Don Cherry’s firing from Hockey Night in Canada on November 11th—after criticizing low poppy sales and calling for newcomers to honor veterans—exposed a media-politician alliance targeting conservative voices, despite his $3M salary and past controversies like the CBC’s disco welcome for Omar Cotter. Veteran Lee Humphrey reveals bureaucratic failures, including blocked crowdfunded food drives and delayed mental health care, where generals fear political fallout over troop support. The episode ties Cherry’s dismissal to "cancel culture," mocking Ron McLean’s forced apology as "gaslighting," while Alberta’s conscience-rights bill is dismissed as toothless, pitting faith-based medical objections against Charter freedoms. Ultimately, it frames veterans’ struggles and Cherry’s ouster as casualties of partisan media wars and performative virtue-signaling. [Automatically generated summary]
Don Cherry Fired for Remembrance Day Comments00:14:28
Hello my rebels.
Today I talk about Don Cherry being sacked by SportsNet, not after any genuine public demand.
The opposite really, a fake Twitter storm, led in fact by other journalists, including at the CBC, where Don Cherry was once the top rated and top paid talent.
I think the CBC hated him all those years, couldn't really express it, but now that he's with SportsNet, they just had at it.
And SportsNet bent the knee.
Very upsetting.
I'll go into the details and show just how outrageous it was.
Can I invite you to become a premium subscriber, though?
Go to premium.rebelnews.com.
And just eight bucks a month, you get access to the video version of this podcast and a couple other shows too.
That's premium.rebelnews.com.
Okay, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, it's Remembrance Day and Don Cherry was just fired for telling Canadians to wear a poppy.
It's November 11th and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carmen consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government.
But why not?
is because it's my bloody right to do so.
It's November 11th, which is Remembrance Day.
Later on the broadcast, I'll talk with my friend Lee Humphrey, a military veteran and an advocate for veterans.
And of course, I'll read the poem that I do every year, not in Flanders Fields, which is very touching, but something that I think is a little more painful, actually, a poem by Rudyard Kipling about how veterans are treated when they come back from the war.
It's called Tommy Atkins.
It was published more than a century ago, but it could have been written yesterday.
You know who loves the troops?
Don Cherry does.
He's the plain-spoken host of Hockey Night in Canada, or at least he was till today.
For years, he was the only conservative voice allowed on the CBC, other than Rex Murphy.
The CBC always hated Don Cherry for three reasons.
Like I say, he's conservative and not in a snobby, think-tanky professor kind of way, but in a way that connects with grassroots blue-collar guys, severely normal guys.
Second, he was more popular than literally anyone else at the CBC.
No one came close to his viewership.
I know it's shocking that more people don't want to watch Rosemary Barton go on platonic dates with Justin Trudeau, but it's true.
And the third reason is that Don Cherry was literally the only profitable thing at the CBC because of the first two points.
So the CBC made a massive miscalculation when they let Rogers outbid them for the NHL rights, the rights to hockey night in Canada, with a bid of more than $5 billion for a dozen years.
Rogers locked up the show.
Now they subleased some rights back to the CBC, but it's Rogers' show now.
Canadians don't much care which channel they watch as long as they're watching hockey, and they love Don Cherry as the color commentator.
I don't think ordinary Canadians obsess over Cherry's politics the way other journalists do.
Again, it's the jealousy and the political partisanship I referred to earlier.
The CBC humiliated Don Cherry by putting him on a seven-second delay as if he were some criminal who might blurt out some thought crime or something.
I don't know.
What a contrast to the heroes welcome the CBC gave to the terrorist Omar Cotter when they literally welcomed him with disco lights, music, and champagne.
Look at that.
Ovation for a murderer.
Oh, those women, they can't get enough of him.
Anyways, this weekend on Hockey Night in Canada, Don Cherry was frustrated with the fact that so few people wear poppies.
So he said this.
You know, I was talking to a veteran.
I said, I'm not going to run the poppy thing anymore because what's the sense?
I live in Mississauga.
