Necessity of Due Care and Attention

He didn’t mean to dishonour the memories of Canadian soldiers who defended Canada through wars.  But, let’s see.

Mr. Cherry made a rather moving video of his visit to Flanders Fields to walk among the poppies looking at the crosses row on row.  He truly, in measured tones, honoured our soldiers. 

But then, after the first period in the tv broadcast of a hockey game, in his show “Coaches Corner” he attacked “you people” clearly referring to immigrants enjoying our milk and honey, our way of life.  Interestingly in both WWI and WWII, Canada’s shores were never under real direct threat of invasion.  Our soldiers who died mostly died overseas defending others and thereby defending all humanity. 

As Mr. Law of Ottawa put it in a Facebook post, “In November, I have always worn a #poppy. Why? To honour those whose sacrifices gave me the liberty to decide if I will - or will not - wear a poppy.”

I don’t know why some won’t wear one, but THEIR FREEDOM is just as the same as mine, #DonCherry. That’s what the fallen gave us.

But ex-NHL coach Cherry has random rants with slurs on other players, Europeans for wearing protective gear and not engaging in hearty fisty cuffs, when he asserts all this bravado and violence is just part of the emotional game.  Then we find high incidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy and our hockey heros are dying of a horrible brain disease contracted for our entertainment.  Doesn’t say too many good things about us either.

Ex-coach Cherry has been in hockey broadcast for thirty-eight years.  As a broadcaster, I assume it’s his obligation to handle his communication with all the finesse he would expect a player to use in handling a puck with a stick.  Yet he has made it his schtick to do the exact opposite, sounding more like the stereotypical bully and beer leaguer in the beer hall, waxing loudly in the pub after the game.  You know the style, wisecracking ever more irreverently to gain a laugh.  Beer leaguers are almost always good neighbours, family men, employees and employers in their private lives, but with the audience of a pub, often one of them can be different person.

His actual claim to fame was having the great good luck to be the flamboyant coach of the Bruins with one Mr. Orr playing on that team. He earned success in winning Lord Stanley’s Cup as head coach.

I recall Scotty Bowman having some success as head coach in the NHL.  I recall he being a different role model, even though he had considerable success. But would Mr. Bowman have had a flair for television?  Perhaps not.

As I think about the current Cherry controversy, I am reminded of what I view as an apt automobile driving analogy.  We used to have a traffic law in Saskatchewan we referred to as “driving without due care and attention”.  This is probably the starting point of a continuum that I, a non-lawyer, think ends with criminal negligence causing death.

So when I lane wander because I have not driven with due care and attention as I drive along the highway and nothing comes of it, it’s all good.  So I run over a bus with a hockey team in it, death comes of it, it’s all very bad. Same lack of care and attention, massively different outcomes.  Maybe a lane wander incident is actually always very, very bad.

So Mr. Cherry, from his broadcaster’s pulpit, decides to loudly judge people who do not wear poppies without considering that important symbolic practice has perhaps not yet become part of their new Canadian identity for them; or it has fallen off.  He is clearly being critical of “the other”, marking them as people who somehow do not count.. But it’s all part of his schtick.  He does make the point that we must all honour our protectors.  On balance it’s a bit like getting away with driving without due care and attention, so not a big deal.  Then somebody murders a group of people in a classroom or house of worship.  Now ... is the blurter of slurs against the other aiding, abetting and enabling hate crime in the form of mass murder?  I guess time might tell.  We do know it is certainly not “all good”.

Michael Klein

Note: David Law blogs at: https://davidkeithlaw.wordpress.com/ .