Juno News - Don Cherry was right

00:00:00.000 Hi, Juneau News, Alexander Brown here. Great to see you for another week. I'm the director of

00:00:07.040 the National Citizens Coalition. I'm a writer, communicator, campaigner. And while you're here,

00:00:11.860 please take advantage of our great discount. For more from Juneau News, that's junownews.com

00:00:17.820 slash not sorry for 20% off. It's Remembrance Day and Don Cherry wants you to wear your poppy.

00:00:23.940 Are you wearing your poppy? I hope you are because we're seeing poor uptake. We are seeing activist

00:00:29.420 courts that are fighting to ban poppies in the courtroom. The poppy is not supposed to be a

00:00:35.100 political symbol. We're talking basic human decency and national pride here. It certainly brings to

00:00:42.680 mind Don Cherry's infamous, to me, just famous. Infamous implies it's a negative. You people speech

00:00:49.620 where he's not just calling out our new Canadians. He's letting everybody know that they should wear

00:00:55.720 their poppy. It is an appropriate way to be respectful of our country and the sacrifices

00:01:00.580 that were made to found it and to our great veterans. Let's go back and look at that terrific

00:01:05.760 speech. You know, I was talking to a veteran. I said, I'm not going to run the poppy thing anymore 0.83

00:01:10.540 because what's the sense? I live in Mississauga. Nobody wears, very few people wear a poppy.

00:01:16.980 Downtown Toronto, forget it. Downtown Toronto, nobody wears a poppy. And I'm not going to, he says,

00:01:21.440 wait a minute. How about running it for the people that buy them? Now you go to the small

00:01:26.300 cities and you know, you, you know, those, the rows on rows, you people love you. They come here,

00:01:32.560 whatever it is. You love our way of life. You love our milk and honey. At least you could pay a couple

00:01:38.240 of bucks for poppies or something like that. These guys pay for your way of life that you enjoy in

00:01:44.040 Canada. These guys paid the biggest price. Anyhow, I'm going to run it again for you. Great people

00:01:49.900 and good Canadians that bought a poppy. I'm still going to run it. Anyhow.

00:01:55.340 Love you for it.

00:01:56.100 Wrong. McLean, giving the thumbs up there before knifing him in the back. Now, where did Cherry's

00:02:02.980 prescience get him other than being fired for being right too early? And where are we now?

00:02:09.420 We showcased this heartbreaking video on Friday that I wanted to revisit, aired on Saturday,

00:02:14.820 filmed on Friday. I wanted to revisit this Remembrance Day where British World War II veteran

00:02:19.640 Alec Penstone shared heartbreaking remarks that he feels like we've wasted that ultimate sacrifice.

00:02:26.200 Please take a look.

00:02:26.920 What does Remembrance Sunday mean for you? What is your message?

00:02:31.560 My message is, I can see in my mind's eye, there was rows and rows of white stones of all the hundreds

00:02:41.880 of my friends and everybody else that gave their lives for what? A country of today. No, I'm sorry.

00:02:53.080 The sacrifice wasn't worth the result that it is now.

00:02:57.720 Oh, well, I'm sorry.

00:02:59.160 What do you mean by that, though, at this point?

00:03:02.600 Well, what we fought for and what we fought for was our freedom. We find that even now it's

00:03:11.640 darn sight worse than what it was when I fought for it.

00:03:16.600 Oh, Alec, I'm sorry you feel like that because I want you to know that all the generations that

00:03:21.800 have come since, including me and my children, are so grateful for your bravery and all that for

00:03:29.160 service personnel. And it's our job now, isn't it, to make it the country that you fought for,

00:03:36.040 you absolutely fought for, and we will do.

00:03:38.840 I'm so wonderful to know there are people like you that can spread the word around.

00:03:44.600 And that for what, that job to make it worthwhile, it falls to us to make up for the fact that he is

00:03:53.080 right. We are wasting this, not just Britain, but Canada, where there is now a beautiful display

00:03:59.480 outside the Senate of poppies falling and just a stone's throw away scenes of utter degradation

00:04:06.120 at the Rideau Center. Migrants camped out in front of the U.S. Embassy every morning,

00:04:11.720 you have gangland activity right down that street. It is a disgrace, and we have allowed it to become

00:04:19.480 so. It is, of course, the fault of our cowardly politicians, and that cowardice is as contagious 0.99

00:04:24.840 as courage. So be courageous. Let's talk to a young conservative thought leader, a terrific columnist, 0.95

00:04:31.320 Jeff Russ, who's been writing about Remembrance Day and does terrific cultural work. He works with

00:04:37.400 the National Post and the resource sector, a publication known as Without Diminishment,

00:04:42.280 thank you for joining us for this chat. Jeff Russ joins the show. Jeff is one of Canada's

00:04:46.280 most influential opinion columnists. He works in the resource sector, has columns in the National

00:04:51.800 Post, Spectator Australia, Modern Age, and is the editor at large and co-founder of Without Diminishment,

00:04:57.800 a new publication to which I contribute as well. Jeff, welcome.