Nobody wears, very few people wear a poppy.
Downtown Toronto, forget it, downtown Toronto, nobody wears a poppy.
And I'm not going to win.
He says, wait a minute.
How about running it for the people that buy them?
Now, you go to the small cities and you know, the roles on roles, you people loved, they come here, whatever it is, you love our way of life, you love our milk and honey.
At least you can pay a couple of bucks for poppies or something like that.
These guys pay for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada.
These guys paid the biggest price.
Anyhow, I'm going to run it again for you great people and good Canadians that bought a poppy.
I'm still going to run it anyhow.
Love you for it.
Tough to disagree with Don Cherry.
He wants more people to buy poppies and he wants people who come to Canada from other countries, newcomers, to show respect to the people who built Canada, made it the land of milk and honey, as he says.
And they made it that way by making enormous personal sacrifices in wars.
I got to say, it's tough to disagree with that.
Ron McLean certainly agreed.
He nodded along, gave it a thumbs up, and said, I'd love you for it afterwards.
Pretty normal Don Cherry type stuff.
In fact, more normal than he normally is with his crazy outfits, high-collared shirts, and he loves making up words and phrases.
I had never heard the word cuckaloo before.
Six more weeks of cold weather.
Now, I'd like to ask you with your left-wing pinko friends, what about the warming trend?
Like, where does that come now?
You know all about that.
Do you really want to get into that?
No, I'm just asking you that the cuckaloos are always saying the warming trend, we're freeing the debt.
The cuckaloos.
I think everyone knew what he meant.
Now, could Don Cherry have been a bit smoother as he expressed his point about new Canadians needing to study our customs?
Probably.
Maybe he wasn't as perfectly wordsmithed as some woke PR firm would be.
They would have been trans-friendly also.
Started out with some comment about being on sacred Aboriginal land or something, probably would have said, I'm him, her, they, them pronouns.
But no, Don's Don.
Pretty normal guy, which is why he's so popular.
And why so many second-rate journalists, especially other sports journalists, and especially journalists of the CBC, hate him because he's better and they hate that.
So there was this fake storm of protests.
They just faked it.
No one real was upset by this.
No normal people.
It was all his rivals or leftist politicians, people who had been holding a grudge for years.
And they started going nuts because Don Cherry is the last conservative in the mainstream culture.
So here's a Trudeau MP tweet.
He simply needs to leave hockey night.
It's time.
That's Peter Fragiscatos, who's a Liberal MP.
So now we have the Liberal government saying who should or shouldn't be on television.
Well, of course, it's Trudeau's Canada.
And really, we know where the Liberals stand on veterans already, don't we?
First of all, why are we still fighting against certain veterans groups in court?
Because they are asking for more than we are able to give right now.
Yeah, Mr. Frad Giscatos is fine working for a party leader who's dressed up in blackface so many times he's lost count, but he can't stand a conservative being on TV.
The CBC naturally led the war against Don Cherry.
They're finally free to hate him out loud as they did under their gritted teeth for decades.
They hated him for years at the CBC, but they couldn't attack him publicly.
He worked for the company.
He was their most popular broadcaster.
He paid all the bills.
But now that he works for SportsNet, 20 years of pent-up hatred came spilling out of the CBC.
It was amazing to watch the CBC.
If anyone actually watched the CBC anymore, I don't know.
On a Sunday night, I'm guessing maybe 50,000 people watch CBC's The National out of 35 million Canadians.
Here's why.
Get along with this woman, who I think is a weird bigot.
I don't even know what the word racialized means.
Do you mean visible minority?
I don't know.
And I noticed she isn't wearing a poppy while she's shouting at Don Cherry.
Take a look.
I don't need to be told by you that my poppy will represent my supportive vets.
I hated the way that he did that.
I thought that he was absolutely looking and pointing fingers at people of color, racialized communities, because he didn't see enough poppies.
So that translates into racialized communities not caring about this country.
I'm sorry, it was unacceptable.
I would love to see Don Cherry white.
Of course, you would, dear.
