I would say corrosive, these sort of, obviously just anti-Canadian
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movements, overall ones that delegitimize the country. Delegitizes the country, especially
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that the soldiers of World War I and World War II fought for. If you look at the recruitment posters,
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if you read their letters home, you look at what caused the conflict, it was very much an imperial
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patriotic war to start. And if you start to treat that Canada, you know, that old imperial Anglo-Canada,
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if you treat that as a foreign country, then you remove that history from our own. And it becomes
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very easy to start beating it over the head and browbeating the historical figures involved in that.
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So when they talk about these soldiers fought for inclusion, they did not fight for inclusion.
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Now, can you make an argument to say that indigenous volunteers volunteered to get their
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place in society? Sure. Was that the overarching drive of the war? No, this was not a war. I think
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what war has been fought for inclusion? That's a better question. So it was never a war for inclusion.
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This was certainly not a war for decolonization. This was World War I. It was a war for the empire.
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Yeah. It's the most powerful colonial enterprise that has ever existed. So it is historically
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incorrect. I would say it's morally incorrect to even take the sacrifice of 50,000 Canadians,
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which Arthur Mead referenced in his speech. There's 50,000 Canadians who now lie buried in France and
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Belgium. So to take that, ignore the motivations, ignore the letters home, ignore the recruitment
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posters and tried to claim this, this day as part of your, let's just call it the anti-Canadian
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ideology. I find very disgraceful. So I want to put those thoughts onto paper, so to speak,
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it's online, it's not on paper, but I'm very glad it was shared. Some very famous names did both
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privately and publicly. So I think there is a widespread frustration among the population,
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whether the people be leaders or ordinary citizens. And I think it's important to harness that because
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if you don't defend Remembrance Day, like I said, you are ceding it to the people who have the bad
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intentions. You wrote this great piece in the National Post on the cultural barbarization of
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Canada. And I want to bring it up on my screen, not just show it to your readers, where you wrote,
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Jeffrey, whether it be drug infused murder, terrorism, or political arson, there will always
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be an idiot to be found at a university or NGO that will justify it with the mental gymnastics
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of subpar intelligence. Tell us how you really feel. There is no excuse for the barbarization of
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Canada and refusing to crush that transformation in its tracks is a choice made by governments at all
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levels. This is obviously a moment for Remembrance and to think about all the the utmost wonderful
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qualities of our heritage and our upbringing. Why do you also worry about this growing barbarization
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in Canada? Well, this is a high trust, peaceable, orderly country, and that has been the goal of it
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since Confederation, I would argue even before. So for us to try to normalize old world blood feuds,
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in our streets is to me a complete disgrace. It's dangerous, for one. It puts citizens in danger.
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And we have seen since the October 7th attacks, you have seen the Middle Eastern blood feuds,
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decades old, being played, synagogues being burned, stores smashed, campuses stormed. It's just
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unacceptable. And it's not to say that there has not been a response from the authorities, but they seem
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reluctant to raise their voices about it. Why not make it a moral outrage? Why treat it as a
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a troublesome, but may potentially electorally dangerous issue to tackle? And to me, that just
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screams cowardice. And when you said drug infused murder, we had people with their limbs severed in
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Vancouver among the homeless population. Just walking to work too. That one guy was just walking to work
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at the end. He just walked into work, took an ax and lost his hand.
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What people have been shot with crossbows? It's out of control.
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I don't know why we choose to live here. Good question there. But there was a
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lady on the seawall the other day who stabbed nine people.
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Yes. Nine people. And you wouldn't even hear about it today.
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No. And she would be someone to be deescalated and taken care of the way that we
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more after more post-national protests in Jewish neighborhoods in Toronto over the weekend. Surprise,
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surprise. The police and the, you know, the police chief in Toronto are talking deescalation tactics.
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It's like, or, you know, there's no embassy there. What are we doing? This is intimidation. This is
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bigotry. This is post-national slop. I agree more. Jeff, where can we find more of your work?
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As you mentioned, you can find me at JeffRuss3 on X. You can find my work in the National Post
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under my name, Jeff Russ at the McDonald Lurie Institute. Big shout out to them. They were in
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Vancouver last week. Maybe Juneau news in the future. That'd also be fantastic. Modern age when
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I am published there again, and without diminishment as always, and maybe on your show,
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if you invite me back. Anytime, pal. Thanks so much for coming. Thank you, Alex. Cheers.