00:05:00.680 Thank you for having me, Alex. Appreciate it.

00:05:03.320 Hey, my pleasure. Now for our audience, and we believe in modeling behavior,

00:05:06.920 we're taping this the day before, but how are you spending your Remembrance Day?

00:05:12.280 Well, I will be down at the Cenotaph over on the North Shore, and I will be there with

00:05:17.880 the vets who are still there and all of their family and friends and the people who wish to

00:05:21.720 pay their respects, as I always do.

00:05:24.280 Wonderful. I think I'm going to join you because my calendar's free. It'd be wonderful to be there,

00:05:30.120 to actually practice what you preach. My wife and I went for a trail run this week in North Vancouver.

00:05:36.200 We're also in the Lower Mainland along with you. The North Vancouver Cemetery has a beautiful Cenotaph

00:05:42.040 display and the crosses row by row. It's wonderful to see. It's important to remember and to commemorate

00:05:51.800 I don't know. We're all kind of looking around in public right now, and there's an Ipsos poll from

00:05:56.280 2023 that touted that 72% of Canadians claim they're wearing a poppy in the lead up to Remembrance Day.

00:06:03.480 Sadly, we know that's a lie. If you were to ballpark that actual number, what would you

00:06:08.360 suppose uptake actually looks like now, and how concerned would you be about that?

00:06:12.200 In a good year, I would say 33%, sadly.

00:06:16.760 I look around the mall. I see one-third of people wearing a poppy. I see less veterans with them.

00:06:23.080 I have heard that the lack of a tap machine has also contributed to people not being able to

00:06:28.520 purchase the poppies or make a donation. I don't think that's true because I do see the

00:06:31.640 tap machines with every single basket, so I'm not sure I buy that. I think people are simply complacent.

00:06:37.480 Now, in fairness, some people don't want to put a pin through their

00:06:42.520 acrylic or polyester coat. I understand. Sometimes people come back from the gym,

00:06:46.040 they don't have one, but I think both of us wear poppies to the gym, so maybe that's not a good

00:06:50.680 excuse either. But either way, it is complacency. It is forgetting and laziness overall. And

00:06:59.480 do we blame the people? No, I don't think so. But I think the institutions that we rely on to keep

00:07:05.560 this memory alive have not done a good job of holding it.

00:07:08.360 Paul Jay Yeah. No, we obviously forgot ourselves. We're in the same camp when it comes to national

00:07:15.480 identity and symbols and defending as such, where if you can take down a John A. McDonald statue for

00:07:21.400 a few years or board it up, it stands to reason that perhaps the poppy would become less important

00:07:27.480 to the public as well. We are modeling a behavior that is inconsistent with our former values. We

00:07:34.120 have museums that seek to teach about decolonization and not our history.

00:07:41.240 I think today about Don Cherry. I think you're a fellow Don Cherry aficionado. I think it's safe to

00:07:48.840 say he was right. And perhaps the crime he committed and no crime at all was being right too early,

00:07:54.920 even if they were just looking for an excuse to fire him. Off the top of the episode, we showcased

00:07:59.320 his famous or infamous, you people speech. It was spun as expressly bigoted as an excuse to fire him,

00:08:06.200 but we know that he was correct, seemingly about the lack of buy-in and integration when we shared

00:08:13.080 these remarks and he's being proven more right by the year. What's it going to take to reverse some

00:08:17.400 of that trend among new Canadians and even our apathetic citizens, as you pointed out?

00:08:22.840 I hate to say it, but when people talk about politicizing Remembrance Day, it's already been

00:08:30.840 politicized. Let's get that out of the way. You had the mayor of Calgary, the former mayor,

00:08:35.720 I should say, thankfully ejected in last year's election, Jyoti Gondek, last year going on a big

00:08:39.800 tirade about settlers, colonization and all that nonsense on the Remembrance Day ceremony itself,

00:08:47.480 which completely subverts the occasion. You had officials of the city of Toronto on the same year

00:08:52.840 doing the perform the exact same routine. So it does get away from the root of which is

00:08:57.880 remembrance and these are very and it puts it into a very divisive territory. These topics like

00:09:03.480 decolonization are not in any way, shape or form universally accepted. I would say more people

00:09:09.640 than perhaps current governments would like to imagine, they do reject them. And so when you

00:09:14.680 do that, the holiday, well, I don't know if it's appropriate to call it a holiday, this day of

00:09:18.760 remembrance simply loses its meaning. There's something unifying about remembering. And when

00:09:23.800 you insert what are effectively culture war topics, then it destroys that. And so I would say it's already

00:09:29.880 been politicized. And if you want to defend a Remembrance Day, you have to engage in that politicized

00:09:34.040 process. And that means actively telling people to wear a poppy, why you should wear it, and maybe there's a bit of

00:09:38.600 shame involved in that too. Shame in those who don't wear them.