But we don't believe in censorship in Canada just because you're angry and call someone a racist who, by the way, didn't mention race at all.
And by the way, put on your poppy, you ingrate.
Well, Don Cherry didn't apologize.
He did not bend the knee.
Why should he?
He's 85.
He's almost 86.
He hasn't bent the knee to anyone in 85 years.
Why would he star now?
But the coward Ron McClain did.
Watch one more time.
Don Cherry's normal Don Cheriness as his sidekick.
Ron McClain, who was a millionaire because of Don Cherry.
Watch Ron closely this time.
You people loved you that come here, whatever it is.
You love our way of life.
You love our milk and honey.
At least you could pay a couple of bucks for poppies or something like that.
These guys pay for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada.
These guys paid the biggest price.
Anyhow, I'm going to run it again for you great people and good Canadians that bought a poppy.
I'm still going to run it anyhow.
Love you for it.
So if I'm counting right, there were five head nods.
One love you for it and one thumbs up there.
But look at Judas McClain the very next morning.
I wanted to address what happened last night on Hockey Night in Canada.
Don Cherry made remarks which were hurtful, discriminatory, which were flat out wrong.
We at SportsNet have apologized.
It certainly doesn't stand for what SportsNet or Rogers represents.
We know diversity is the strength of the country.
We see it in our travels with our show and with Hockey Night in Canada.
So I owe you an apology too.
That's the big thing that I want to emphasize.
I sat there, did not catch it, did not respond.
Catherine Denise, Titana First Nation, once said, in any wrongdoing, the real key is recognition and acknowledgement.
And I wanted to let you know that first, and then you work on the relationship so that it isn't a visit, so that something can be a unifying event.
Idle No More was a great lesson to all of us.
Last night was a really great lesson to Don and me.
We were wrong, and I sincerely apologize.
And I wanted to thank you for calling me and Don on that last night.
Hurtful, discriminatory, flat-out wrong?
How?
And stop lying.
You say you sat there and did not respond?
You didn't catch it?
You absolutely did respond, you liar.
Five nods, a thumbs up, and a love ya.
Why are you trying to gaslight us?
We saw what happened.
And you're invoking Aboriginal moral authority or whatever weirdness you're trying to do there.
Why not invoke Black Lives Matter, you woke weirdo, you betrayer of your best friend who made you a millionaire.
SportsNet called Cherry divisive and discriminatory.
Really?
I heard a guy encouraging all Canadians, old-timers and newcomers, to learn about our customs and buy poppies to show respect.
But this is SportsNet's version of taking a knee.
They worship wokeness.
And look at all the vultures.
Here's the once second highest paid CBC talent, Peter Mansbridge, making a false accusation against the once highest paid talent at the CBC.
The notion that Canada's veterans were all white is dangerously wrong and an insult to thousands, says Peter Mansbridge.
Yeah, Peter, who said anything about only white veterans?
What a cuckaloo, Mansbridge, not Cherry.
Cherry's the normal one.
Who asked you, Peter, is this some grudge against the guy who earned more money than you for decades?
All the people who had nothing to say about Justin Trudeau's blackface had a lot to say about Don Cherry.
Here's Bruce Arthur, always under Cherry's shadow as a sports reporter.
He called for Cherry to be fired.
But not for Trudeau to be fired.
Same guy, Bruce Arthur, because you see, he's so progressive.
He's so progressive.
Here's the liberal John Moore, who actually compared Don Cherry to a Nazi.
Do you see that Kristallnacht?
Kristallnacht, I don't know if you know Kristallnacht is when the Nazi riots torched synagogue smashed windows.
Here's a picture of Kristallnacht.
That's what John Moore said.
Don Cherry's comments were like.
And by today, this afternoon, Don Cherry was fired.
There actually was no public outrage.
Just 30 mean girls in the media and 30 Liberal Party censors.
Boy, the Liberals were out in force.
That's how it rolls in 2019.
You get what you get when you elect Justin Trudeau as prime minister.
