Why Don Cherry is the Greatest Canadian Who Ever Lived

CBC TV has offered a list of the top ten Canadians of all time, as decided by Internet poll. Over the upcoming season the list will be gradually narrowed, until at last the greatest Canadian of all time will emerge.

Here's the starting list:

* Tommy Douglas
* Wayne Gretzky
* Don Cherry
* Sir John A. Macdonald
* Terry Fox
* Dr. Frederick Banting
* Lester Pearson
* Alexander Graham Bell
* Dr. David Suzuki
* Pierre Trudeau

Inevitably--and happily, for CBC--the list has been controversial. Everyone objects.

Me too, of course. With all due respect, I cannot see Tommy Douglas or David Suzuki. I ran the list by non-Canadians of my acquaintance; none had heard of them. Douglas never even rose to the top of his profession.

Others object to Don Cherry. Funny. He's the one who struck me as most clearly belonging there.
Here's my thinking:

1. You cannot be truly great unless you are self-made, self-defined. If you do not rule yourself, you rule nothing.

2. Anyone who owes their greatness largely to office is less great. They may have merely had greatness thrust upon them.

3. Anyone who owes their greatness to privileged birth is less great. They started on second base.

4. Anyone who has not faced and overcome significant adversity is less great. They may only have been lucky.

5. To be a great Canadian, you should be somehow special to Canada. You should reflect or speak to the Canadian soul. To be, say, the "first Canadian" to do something is meaningless.

Most on the CBC list are surely still great by these criteria; but the greatest? Only Don Cherry seems to me to perfectly fit the bill. Cherry was not born to privilege; he has defined himself, has succeeded in widely differing roles, has overcome a career setback (losing the coaching job in Boston), and he surely speaks to something in the average Canadian.

Canadians think of themselves as quiet, modest, conformist, polite. Don Cherry seems to violate this mold. But in fact, when I think of other great Canadians who fit my criteria, they all seem to defy this type. In fact, they are, like Cherry, generally boisterous, roughhewn, and eccentric. Is this, perhaps, the real, unacknowledged, Canadian character?

Consider this list, presented not in any particular order. Perhaps it is a list of real Canadian heroes. Perhaps it is a list of Canadian anti-heroes. You decide.

1. Eddie Shack. Anyone with Gretzky's talent can be great. Eddie Shack did it without talent.

2. John George Diefenbaker. Not even his own party seemed to want him to be Prime Minister. His views were radically different from those that ruled the Conservative party of his day: in some ways, Margaret Thatcher was really a Diefenbaker Conservative. Dief overcame much adversity: he lost his first wife, and his first several tries for public office. He has left a deep impression: no prime minister save Trudeau is so well remembered, so loved or hated.

3. Robert W. Service. Ignored or scorned as an embarrassment by "sophisticated" Canadians, Service is the most successful poet who ever lived. Keith Spicer once said Canada, to become a nation, needed to be defined by poetry. At your Service: he invented the North. Considered rough and uncouth even in his own day, he struck a chord with ordinary Canadians. And he did it on his own: he wandered the country destitute for some years.

4. William Kurelek. Here too is a self-made man: surviving a poor and abusive childhood and crippling depression, Kurelek invented himself as an artist, following no school nor established style. His style is childlike, rough, often falsely called primitive. His political and religious views were strongly held and unfashionable. He sanctified the Canadian landscape and daily Canadian life.

5. Gordon Sinclair. Another self-made man. Sinclair said what he believed, regardless of the consequences. His reporting of the Second World War made him persona non grata with the Canadian brass. He established something of a Canadian tradition of the radio curmudgeon.

6. Ed Mirvish. Not the richest man in Canada, but unique, irreplaceable, boisterous and roughhewn. Toronto would be a very different place without Ed Mirvish.

Don't we begin by now to see a definite type?

7. Johnny Wayne. I can hear the groans. The official view of Wayne today seems to be "too corny for words."

Never mind. "Sophisticates" of all nations are embarrassed by just what is unique in their culture. They want to be like everyone else.

He was an odd mix: very literate, even intellectual, but never above a cheap gag. Frank Schuster, his partner, was more the standard Canadian model of the standard Canadian; but Johnny Wayne was the one who drew your eye.

Nobody was ever bigger in Canadian entertainment.

Here are a few more examples of the type: Real Caouette, Camillien Houde, Jean Drapeau, Ma Murray, Amor de Cosmos, Richard J. Needham, William Lyon Mackenzie, Irving Layton, Jim Carey, Stompin' Tom Connors, Ben Weider, John Robert Colombo, Charlotte Whitton.

Not a lot of shrinking violets there.

Now let's look at the feminine form of the archetype:

8. Lucy Maud Montgomery. The unacknowledged founder of Canadian literature. Almost everything written or even filmed in Canada since has been annotation on Anne of Green Gables. I have little impression of Montgomery's own personality; I take it as expressed in her character Anne. And Anne is the female Don Cherry. Anne knows adversity, and triumphs by the force of personality. Rough-hewn, outspoken, and self-invented. She is, in short, a Canadian.

And Montgomery is our Shakespeare, our Moliere. One consequence is the great Canadian strength in children's literature.

9. Celine Dion. Again, I can hear the groans. Of course, the average Canadian "sophisticate" is embarrassed by her. But she has to be on the list: she is probably the most famous Canadian, in world terms, of all time. She too came from nowhere in social and financial terms; not even blessed, as are so many current "divas," with looks. She is not outspoken in the way some of the male figures on this list are, but she does seem to be her own woman.

10. Kateri Tekakwitha. Perhaps not a familiar name to all Canadians, but one engraved deep in the heart of Canadian Catholics. Leonard Cohen saw her as archetype of Canadian spirituality. And that is, in the end, the greatest of greatnesses. Blessed Kateri too was a determined non-conformist in her Mohawk milieu. No timid soul.

How to account for the variance between this list and the official “modest Canadian” type?

I think it may be a question of class: my criteria have naturally favoured the working class; I think the official view favours the Canadian upper class.

And it says something about Canada that the two classes are so different. They would not be, say, in Korea or in the US. Canada, in the end, is, like Europe, a very class-conscious place.

Canada has always been a bit of a struggle between the Family Compact and the Clear Grits, between Citadel clique and Patriotes.

The CBC list is mostly the Family Compact list. Mine, although some are nominally Tories, is mostly a list of Clear Grits.