For centuries, Canada’s identity was stitched together under borrowed banners, but the debate over a true national flag sparked some of the most defining moments in the country’s history. Releasing on Feb. 25, Flags of Canada by The Right Honourable Stephen J. Harper — an avid vexillologist and Canada’s 22nd prime minister — chronicles the political battles, cultural tensions and national aspirations that led to the adoption of the Maple Leaf flag on this day in 1965. Published by Sutherland House Books in association with the Royal Canadian Geographical Society for the flag’s 60th anniversary, Flags of Canada reveals how a symbol of unity emerged from one of Canada’s most polarizing debates.
World War II fundamentally altered Canada’s place in the world. It was not just that the country declared and pursued its own war effort. In a reversal of historical roles, it was Canada helping to save the United Kingdom during the Battle of Britain in 1940. That same year, Canada entered into a mutual defence agreement with the United States, which henceforth became its most critical ally. The implications of this new strategic positioning were not entirely understood at the time.
In any case, a new flag debate broke out almost as soon as the fighting ended. The groundwork was being laid during the war itself. As WWII progressed, the Canadian Red Ensign increasingly dislodged not only the Canadian Battle Flag, but also the Union Jack and other service ensigns, as the flag of the Canadian war effort and of Canadian nationhood generally. Canadian officials would invariably use the banner when they found themselves at allied meetings.
Shortly after the final surrender of the Axis powers in 1945, cabinet authorized the flying of the Canadian Red Ensign over all federal government buildings “until such time as action is taken by Parliament for the formal adoption of a national flag.”
While a few supporters of the Union Jack vehemently objected, even the opposition Conservatives overwhelmingly supported the decision. Indeed, they began to press Prime Minister King to make the Canadian Red Ensign the official national flag.
This time, King decided to be proactive. He launched a joint parliamentary committee to study the flag question. It received over 2,500 suggestions, more than ten times the number that had appeared in 1925. Union Jacks, stars, fleurs-de-lis, beavers, crowns, and/or crosses were contained in many of the submissions. However, maple leaves were far and away the dominant symbol proposed, being present in some 60 percent of designs.
This input seemed to confirm King’s instincts. He believed that the country was gravitating toward the Canadian Red Ensign, but that it wanted stronger, more immediately recognizable, Canadian symbolism. From behind the curtain, he pushed the committee toward his preference.
It would turn out to be a new Canadian Red Ensign with the coat of arms replaced by a single, large, gold maple leaf. Recall that similar designs had been mooted as far back as the 1890s. In this case, a very “leafy” version of the maple was proposed, which was both odd and unattractive.
Public opinion was evolving more quickly than the wily old prime minister realized. A grassroots campaign had emerged to advocate for an altogether different alternative: the proposal of the National Flag League. It was actually the project of two organizations, the largely Francophone Ligue du drapeau national and the mainly Anglophone Native Sons of Canada.
The National Flag League offered a clear rationale for its choice of colours. Red, it explained, was the traditional colour of British-Canadians, and white was that of French-Canadians. This seems far more likely than anything officials had admitted when they had pushed the combination back in 1921. It was a compelling, yet subtle way to reflect a two-nations heritage. The sole symbol on the banner was a single Canadian maple leaf in green. That colour was to represent the land, and, in any event, the coat of arms still sported green leaves.
Through 1946, the parliamentary committee moved toward consensus on the simplified Canadian Red Ensign. However, close to half the public submissions were supporting the National Flag League option. The federal government was then hit with a broadside. The Legislative Assembly of Quebec pre-emptively voted to reject any flag that included any sign of colonialism. It was a transparent attack on the inclusion of the Union Jack in the design.
King ultimately declined to move the committee’s recommendation forward. He sensed that public opinion was not merely divided, but that it risked becoming polarized. As he had done in 1925, the prime minister moved to end the parliamentary debate. While the debate would continue in the country, King would have nothing more to do with it.
Over time, a fascinating dynamic had unfolded around the Canadian Red Ensign. In the early 1900s, as Anglophones were subordinating it to the Union Jack, Francophones were prepared to support it. In the 1920s, with Anglophones raising its status, Francophones had concluded it could only be tolerated with the inclusion of equal French symbolism. And now, just as Anglophones were fully embracing it, Francophones deemed it unacceptable. This dynamic had prevented a national flag from emerging in Ottawa, yet it had led to consensus around a provincial flag in Quebec.
The alternative, a model based on purely Canadian symbolism, was just as far from consensus. But the National Flag League design had, with little high-profile backing, emerged as the single biggest challenger to the traditional patterns. It would also prove to be the unmistakeable forerunner of our eventual national flag.
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A key step in the final flag debate was undertaken before it truly began by people who really did not want it to happen. In 1957, the newly elected Conservative government of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker made significant changes to Canada’s coat of arms. For one thing, the Irish harp was given a simplified form. For another, the maple leaves were finally changed from green to red.
The decision had the effect of removing any ambiguity about Canada’s national colours. It was soon reflected in various flags and other insignia. For example, it has determined all versions of the Canadian flags of members of the royal family. They are essentially cloth versions of the shield, often with a personal mark or crest added. Of course, the change in the shield also necessitated further modification to the Canadian Red Ensign.
Meanwhile, the postwar years were witnessing profound shifts in Western societies. By the 1960s, wide gaps were evident in the worldview of those who had come of age before and during the war versus those who were younger. In Canada, these social changes were overlaid by unique dynamics among both the Anglophone and Francophone populations.