Liberals Out In Force00:03:20
That's the culture.
On Remembrance Day, the number one Canadian defender of serving military and veterans is sacked as being divisive, while the blackfaced groper just laughs and laughs and cuts another check to the CBC.
What a disgrace.
But today isn't about the CBC or Sports Center Trudeau or even Don Cherry.
It's about our troops.
Completely forgotten in this hullabaloo.
Every year I read a poem by Rudyard Kipling, and I'll do it again today.
There's one line that always makes me lose my composure a little bit.
I'll see if I can read it through calmly today.
This is Tommy Atkins by Rudyard Kipling.
I went into a public house to get a pint of beer.
The public canny up and says, we serve no red coats here.
The girls behind the bar, they laughed and giggled fit to die.
I oust into the street again and to myself says I, oh, it's Tommy this and Tommy that and Tommy go away, but it's thank you, Mr. Atkins.
When the band begins to play, the band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play.
Oh, it's thank you, Mr. Atkins, when the band begins to play.
I went into a theater as sober as could be.
They gave a drunk civilian room, but hadn't none for me.
They sent me to the gallery or round the music halls, but when it comes to fighting, Lord, they'll shove me in the stalls for it's Tommy this and Tommy that and Tommy wait outside, but it's special train for Atkins when the trooper's on the tide.
The troop ship's on the tide, my boys, the troop ship's on the tide.
Oh, it's special train for Atkins when the trooper's on the tide.
Yes, making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep is cheaper than them uniforms and they're starvation cheap.
And hustling drunken soldiers when they're going large a bit is five times better business than parading in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this and Tommy that and Tommy out of your soul.
But it's thin red line of heroes when the drums begin to roll.
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll.
Oh, it's thin red line of heroes when the drums begin to roll.
We aren't no thin red heroes.
No, we are no blackguards too.
But single men in barracks, most remarkable like you.
And if sometimes our conduct isn't all your fancy paints, why single men in barracks don't grow into plaster saints.
Well, it's Tommy this and Tommy that and Tommy fall behind, but it's pleased to walk in front, sir, when there's trouble in the wind.
There's trouble in the wine, my boys, there's trouble in the wine.
Oh, it's pleased to walk in front, sir, when there's trouble in the wind.
You talk of better food for us and schools and fires and all.
We'll wait for extra rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess around about the cookroom slops, but prove it to our face.
The widow's uniform is not the soldier man's disgrace.
For it's Tommy this and Tommy that.
Chuck him out, the brute.
But it's savior of his country when the guns begin to shoot.
And it's Tommy this and Tommy that and anything you please.
And Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool.
You bet that Tommy sees.
Stay with us.
Lee Humphrey is next.
Welcome back.
Well, we're affectionate of our military here at Rebel News.
Veterans' Mental Health Care00:15:02
I don't think anyone who is on air has served, but we have lots of people who behind the scenes have helped.
We have an editor who is in the Navy, and of course, Sheila's daughter is in the cadets, so we have a lot of sympathy and support for our troops, especially for those who paid the price in ways we can never imagine.
And I think maybe it's because I myself have not served in the military that I feel an extra obligation to note Remembrance Day and to stand up for veterans, because given that I did not serve in the military, is it not the least I can do?
And that's how I feel.
I think even if I had served, perhaps I'd be even more supportive of veterans and the serving military.
I find it odious that rival networks such as the CBC State Broadcaster seem to actually put their sympathies for foreign enemies like Omar Cotter ahead of our soldiers and veterans.
And for one day a year they grit their teeth and pretend to give a damn.
I'm not doing this to virtue signal that we're morally superior to the CBC.
I'm lamenting the state of our entire country.
That what Rudyard Kipling wrote about in his poem, Tommy Atkins, a century ago, is unfortunately still true.
It's a, I don't know, it's, I suppose, part of that peace dividend is that you don't have to care about soldiers anymore, but that's wrong.
The peace dividend is precisely because the price soldiers have paid.
So those are my thoughts.
