PQ language critic Pierre Curzi and Hockey Night in Canada commentator Don Cherry would probably get along quite famously if they could understand a word each other was saying.
Curzi's much-publicized lamenting of the lack of Francophone players on the Montreal Canadiens has a lot in common with Cherry's oft-repeated screed about Europeans taking NHL jobs from "good Canadian boys," especially on Cherry's beloved Toronto Maple Leafs.
To put it politely, Curzi and Cherry are both old school patriots who miss the days when they could easily and profoundly identify with the representatives of what they each consider to be a treasured cultural institution.
But while Cherry's expressions of scorn are largely limited to deliberately mispronouncing French-Canadian and European names, Curzi is over the top in his antipathy towards English Canada and Anglophones.
This is a guy who not only believes the Montreal Canadiens roster is a federalist plot, but who endorsed a petition opposing ex-Beatle Paul McCartney's performance on the Plains of Abraham and has openly mused about stripping English-speaking West Islanders of the right to vote in an independent Quebec.
Canadiens fans of all cultural stripes would love to see the best Quebec-born players on the Montreal roster, but that scenario went by the wayside more than four decades ago with expansion and the introduction of the amateur draft.
Pierre Curzi needs to be a little more selective in his conspiracy theories and a lot more subtle in his approach, and the fact that he could take subtlety lessons from Don Cherry is a measure of how far he has to go.