Among Anglophones, the decline of the connection to the United Kingdom was evident. The British Empire was dissolving, and the Commonwealth, while it remained an important global association, was simply not as relevant to political consciousness in Canada. At the same time, the new relationship with the United States created a mixed reaction. The American alliance gave English-Canadians their greatest level of national security ever. But this closeness also threatened their sense of separate identity in a way the British relationship never did.
For its part, French-Canadian life was undergoing some of the most radical social change in the world. Particularly in Quebec, Francophones were moving from one of the most traditionally pious peoples on the planet to one of the most thoroughly secularized. And French-Canadian identity in its heartland was rapidly morphing into explicit Quebec nationalism.
The new consciousness of Anglophones was bound to find expression in a renewed Canadian nationalism and a rekindled interest in national symbols such as the flag. The new nationalism of Francophones implied the potential risk of Quebec separatism. The Liberal Party, whose electoral fortunes depended on Quebec, was especially alert to that risk. In any case, both developments led the federal Liberal leader, Lester Pearson, to make the adoption of an official national flag a firm commitment as early as 1960.
The flag debate that followed Pearson’s election as prime minister was the shortest and the most intense in Canadian history. Increasing public discussion had begun to produce the normal flow of proposals. However, Pearson put the cat among the pigeons when, in May 1964, he produced his own preferred alternative. It was quickly, usually pejoratively, dubbed the Pearson Pennant.
Pearson’s flag was anything but strange. Its principal feature was the three-red-maple-leaves sprig from the coat of arms. The prime minister, in his quest for an exclusively Canadian design, had borrowed a simplified version of Duguid’s original Canadian Battle Flag. But Pearson believed that the symbol on a plain white background would appear too empty. He had thus chosen a variant created by Lieutenant Commander Alan Beddoe, whose blue sidebars were meant to reflect Canada’s “sea to sea” national motto.
The blue bars were controversial in more heraldically orthodox quarters. They were not the traditional “wavy lines” way of depicting water bodies (although Pearson’s intent was metaphoric, not geographic). More notably, they departed from the national colours. Of course, these had only been recently confirmed, whereas Pearson’s selection derived from both the British and French mother countries. It also helped that the blue detracted from the charge that the Pearson Pennant was a partisan Liberal banner.
The boldest part of Pearson’s proposal was his intention to push his flag through Parliament as a confidence measure. It was brash, given the nature of the issue alone. It was more so considering the reality that his government did not command a majority in the Commons. He was soon forced to drop the idea.
On the other side of the Commons, John Diefenbaker’s Conservatives engaged in ferocious opposition from the outset. The former prime minister had been a lifelong booster of the Canadian Red Ensign. He did indicate that he was open to simplifying it by replacing the shield with a single white fleur-de-lis. However, two-nations designs no longer had a strong following at either end of the linguistic divide. In the meantime, the Tories dug into a filibuster that kept Parliament sitting all summer without resolution.
In September, Pearson finally agreed to submit the question to a parliamentary committee. As in 1945–1946, this led to a flood of submissions that would eventually crest at nearly six thousand. Being the 1960s, they included both the absurdly abstract and the clearly comical. Still, on balance, the proposals displayed the same range and frequency of symbols as in the debate of two decades earlier.
Objective polling on the matter was scarce, but it is safe to say that the debate broke down into two broad camps: the traditionalists and the nationalists. To be clear, each side proclaimed its dedication both to time- honoured symbols and to patriotic values. But their emphases differed markedly.
The traditionalist camp was dominated by backers of the Canadian Red Ensign. It had had a following, generally a growing one, for almost a hundred years. Sentiment was strongest among war veterans, who viewed it as the flag they had fought under. But there was still a minority who favoured the Union Jack, especially among those who most keenly valued the British connection. They included recent immigrants from the United Kingdom and people who lived in areas of the country culturally closer to Britain, such as Newfoundland and Vancouver Island.
The nationalist camp was clearly larger, but it was also more diffuse and less intense in its views. That said, it seems there were two flags in that group that had significant followings. One was the Pearson Pennant. The other was based on a suggestion by historian George Stanley, dean of arts at the Royal Military College. Stanley proposed using that institution’s flag, retaining the red bars on each side, but replacing the Royal Military College emblem in the white centre with a single red maple leaf.
We do not know which of these new alternatives had more support. Nevertheless, there is ample reason to believe that the prime minister’s proposal was ahead. That was certainly true in the case of the parliamentary committee examining the various designs.
Once the Canadian Red Ensign had been voted down, the Conservative members of the committee preferred the blue-bar design. However, they secretly voted for the red-bar design to prevent a consensus around the prime minister’s flag. The Liberals naturally followed Pearson’s preference, but they privately decided that it would be seen as too partisan. They also voted for the Stanley-inspired option.
Politics being politics, while everybody preferred the blue-bars pennant, the red-bars alternative passed unanimously. The matter then returned to the Commons. There, Diefenbaker’s forces regrouped for another filibuster, demanding the matter go to referendum. With the debate becoming increasingly polarized, the Tories’ Quebec caucus broke with their leader in December and agreed to have the matter voted on through closure.
The rest, as they say, is history. The national flag — to be clear, the first official national flag of Canada — became law on February 15, 1965.
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