And joining us now is a man who has served more than most, our friend Lee Humphrey, who joins us now from Calgary Lee.
To see you again and I rely on you for information, for opinions and because you have the moral authority, having served our country in dangerous places, in the most dangerous places.
So thank you for your service.
You're very welcome.
Let's talk about the state of affairs, because I'm a critic of the Liberal government and I don't want my partisan bias to color my observations on the veterans file.
If there's something they are doing right, I'd like to acknowledge it.
In fact, it's important that I do, because I don't think veterans issue should be a conservative versus liberal issue.
I think every party should be wanting to outdo each other.
It should be unanimity.
Sometimes I talk about seeing eye dogs.
Who could be against that?
You know, widows and orphans.
I think veterans should be in that same category, that there's no daylight between any of the, there should be no daylight between any of the parties on how we treat veterans.
Is there anything I can point to and give the Liberals credit for?
It's a tough one.
I agree.
It should become, and I hope it does at some point become a nonpartisan issue because there are good people on both sides of the aisle, on every side of the aisle, that do want to support veterans.
The problem that we seem to run into is, regardless of the party in power, the bureaucracy within veterans affairs, the mentality within veterans affairs that puts an incredible onus on paperwork and red tape and pushes veterans to the brink of giving up just never seems to end.
So I'll certainly give the Prime Minister credit for saying the right things recently.
He clearly had his misstep when he said veterans were asking for more than they could afford.
But he has put forward the right policy platform to support veterans in many cases.
It's not been enacted the way we would like to see it enacted, certainly not with the speed that we'd like to see.
We haven't seen consistency at the ministerial level.
We've gone through five ministers and if rumors are correct, we'll have a sixth minister in a couple of weeks.
So he's saying the right things as the Conservatives did as well, but we're not seeing the follow-through that we'd like to see.
You know, this isn't just a problem for liberal parties.
I sometimes spend some time over in the United Kingdom and I see how they treat their vets too.
And they've had a conservative government in name at least for some years.
And over there, and I, you know, I'm sort of embarrassed actually that I know some British stats more than our own Conservative stats, but my buddy Tommy Robinson out there brought to my attention there was a hospital for vets specializing in PTSD.
And I didn't know just how widespread that was.
I mean, I suppose in World War I, it was called shell shock.
They didn't have the word PTSD.
But I didn't realize how widespread it was.
And even in the UK, under a Conservative government, they were shutting down the medical support for vets.
How is it on the medical side?
It's one thing to show moral support and have financial support, but PTSD or shell shock and the psychological trauma of these awful wars, the terrorist wars where children themselves are often the human bulletproof vet, like human shields.
Are we properly addressing the psychological damage done to our vets in Canada?
A mixed result, I'd say.
So, you know, more than a decade ago, the Conservatives opened the occupational stress injury clinics across Canada.
The Liberals put more money into it and offered up a couple of more clinics to expand the service capacity.
The challenge there is that it still isn't enough.
The wait times are still too long.
We had another suicide just last week from somebody suffering that wasn't getting help in a timely way.
We've seen the government drag their feet on recognizing the importance of service dogs and providing those to veterans for those that it helps.
We've seen them roll back the cannabis allotment a couple of years ago, saying that the veterans were getting too much cannabis for free for those that it helped.
So a mixed bag.
Again, on paper, they're opening the right clinics.
They're hiring specialists in this category.
They're certainly trying to destigmatize the scourge that is PTSD.
But the bureaucracy, again, gets in the way.
And you think about this.
You have a veteran and he phones for help and he starts getting told about the forms he's going to fill out and that he's got to see a doctor to get another form filled out and then they're going to process it and then he's going to get a call from a clinic in a few weeks, hopefully.
And the frustration builds.
So the person, because they have this mental injury, starts self-medicating while they're waiting for proper treatment.
And as they self-medicate, they run into the same problems that other people that become addicted to drugs and alcohol run into.
They have fights with their spouses.
They have fights with their employer and lose their job.
And the spiral begins.
And it's like an airplane whose wings have fallen off.
