Pole Position

In 2015, I curated a small display at the Canadian Museum of History to mark the Canadian flag’s fiftieth birthday on February 15. It featured recently rediscovered cardboard maquettes from the final days of the parliamentary flag committee’s deliberations in 1964. Transferred to the Human History Division of the National Museum in 1966, these preliminary models resurfaced in storage only in early 2014. Ensuring that they were exhibited in conjunction with the anniversary became — for this vexillologist turned curator — a passion project.

In the early 2010s, academics and pundits warned that federal heritage institutions risked becoming propagandists of a triumphalist version of Canada’s past that privileged “the military and the monarchy.” In this context, my colleagues and I anticipated that some suspicious visitors might dismiss a small exhibit on a patriotic topic as just another example of creeping “Harper History.” We were not prepared for the allegation that pressure from on high had kept our modest commemoration — well, modest. In the Globe and Mail, Roy MacGregor cited the museum’s display as evidence of the Conservative government’s “embarrassing” and “pathetic” neglect of the flag’s golden anniversary. Stephen Harper, he insinuated, could not bear to give Lester B. Pearson his due.

What a difference ten years makes. As the national flag of Canada nears senior-citizen status, it has graced the backpacks of countless world travellers, flown millions of kilometres aboard the International Space Station, and endured populist “appropriation” by the Freedom Convoy of 2022. And today it seems to be enjoying cross-partisan redemption as a symbol of patriotic resistance to Donald Trump’s tariffs and annexationist sabre-rattling. Just before the flag’s sixtieth birthday, five former prime ministers publicly called upon Canadians to fly their colours proudly — a rare show of common cause.

A history of the flag and its precursors by one of those former prime ministers will, no doubt, be read as an artifact of the current moment. Its author, it appears, is not so indifferent to the emblem and its origins as his critics supposed in 2015. Harper’s Flags of Canada is a brief but interesting read, enhanced by Greg Stoicoiu’s engaging illustrations of historical standards.

Harper delves into the distant past to find the current flag’s antecedents. In doing so, he acknowledges that national flags as we understand them did not exist in the first years of colonization, even as he tries to make the case that the Pavillon blanc was New France’s national emblem.

Most of Canada’s early flags served specific functions rather than being multi-purpose symbols of identity; military, merchant, and civil ensigns in the age of sail and steam may have foreshadowed the widespread use of national flags, but purists bristled at seeing them flown on land. The Canadian Red Ensign, approved in 1892 as the flag of the merchant marine and the favoured banner of 1960s empire nostalgists, was indeed, as Harper notes, a nationalist rather than an imperialist emblem before the First World War. However, its imperialist opponents, who favoured the Union Jack, invoked protocol as often as sentiment. To them, it was inappropriate to display a seafaring ensign on schools, post offices, and the Parliament Buildings.

Although the Red Ensign and the Pavillon blanc were never intended to be modern national flags, they left what Harper suggests is a permanent legacy. Here he gives credence to the old legend that the white and red mantling of the 1921 coat of arms of Canada determined our official national colours. It’s a nice story but one for which the evidence is slim. Eugène Fiset, the deputy defence minister, did suggest red and white as Canada’s livery in 1919, but it was Colonel Archer Fortescue Duguid who concocted the mantling story to justify his design for the Second World War Canadian Army battle flag. There is no necessary connection between mantling — the cascade of cloth that shrouds the helmet and shield of a coat of arms — and national colours. The mantling of the Royal Arms of Sweden, for example, is purple and ermine, but if these are the Swedish national colours, no one has thought to inform IKEA.

Nevertheless, Duguid’s confidence convinced many in government; his notion that red and white were sanctified colours became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Harper is generous in his assessment of the red and white flag as adopted, defending it against the accusation that it is merely an iconic logo rather than a historically inspired emblem. But his treatment of the long and bitter Great Flag Debate is short. He does not dwell on the behind-the-scenes intrigue of the committee deliberations; to be fair, that story has been well told elsewhere. Nor does he examine the thousands of designs that everyday Canadians submitted for consideration. These are fascinating evidence of diverse nationalisms at mid-century, but they were never really contenders.

While Harper is pleased with the final product, he does take Pearson’s government to task for failing to give the Red Ensign some subsidiary official status, perhaps to be flown instead of the Union Jack to symbolize the Commonwealth connection. Guidelines still limit the Union Jack’s formal display to three days a year — Victoria Day, Commonwealth Day, and the anniversary of the Statute of Westminster — and then only on military bases and on federal buildings endowed with a second flagpole. Would retaining the Red Ensign for this limited purpose have brought its most ardent partisans into the Maple Leaf fold? (The Union Jack does fly regularly over some provincial properties, such as the Alberta Legislature Building in Edmonton.)

In fact, the first Maple Leaf flags saluted their predecessor, albeit subtly. My 2015 display included the cardboard maquette sent to the Montreal manufacturer Bruck Mills as the pattern for some early fabric prototypes. A pencil note on the back requested that the red dye match the Canadian Red Ensign. Although the hue has evolved since, at the outset the shade was an understated olive branch to ensign devotees. When the flag turned fifty, some commentators still fretted that the Tories had only begrudgingly accepted it. A generally conciliatory history of the flag at sixty by a former Conservative prime minister suggests that it has come of age, and the partisan acrimony of the 1964 debate might finally be behind us.