00:09:42.200 I'm okay with shame. I think maybe we forgot the power of shame the last 10 years. I think there's

00:09:48.600 even an argument that maybe we always needed the Karen. Maybe we needed a cultural bulwark 0.83

00:09:53.400 to remind people that you're supposed to return the shopping cart. These little acts, they add up to what

00:10:02.040 is culture. On that North Vancouver trail run my wife and I were on over the weekend, you see this

00:10:08.920 beautiful cenotaph, but it's tucked away. It's a gorgeous cemetery, but we were the only ones there.

00:10:14.600 And there was a sadness to that beyond just mourning our dead and their sacrifice. And then you get back

00:10:21.160 onto the main trail and you're just passing hundreds of people where you wouldn't know that Remembrance

00:10:28.600 Day was going on if you didn't look down and notice it on your own lapel. And so I'm okay with shaming

00:10:35.160 these people. I'm okay with shaming some of the elbows up crowd who lowered the flag for so long and

00:10:40.840 are now seemingly buying new flags on Timu or Amazon because it's politically convenient for them to do so.

00:10:47.320 This is not supposed to be political. It is supposed to be, you know, this is a thing for us to be proud

00:10:52.840 of. This is just this basic buy-in, this basic expectation. I completely agree with you. And

00:11:00.440 again, old Canadian, new Canadian, I don't see the poppy on either group. If they can be called two

00:11:05.960 groups to begin with, it seems to be a fairly universal decline. The only consistency I would say

00:11:10.360 is among the elderly tend to wear them in much greater proportion from my own observations.

00:11:14.440 Yeah. People in uniform tend to wear them. People in the downtown business district tend to wear them

00:11:19.240 a little bit more, but I wonder if they wear them when they're off working at the pub.

00:11:23.640 That is a good question. No, but it's true. It's not just a you people as in a new people.

00:11:28.760 It is, you know, we're seeing Gen Z, we're seeing younger millennials, guys, step it up,

00:11:34.360 talk to your friends, shame them, guilt them. They should feel guilt over this. Now,

00:11:39.000 Jeff, you're making waves as a young common sense voice in Canadian politics. This is going to be me

00:11:43.480 putting you over for a second as I tend to do as we're collaborators and co-conspirators

00:11:49.720 in our common sense work. You were recently even listed by a popular conservative influencer on

00:11:54.360 Twitter as the number one guy to follow and folks can do so at JeffRuss3 on Twitter. For the record,

00:12:01.480 I finished second. Surely there's no shame losing out to you because you're great at what you do and

00:12:06.040 I'm proud of you. But I wanted to highlight that expanding influence for our audience of your work.

00:12:11.480 Tell me about your recent powerful Remembrance Day piece you wrote for Without Diminishment,

00:12:16.360 which has been shared by so many in the Canadian political sphere,

00:12:19.800 and then let our audience know a bit more about that project.

00:12:22.920 Well, the Remembrance Day piece I wrote in reaction to the memory of

00:12:26.760 GOTYONDEC, like I said, that whole process of bastardizing the Day of Remembrance to suit

00:12:32.280 fashionable, but I would say corrosive, these sort of, obviously just anti-Canadian

00:12:37.640 movements, overall ones that delegitimize the country. Delegitizes the country, especially

00:12:41.640 that the soldiers of World War I and World War II fought for. If you look at the recruitment posters,

00:12:45.880 if you read their letters home, you look at what caused the conflict, it was very much an imperial

00:12:49.880 patriotic war to start. And if you start to treat that Canada, you know, that old imperial Anglo-Canada,

00:12:56.200 if you treat that as a foreign country, then you remove that history from our own. And it becomes

00:13:02.600 very easy to start beating it over the head and browbeating the historical figures involved in that.

00:13:07.560 So when they talk about these soldiers fought for inclusion, they did not fight for inclusion.

00:13:12.360 No, they shouldn't, yeah.