It doesn't take long before the spiral ends in a terrible crash.
And in many cases, that's a suicide.
So the Liberals in their platform, you know, said a very important thing, and I hope they live up to it, which is that they will ensure that a veteran can have up to $3,000 worth of treatment before they're diagnosed.
So if a veteran calls the helpline, they can immediately be transferred to a hotline where you have a mental health care professional at the other end that begins speaking to the veteran and helping them before we worry about the paperwork.
If that occurs, maybe, just maybe, we'll save a few lives here.
Wow, that's the way you described it there.
It makes it very real.
Now the military itself has always been a place of paperwork and forms in quadruplicate and things like that.
Is the way serving soldiers get their medical care and mental health care, is that any better than the way vets get it?
Like is there, I'm just curious because when you describe forms and bureaucracy, I thought, well, I think the military is a little bit like that on the inside, am I right?
Yeah, you know, and there's a huge debate around the idea of being fit for service.
Back in the early 90s, mid-90s, they came out with a term called universality of service, which meant each trade has medical criteria that makes you fit to serve, and you had to be deployable because the military was downsizing in huge, huge ways.
So they did not have places to hold injured soldiers for very long or trades to transfer them to where they wouldn't have to deploy.
So the idea behind it was the Army is expeditionary, the Army is deployable, and you must be fit to fight at all times.
And you can be injured for a short period of time, but we're not going to hang on to you for very long because we can't recruit a replacement until you're out of the system.
Within the community, you know, people recognize that it's important that if you can't deploy, that puts stress on other people that end up deploying more frequently, which puts more stress on their family, which puts more stress on them.
And often they leave the military or they break down.
So I was going to say, it made sense, but at the same time, when you go to war and suffer so many casualties, you need to take care of those people.
And the best way to take care of them is within the military community.
So, you know, I think they're starting to recognize and understand there needs to be, it can't be black and white.
There needs to be flexibility until we get through this period of time where we had a surge of casualties.
And we need to take care of those folks and transition them either back into other military trades or into the civilian world in a way that's acceptable to them.
You know, my father is a retired doctor, and I remember as a kid, he would say that there were some patients who went to the front of the line.
And prisoners were actually one example of people who went, they had a special payment to go to the front of the line for medical care.
I found that odd.
And another example was soldiers.
And that makes a lot of sense.
You don't want a soldier languishing for six months in a waiting line.
He has to be, like you say, ready to roll.
Now, that's my memory from what my retired doctor dad told me 30 years ago.
Is it the same way now?
Do I know prisoners still go to the front of the line?
Do soldiers go to the front of the line for health care?
Serving soldiers do get MRIs, CT scans, et cetera, purchased so that they can see specialists more quickly because they're getting paid whether they're functional or not.
So the government, and it's a tiny military.
The idea was to shrink the military to the smallest possible size and make everybody deployable and fit And ready to roll at all times so that you didn't have a lot of excess fat to trim once the cuts had been done.
So they do still do that, and they do still get their medical care far quicker than the average citizen simply because the government's paying for their services and they want them to be ready to go.
That does not apply to veterans.
Got it.
And does that apply to mental health as well?
Or it does, eh?
If you're serving, it applies to mental health, but there is a limit in the sense that the military hires mental health care professionals.
And typically these mental health care professionals share their duties with other hospitals, with clinics, with their own private practice.
So there's only so many of them, and they need a special level of training to deal with military mental health because it is, trauma is trauma, but there's a military component and a military ideology and a military culture that has to be understood by those care professionals or they simply won't be accepted.
Geez.
I tell you, I wish that you were somehow involved in figuring out the system on the inside.
Obviously, you're a critic of Trudeau just like I am, and you would never be brought in.
I just wish there were someone who had your knowledge of the lay of the land.
I mean, I'm sure that the liberals would say they do have plenty of experts, but they don't seem to be getting it done.
Can I ask you about a different thing besides mental health and physical health, though?
Embarrassing the Government Payes a Heavy Price00:04:55
I remember a couple years ago, someone at CFB Borden sent me the base newsletter.
