CBC firing Cherry?

Don Cherry reportedly won't have his contract with CBC renewed after the playoffs:

The Globe and Mail reports that the relationship between the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Coach's Corner host Don Cherry is so strained that they are preparing to sever it at the end of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Cherry told the Globe Wednesday that he hopes to remains on his intermission show with partner Ron MacLean, but was not sure which direction things would go. When asked whether the 70-year-old Canadian hockey icon will be on the CBC's payroll next year, spokeswoman Ruth Ellen Soles told the paper that the corporation had not reached a decision.
[...]
Official Languages Commissioner Dyane Adam announced that she was launching a formal investigation into whether anti-francophone comments from Cherry reflect a systemic failure by the CBC to respect the Official Languages Act.

Said federal cabinet minister Denis Coderre after the visor comment: "It's time for Don Cherry to stop pushing French-Canadians around."

In another segment earlier this season, Cherry commented on reports of drug use among junior players, alleging that only players in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League did drugs.

Last year, Cherry's on-air support for the war in Iraq was also considered provocative, and prompted the CBC to remove the segment from its website.

Cherry once landed in hot water for criticizing Olympic freestyle skier Jean-Luc Brassard, an Olympic and world champion whom he called "a French guy, some skier that nobody knows about." Cherry also got in trouble at Nagano for blasting Quebec in the wake of comments by Bloc Quebecois MPs that there were too many Canadian flags at various Olympic sites. [emphasis added]

I can understand French-Canadians getting upset about some of these comments, but is there another nation on earth where complaints about "too many flags at the Olympics" can actually be made without the complainant being laughed out of public life for good?

Posted by damian at April 29, 2004 06:16 AM