00:13:14.920 Now, can you make an argument to say that indigenous volunteers volunteered to get their

00:13:19.560 place in society? Sure. Was that the overarching drive of the war? No, this was not a war. I think

00:13:25.000 what war has been fought for inclusion? That's a better question. So it was never a war for inclusion.

00:13:29.960 This was certainly not a war for decolonization. This was World War I. It was a war for the empire.

00:13:35.240 Yeah. It's the most powerful colonial enterprise that has ever existed. So it is historically

00:13:43.320 incorrect. I would say it's morally incorrect to even take the sacrifice of 50,000 Canadians,

00:13:49.000 which Arthur Mead referenced in his speech. There's 50,000 Canadians who now lie buried in France and

00:13:53.640 Belgium. So to take that, ignore the motivations, ignore the letters home, ignore the recruitment

00:13:59.560 posters and tried to claim this, this day as part of your, let's just call it the anti-Canadian

00:14:07.480 ideology. I find very disgraceful. So I want to put those thoughts onto paper, so to speak,

00:14:12.520 it's online, it's not on paper, but I'm very glad it was shared. Some very famous names did both

00:14:18.840 privately and publicly. So I think there is a widespread frustration among the population,

00:14:23.720 whether the people be leaders or ordinary citizens. And I think it's important to harness that because

00:14:29.720 if you don't defend Remembrance Day, like I said, you are ceding it to the people who have the bad 0.86

00:14:35.080 intentions. You wrote this great piece in the National Post on the cultural barbarization of 0.99

00:14:41.080 Canada. And I want to bring it up on my screen, not just show it to your readers, where you wrote,

00:14:46.360 Jeffrey, whether it be drug infused murder, terrorism, or political arson, there will always 0.99

00:14:51.960 be an idiot to be found at a university or NGO that will justify it with the mental gymnastics 1.00

00:14:58.040 of subpar intelligence. Tell us how you really feel. There is no excuse for the barbarization of 1.00

00:15:03.320 Canada and refusing to crush that transformation in its tracks is a choice made by governments at all

00:15:10.360 levels. This is obviously a moment for Remembrance and to think about all the the utmost wonderful

00:15:18.760 qualities of our heritage and our upbringing. Why do you also worry about this growing barbarization

00:15:25.240 in Canada? Well, this is a high trust, peaceable, orderly country, and that has been the goal of it

00:15:30.280 since Confederation, I would argue even before. So for us to try to normalize old world blood feuds,

00:15:39.880 in our streets is to me a complete disgrace. It's dangerous, for one. It puts citizens in danger.

00:15:46.360 And we have seen since the October 7th attacks, you have seen the Middle Eastern blood feuds,

00:15:55.000 decades old, being played, synagogues being burned, stores smashed, campuses stormed. It's just 0.70

00:16:01.640 unacceptable. And it's not to say that there has not been a response from the authorities, but they seem

00:16:05.880 reluctant to raise their voices about it. Why not make it a moral outrage? Why treat it as a

00:16:13.000 a troublesome, but may potentially electorally dangerous issue to tackle? And to me, that just

00:16:17.960 screams cowardice. And when you said drug infused murder, we had people with their limbs severed in

00:16:23.320 Vancouver among the homeless population. Just walking to work too. That one guy was just walking to work

00:16:28.840 at the end. He just walked into work, took an ax and lost his hand.

00:16:32.360 What people have been shot with crossbows? It's out of control.

00:16:37.720 I don't know why we choose to live here. Good question there. But there was a

00:16:40.600 lady on the seawall the other day who stabbed nine people.

00:16:43.880 Yes. Nine people. And you wouldn't even hear about it today.

00:16:49.080 No. And she would be someone to be deescalated and taken care of the way that we 1.00

00:16:55.400 more after more post-national protests in Jewish neighborhoods in Toronto over the weekend. Surprise,

00:17:00.280 surprise. The police and the, you know, the police chief in Toronto are talking deescalation tactics.

00:17:08.520 It's like, or, you know, there's no embassy there. What are we doing? This is intimidation. This is

00:17:14.200 bigotry. This is post-national slop. I agree more. Jeff, where can we find more of your work?

00:17:22.920 As you mentioned, you can find me at JeffRuss3 on X. You can find my work in the National Post

00:17:27.320 under my name, Jeff Russ at the McDonald Lurie Institute. Big shout out to them. They were in

00:17:31.560 Vancouver last week. Maybe Juneau news in the future. That'd also be fantastic. Modern age when

00:17:36.200 I am published there again, and without diminishment as always, and maybe on your show,

00:17:40.840 if you invite me back. Anytime, pal. Thanks so much for coming. Thank you, Alex. Cheers.

Juno News - November 11, 2025

Don Cherry was right

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