So this was the official newspaper published by the base.
It wasn't like some dissident pamphlet.
This was the official newspaper in both languages for the base.
And it talked about Christmas hampers, although they banned the word Christmas.
They didn't use the word Christmas in it.
They called it holiday something, something.
And it sounded like a fun Christmas tradition until when I read it more carefully, what they were saying is that there were people on the base who they needed food bank food.
Like soldiers and their families on the base needed food.
This wasn't for like the surrounding communities.
This was for serving soldiers on the base.
And we saw that and we crowdfunded, I think it was about 15 grand, and we went to give the check to the food hamper program and they refused it.
And you know this because you helped us find a veterans charity in the end.
I'm worried that the attitude in the military, because we didn't access information about that afterwards, and we found that the number one priority in the Defense Department was don't embarrass the minister.
Cover things like that up.
They thought our $15,000 gift, they hated the fact that we're conservative, they're liberal, and it made the minister look bad.
We had the actual documents saying don't take the money, block them.
How did this, you know, how was this published in the first place?
So I sense that rather than fixing some of these problems, the liberal bureaucracy, and there were dozens of people involved in those email exchanges.
I was shocked by how many people were working against this food hamper project.
I sense that it's all about protect the leadership, protect the brass, protect Trudeau and Harjit Sajjan, even if it means turning down help for vets or serving soldiers in that case.
I don't know.
I just, I got a taste of the Kafka-esque bureaucracy just when we were trying to do a simple thing, like dropping off a check.
It was really crazy.
You know, the military is, it's an interesting place.
In the mid-90s, we were getting lots of notifications coming out saying, you know, because of all the pay freezes that we've had, please let soldiers off early so they can go and get a second job and support themselves.
And please have base food drives and things like that during special occasions.
And if, you know, you can give a guy an extra day off on a Monday once a month or something, please do so so that he can work a second job.
And the military didn't seem to mind it because the idea was to embarrass the government and to start treating soldiers with the respect and paying them what they were due.
But there was some painful lessons that came from that.
And a lot of senior leaders found themselves not promoted, disappearing, retiring.
And those lessons aren't forgotten.
Embarrassing the government is a short-term solution.
It's like when you get a young lieutenant and you have to train him as a senior NCO.
You can take two routes.
You can embarrass him every day because it's very easy with a young lieutenant, or you can teach him how to lead men because someday he is going to be a senior leader.
And if you go the route of embarrassment, well, that's fine for about four to six years.
And then suddenly he's a major and you're still a warrant officer or a sergeant, and he's got some severe power over your future.
So again, it's a short-term solution.
And the lesson was not lost on the military that if you embarrass the government, you will pay a heavy price for that.
So now what you see is a very risk-adverse senior leadership.
Generals, colonels, they are all extremely risk-adverse.
They are well informed in political circles and how to deal with the politics and the bureaucracy of the DD civilian employees that actually run the place.
And they know how the game is played.
They know how they get to the top.
And they know what to do and what not to do.
So they have their local food drives to make sure soldiers don't go hungry over the holidays.
And they do quietly let people have second jobs and take the time they need to be with their families.
Civil Liberties vs Authoritarianism00:05:08
But they don't publicize it a whole lot and they avoid scrutiny like that and they avoid embarrassment at the political level at all costs.
I get it.
I understand that.
It makes sense the way you describe it like that.
I just think it's a shame.
I mean, it would have been a one-day thing and the only people who would have seen it would be our own viewers who would have felt good about their donation.
It's very frustrating to me, but the way you describe it makes perfect sense.
Well, listen, we're being a little bit political because we are by nature a political show, and I know you yourself have been involved with the Conservative Party, but it is my true hope that in time these issues will become nonpartisan and that parties will seek to outdo each other as they do on some other issues.
Everyone trying to outbid the other for, you know, I mean, I remember in the 2015 election, you had Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau saying, I'll give the CBC $1.3 billion, or I'll give them $1.5 billion.
