There are political miscalculations, and then there are gifts to your opponents so perfectly timed they seem almost deliberate. Pierre Poilievre’s campaign to nominate Don Cherry for the Order of Canada belongs firmly in the second category.
The Conservative leader declared last week that Cherry “embodies what it means to be a proud Canadian,” throwing his personal support behind a nomination drive launched by MP Andrew Lawton. The move was apparently designed to appeal to a nostalgic, culturally conservative base that views Cherry as a plain-spoken patriot victimized by woke cancel culture.
What it did was light a fire inside his own caucus, alienate French Canada, and hand his political adversaries a ready-made narrative about a leader whose judgment cannot be trusted.
The petition is hosted directly on the Conservative Party of Canada’s official website, authorized by its Chief Agent, and amplified by the party’s own digital infrastructure. This is not a gaffe. Not a backbench misfire. Not a communications failure. It is a deliberate strategic choice by the leader and his senior leadership.
Why Endorsing the Cherry Petition is Problematic
The Order of Canada exists to recognize “exceptional achievement” and “extraordinary contribution to the nation.” It is worth pausing to consider what contribution, exactly, is being honoured here.
Don Cherry was fired from Sportsnet in 2019 after telling immigrants on national television: “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.” The Royal Canadian Legion, the very organization that distributes poppies in Canada and whose members Cherry claimed to be defending, officially condemned the remarks as “hurtful, divisive and in no way condoned by the Legion.” He refused to apologize.
It was not an isolated moment. The record speaks for itself.
He compared the name of the Finnish coach of the Winnipeg Jets to dog food; referred to the wars in the Balkans as “Lower Slobovia attacking Slimea”; declared that players who wear visors are “sucks” and that most of them are “Europeans and French guys”; called French-Canadian flag bearer Jean-Luc Brassard “some ski guy that nobody knows about”; told French Canadians they were not “true Canadians” for opposing the Iraq War, singling out Habs fans for booing the American anthem and adding: “You have to realize it’s Quebec and it’s French Canadians.”.
When Ron MacLean raised the question of whether First Nations kids get a fair shake in life, Cherry cut him off: “Fair shake in life? Go out and get your own fair shake in life and work for it.” In 1992, he called Manon Rhéaume’s historic appearance as the first woman to play in an NHL game “a PR stunt” and said women “should stick to women’s hockey.” He said women reporters did not belong in hockey dressing rooms.
He has spent decades championing the law of talion on ice — that every act of violence deserves an equal and opposite response — celebrating enforcers, glorifying retribution, and dismissing the medical evidence on brain trauma as an inconvenience to the natural order of the game, going so far as to call former enforcers who courageously spoke out about brain trauma “pukes,” “turncoats,” and “hypocrites.”
This is the man Pierre Poilievre says embodies Canadian pride.
A Caucus Dangerously Divided
The blowback from the Conservative Party’s Quebec wing has been swift.
Pierre Paul-Hus, Poilievre’s own Quebec lieutenant, declared the nomination “a bad idea” given Cherry’s “unacceptable” remarks toward “the Quebec nation and francophones.” That a leader’s own Quebec lieutenant felt compelled to publicly break with him on a file his leader had personally championed is not a minor internal disagreement. It is a visible fracture at the worst possible time.
MP Luc Berthold went further, warning that awarding Cherry the Order would “irreparably discredit” every previous recipient of the honour. Poilievre, meanwhile, refused to address the controversy at a press conference in Windsor, answering only a handful of questions and none in French. His office had not responded to media inquiries by deadline.
The optics could hardly be worse: in one stroke, Poilievre has alienated loyal Quebec MPs who built their careers on the ground in francophone ridings, while drawing applause from the caucus’s hard-right flank, embodied by MP Jamil Jivani, whose own recent controversies have repeatedly pulled the Conservative leader off message.
The Quebec Problem Poilievre Cannot Afford
This episode does not occur in a vacuum. It arrives at a moment when the Conservative Party is struggling in Quebec, when three of its members from three different provinces have already crossed the floor to the Liberals in the space of a few months, and when Poilievre is struggling to demonstrate that his party can be trusted with the national interest at a moment of genuine crisis.
The Conservative Party has been down a similar road before. In 2008, Stephen Harper’s decision to cut arts and culture funding cost him dearly in Quebec and he never fully recovered his standing there. Poilievre and his team have just made a similar miscalculation.
It is worth noting that hockey is not a niche interest in Quebec any more than it is in the rest of Canada. It is woven into the cultural fabric of the province: its Saturday nights, its school arenas, its sense of shared identity. Cherry was not an obscure figure in Quebec. He was a weekly presence in living rooms across the province for four decades. This is not an elite controversy that will stay confined to the op-ed pages. It is the kind of file that travels: to kitchen tables, to arenas, to family group chats — and the kind that tends to stick.
It is one thing to debate the cancellation of historical figures who lived centuries ago. It is quite another for someone seeking the highest office in the land to actively lionize a contemporary figure whose contempt for French Canadians was not subtle, not occasional, and not ambiguous. It was repeated, televised, and nationally broadcast for decades.
A Self-Inflicted Wound
For the Bloc Québécois, this episode is a gift. Yves-François Blanchet does not need to do anything except point to Exhibit A. Every Quebec Conservative MP forced to distance themselves from their own leader is a reminder to francophone voters that the Conservative Party does not understand Quebec, does not speak for Quebec, and is not fighting for Quebec. The Bloc exists precisely to exploit that gap. Poilievre has just handed them a fresh argument, free of charge.
For the Liberal government, the appropriate posture is one of studied restraint. The Order of Canada is administered through an independent advisory council, and the government will rightly decline to comment on any nomination under consideration. It does not need to say a word. The Conservative Party, its own Quebec caucus, and the daily news cycle are doing the work for them. Sometimes the most effective political strategy is simply to stay out of the way.
It was not so long ago that Pierre Poilievre was described by seasoned Conservative strategists as one of the sharpest political operators the movement had produced. This episode invites a harder look at that assessment.
It has placed his Quebec MPs in the uncomfortable position of publicly distancing themselves from their own leader. It has given his detractors fresh ammunition at a moment when none of them needed any. It has reinforced, for voters already skeptical of Poilievre’s judgment, the impression that the Conservative leader is more interested in cultural provocation than in serious governance. And it has done all of this at the precise moment his caucus can least afford another defection to the other side.
The Order of Canada nomination was likely meant to be a cultural wedge. Instead, it has become a case study in the costs of playing to the gallery. Own goals in politics are rarely fatal. But they compound. A leader whose political instincts fail him on a file this predictable will struggle to project the kind of steady, inclusive judgment that governments are built on.
For Quebec, the verdict on this episode will not be complicated. The Conservative Party was already facing a structural deficit in the province. Episodes like this one do not create that deficit. They deepen it.
And they make the work of rebuilding that much harder for whoever eventually leads the effort.
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