Whether you are a newcomer, or a member of a visible minority living in Canada, there’s a reasonable chance you or a family member, will one day be subjected to a random interrogation about your “cultural fit,” contribution, or even appearance — and not necessarily by a fellow citizen with more social cachet than you.

Such confrontations are easily found on social media these days. They can happen to anyone, anywhere: at a Lethbridge, Alta. Denny's, in a Richmond, B.C. parking lot, or in Jagmeet Singh’s case, outside a Montreal street market where the NDP leader and his wife were strolling recently.

Responding to these comments — usually streaming with profanity, and "go back to where you came from’s” — isn't always advisable. That tends to only fuel the situation while also tacitly acknowledging a social troll’s right to police “Canadian values.”

So one of the strategies people of colour learn early on is how to duck, deflect and defuse. It’s racism rope-a-dope 101, and it’s effective when being cornered by someone desperately seeking an altercation.

But sometimes you have little choice but to square up, especially when the volley is thrown by someone incentivized by one of Canada’s major media companies to play to the mob and who relishes any chance to punch down at his targets.

For too long that has been Don Cherry’s schtick. Rogers Sportsnet’s rock ’em sock ’em star of Coach’s Corner went on yet another hateful and misinformed bender on his national telecast Saturday night. This time, his target wasn’t climate activists, visor-wearing Europeans, socialists or turbaned Sikh veterans fighting for admission to a Royal Canadian Legion, but rather ungrateful immigrants not wearing poppies (or paying for them) in honour of Canadian soldiers who have “provided” the freedoms they enjoy.

“You people love, that come here, whatever it is, you love our way of life, you love our milk and honey, at least you can pay a couple bucks for a poppy or something like that,” said Cherry, a former hockey coach turned wealthy celebrity who still acts the part of a blue collar man-of-the-people on TV.

“These guys paid for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada; these guys paid the biggest price,” he steamed on, as his handler and straight-man, Ron MacLean, sat next to him in feeble silence.

Political correctness aside, the problem with the segment is that Cherry is just dead wrong. He is spewing hate and spreading misinformation on Hockey Night in Canada about the lack of contributions made by those he refers to as “you people,” and on a platform that reaches millions. His ignorant commentary insulted the legacies of countless veterans from non-Western countries — including India and Pakistan, from where many of Canada’s immigrants today hail — who fought in the First World War and Second World War to protect the bedrock of freedoms enshrined across the British Commonwealth — including in this country.

The facts are indisputable, but, unfortunately, in Canada’s eurocentric history curriculums, these acknowledgements are also not so easy to come by. In the First World War, Canada’s Expeditionary Force lost 61,000 men who made the ultimate sacrifice. But the dominion or colonial army that made the greatest contribution wasn’t from Canada — neither was it from Australia, New Zealand, nor South Africa. It was from India.

The Indian Army provided 1.4 million personnel for the Allied war effort, more than all of the dominions combined. And the Indian Army lost more soldiers (74,000), including thousands who died on the Western Front, again more than Canada or the other dominion forces.

But due to the race politics of a century ago, the sacrifices of Indian combatants, half of whom were predominantly Sikh, and Muslim soldiers from the Punjab region, were airbrushed from most Western textbooks. Sadly, they were also omitted from Indian texts, given these soldiers fought on behalf of the Crown prior to independence. And so, for the past century, the stories of their gallantry have remained trapped in a historical no-man’s land between East and West.

Lost within this omission are numerous collaborations between Canadian troops and the Indian Army, including at the infamous Second Battle of Ypres in May 1915, where Canada’s volunteer army of “lumberjacks and farmers” endured their initiation to the war, their baptism by fire. Canada’s First Division and the Indian Army’s Lahore Division fought arm-in-arm to thwart the German offensive at this historic battle where Canadian surgeon John McCrae penned In Flanders Fields.

If Cherry truly wants to preserve the sanctity of the poppy, he should learn about how diverse troops fought side-by-side at Ypres, where the story of the poppy was born. This group includes Canadian, Indian, Moroccan, Algerian, French, Irish and British forces. To counter the German offensive, Punjabi soldiers from the Ferozepur and Jalandhar Brigades marched 55 kilometres through hellfire from their post at Neuve Chapelle, France, to Ypres, Belgium, to come to the aid of the Canadians.

It was on those battlefields, pitted by shelling and with lingering vapours of poison chlorine gas, that John McCrae’s poppies impossibly speckled the eerie moonscape. The Indian troops were a key contingent among McCrae’s faceless and devoted soldiers, just beyond the edges of his poem, who would take up “the torch” from the “failing hands” of our Canadian troops, and with it, our “quarrel with the foe.”

This is the other half of the story of the poppy. But it’s unlikely Don Cherry, nor many Canadians, for that matter, know this omitted half. It’s a fragment of history — one that strengthens our social bonds across communities in multicultural Canada — that still, unfortunately, gets confined to the footnotes.

Don Cherry has, in his own clumsy way, revealed how fragile our social fabric can be, when people we live among, and share our lives with, are not reflected in our history books.

It’s something that Canadian curriculums have sought to rectify in recent years through sidebars in texts that highlight the contributions of diverse Canadians and our Indigenous communities, yet much work remains to be done.

In Vancouver, community historical organizations such as Indus Media, for example, have worked in collaboration with Simon Fraser University and the University College of the Fraser Valley, to publish Duty, Honour, and Izzat, a text revealing the shared history of the Indian Army and the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the First World War. It has, this past year, been added by the Surrey and Abbotsford, B.C. school districts to their list of approved learning resources.

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Today, as veterans from various ethnic communities gather at cenotaphs to honour those who fought on behalf of Don Cherry’s freedom to rail at visible minorities and immigrants, our national game of hockey finds itself at a crossroads. Minor hockey enrollment in different regions of the country is either declining or flat, the costs to play are rising, and the game has been glacially slow at reaching out to new audiences.

But the NHL and Rogers Sportsnet know this score and so they both issued apologies for Cherry’s comments. But if the league and the broadcaster are truly sincere, they need to go a step further. They should ensure Cherry invests his next Coach’s Corner in honouring all of the soldiers who fought on behalf of the Allies — including the previous generations of “you people” — that he, in his ignorance, delighted in slandering.

That would be true to the message of courage and unity the poppy symbolizes.

Correction - Nov. 12, 2019: This article was edited from a previous version that misspelled John McCrae’s surname.

Jagdeesh Mann is a media professional and journalist based in Vancouver. Follow him on Twitter @JagdeeshMann.

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