They were trying to outdo each other.
I only wish that they had that kind of one-upmanship when it came to taking care of our serving military and our retired vets, some of whom are still injured.
Last word to you, my friend.
I'm sorry, I'm a little bit sad listening to what you're saying and thinking about things, but maybe Remembrance Day is a good time to think about these.
But why don't you leave us with some thoughts?
What do you think on this latest remembrance day?
Well, you know, I think about the same things I think about pretty much every year.
My colleagues, my friends, the men and women I served with that didn't come home, all those that gave for us.
They gave so much.
The families that suffered endlessly.
That's what I think about when I'm standing in the cold outside for 30 or 40 minutes or however long the ceremony lasts.
I go to one in Calgary that avoids politicians like the plague, which is really great.
And I'll tell you, I am a conservative.
I have founded a Veterans for the Conservative Party page.
I've advocated for the Conservatives.
I've wanted to run for them.
But if Trudeau called tomorrow, if his minister called, if somebody in the bureaucracy called, I'd be there in a heartbeat and I'd do it for free if they asked my opinion.
Because I don't care what party solves this problem.
I really don't.
All I care about is my brothers and sisters that still serve and my fellow veterans.
If I could help one, I'd become a liberal tomorrow.
Well, you know, that's a really beautiful note to end on, Lee.
It's great to have you on the show and great to hear your voice always.
You stand for what's right and you stand for remembering those who served and those who paid the price.
Nice to see you again, my friend.
Thank you for being with us today.
Thanks for highlighting this, Ezra.
It's so important.
All right, there you have it.
Lee Humphrey, a good friend of ours and a friend who has served our country in many ways.
Stay with us.
more ahead welcome back on my monologue friday about alberta protecting conscience rights of physicians donna writes This bill is needed.
Doctors should not be forced to perform abortions if it is against their faith.
There are many doctors who do not share these beliefs, and they will be happy to perform these services for the women who want them.
Yeah, this bill actually doesn't even change anything.
As I showed you, Section 2A of our Charter of Rights, the Fundamental Freedom Section, the very first freedom is freedom of belief and conscience.
It just shows how when civil libertarians want to be authoritarians, I think their authoritarian instinct wins out.
All these liberal journalists who really want the power to force people to do what they want to do.
Liz writes, that we have to have a conversation about doctors' right to not perform something that is against their morality or religious beliefs is really kind of embarrassing for a civilized country like Canada.
Yeah, I keep saying, where are the civil liberties groups?
When was the last time you saw the Canadian Civil Liberties Association actually stand up for a real civil liberty?
Sam writes, a doctor who performs abortion or euthanasia is not a doctor I want treating me.
Well, I mean, and that's the thing.
Abortion is one thing.
But assisted suicide, how is that even something that a doctor would do?
The Hippocratic Oath, which is millennia old, is do no harm.
I have no idea to this day how a doctor can do that.
I mean, abortion is, we all know the debortion debate very well, but it's novel, the concept of a doctor helping to kill someone who's born already.
That's even more unfathomable.
Support Don Cherry Petition00:01:15
Well, that's our show today.
I'm upset about Don Cherry being fired because it's the bullying culture, the cancel culture, because it was so obviously a fake manufactured by the media party, and because he was the last great conservative voice in the pop culture.
I think we're going to see a lot more of this in the months and years ahead.
By the way, we set up a petition before Don Cherry was fired called supportdoncerry.com, and we were going to send it to SportsNet, thinking perhaps he would be spared, but he was fired a couple hours after we launched the petition.
We're going to do it anyways.
We're going to give a copy of the petition to Don Cherry.
We're going to give a copy to Judas Ron McLean.
We're going to give a copy to SportsNet to let them know that people do not agree with their woke censorship.
And I, frankly, hope that SportsNet loses a lot of money on this.
Reminds me of Gillette when they came up with TV ads that attacked men for being male and called them toxic masculinity.
I think SportsNet did the same thing today.
They listened to the shrill voices of the left instead of severely normal Canadians.