Don Cherry Deserves the Order of Canada

By Ed Fast

Don Cherry is 92 years old and in frail health. For nearly half a century, he was the most recognizable face in Canadian hockey — a loud, opinionated, patriotic original in an era of safe, sanitized sports commentary. He built Rose Cherry’s Home for Kids in Milton, Ontario, a hospice for children in memory of his late wife. He founded Don Cherry’s Pet Rescue Foundation. He volunteered tirelessly with veterans’ associations across this country, year after year, long after the cameras had stopped rolling. In the CBC’s own poll in 2004, over 1.2 million Canadians voted him the seventh greatest Canadian of all time — ahead of Sir John A. Macdonald, ahead of Alexander Graham Bell, ahead of scores of politicians, scientists and scholars who populate the Order of Canada’s distinguished rolls.

And yet, after more than four decades of nominations, Don Cherry has never been admitted to the Order of Canada.

The debate over whether Cherry deserves this honour is not occurring in a vacuum. It is, rather, a stunning case of double standards — one that reveals far more about the cultural and ideological biases of those who control the nomination process than it does about Don Cherry himself.

Let us be honest about what Cherry actually said and did. His most controversial comments — about poppy-wearing immigrants, about female reporters in dressing rooms, about European hockey players — were blunt, sometimes poorly worded, and occasionally tone-deaf. They were the kind of off-the-cuff, shoot-from-the-hip remarks that Canadians had come to expect from a man who never pretended to be a diplomat. They were, in the main, intended to provoke, to stir the pot, to generate the kind of passionate national conversation that Cherry specialized in for 38 years on Coach’s Corner. They were not calculated. They were not motivated by hatred. And they harmed no one physically.

Compare that record to the men and women who have been welcomed into the Order of Canada with open arms.

Tommy Douglas — awarded the Companion grade in 1981, the Order’s highest distinction — is rightly celebrated as the father of Medicare. But his Master’s thesis called for the sterilization of “mental defectives.” That was not an off-the-cuff remark. It was an academic argument, carefully written and submitted for scholarly review. Pierre Elliott Trudeau received the Companion grade in 1984, despite having invoked the War Measures Act, suspending the civil liberties of Canadians, and despite his famous “Salmon Arm salute” — a crude, deliberate gesture directed at his own constituents — and a tenure marked by what Western Canadians rightly regarded as profound regional contempt.

Jean Chrétien received the Companion grade in 2007. His tenure included the Sponsorship Scandal, one of the worst corruption episodes in Canadian political history. He told Canadians, incredulously, that he had no knowledge of residential school abuses despite having served as Minister of Indian Affairs. And on February 15, 1996, on the grounds of the National War Memorial — the most sacred ground in this country — Chrétien physically grabbed a civilian protester by the throat with his bare hands. The “Shawinigan Handshake,” as it became known, was captured on film for all to see. Don Cherry has been barred from the Order of Canada for verbal comments that harmed no one. Jean Chrétien received its highest grade for a career that included physically choking a protester at a war memorial. Let that sink in.

Mordecai Richler was awarded the Companion grade in 2000, the year before his death. He was, unquestionably, a literary giant — but his sustained, decade-long satirical assault on Quebec nationalism led Bloc Québécois MP Gilles Duceppe to denounce him as a “consummate racist with a totally decayed mind.” That was not a fringe view in Quebec. Richler’s pen was a weapon, and he wielded it deliberately. He was honoured anyway, as he should have been. The question is why the same generous judgment has never been extended to Cherry.

The double standard extends to the arts and sciences as well. David Suzuki, Order of Canada Companion since 2004, told a crowd in Victoria in 2021 that “there are going to be pipelines blowing up if our leaders don’t pay attention.” The province’s own public safety minister called the remarks unhelpful. Suzuki refused to apologize. His appointment has never been reviewed. Joni Mitchell — one of our greatest musical treasures, and rightly honoured — has nonetheless been the subject of controversy for her use of blackface stretching back to the mid-1970s, which she has defended repeatedly and without apology over five decades. Her Companion appointment has never been questioned. Neil Young, also a Companion, made deeply offensive comments about gay people and welfare recipients in a 1985 interview that would end most public careers today. His appointment has never been reviewed.

And then there is Ben Johnson. Admitted to the Order in 1987 for his athletic achievements, Johnson subsequently admitted to having used performance-enhancing steroids since 1981 — meaning that his entire decorated career was built on systematic fraud. He retained his Order of Canada membership because the Advisory Council declined to apply its termination policy retroactively. A man who cheated his way to glory for years retains the honour. A man who said immigrants should wear poppies does not. The inconsistency is not merely striking. It is indefensible.

Most recently, restaurateur Mohamad Fakih — awarded the Order in 2021 — posted in August 2025 that any Canadian who served in Israel’s defence forces “must be prosecuted, no exceptions,” and that supporters of Israel “do not have basic human and Canadian values.” A petition demanding revocation of his Order drew over 11,000 signatures within days. Three former parliamentarians from different political parties wrote to the Chief Justice of Canada requesting a formal review. Fakih doubled down, saying he would “scream it from the rooftop.” As of this writing, he retains his appointment.

Don Cherry never said anything remotely like that. He never threatened prosecution of any group of Canadians. He never suggested that any category of his fellow citizens lacked human values. What he said, at age 85, without the benefit of a seven-second delay, in a live television broadcast, was that immigrants should wear poppies to honour Canada’s fallen soldiers. It was clumsy. It was uncharacteristically angry. And Cherry himself later said it was a mistake. But it was the remark of a man who has spent his entire adult life championing Canada’s veterans — a man who has visited military hospitals, spoken at Remembrance Day ceremonies, and used his considerable platform to remind Canadians, year after year, of the debt we owe those who served.

That is who Don Cherry is. Not the sound clip. Not the firing. The whole man.

He opened a children’s hospice. He rescues animals. He coached in the minor leagues for years before anyone knew his name, nurturing young Canadian hockey players with the same fierce pride he would later bring to national television. He turned Coach’s Corner into a weekly civics lesson about what it means to be proudly, unapologetically Canadian at a time when that sentiment was going out of fashion in certain corners of our cultural establishment. He is, as Pierre Poilievre rightly put it, a man who “embodies what it means to be a proud Canadian.”

The Order of Canada’s motto is Desiderantes meliorem patriam — “They desire a better country.” By any honest measure, Don Cherry has spent his life desiring a better Canada, and doing something about it. The Advisory Council has honoured politicians implicated in corruption, a Prime Minister who physically accosted a protester at a war memorial, a doping athlete, and a man who posted that Canadian supporters of a democratic ally should be prosecuted. It has found no room for Don Cherry.

That is not a principled position. It is a political, an ideological one. And it’s long past time for that to change.

Ed Fast served as Canada’s Minister of International Trade from 2011 to 2015 and is the recently-retired Member of Parliament for Abbotsford.