Remembering the birth of our flag - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

It came as something of a surprise the other day when I opened a historical magazine I read and saw that this Saturday marks the 60th anniversary of the unveiling of our Canadian maple leaf flag.

 

I remember going outside that day, 60 years ago, to have the flag raised on our school’s flagpole for the first time. Those of us old enough to remember know that the new flag came at the end of a long debate. Our Prime Minister, Lester B. Pearson, led a minority government, but was a Canadian nationalist before it was fashionable. He was Prime Minister when we got our own flag and when Canada hosted its 100th birthday in 1967, and hosted Expo ’67 in Montreal.

 

But it was the flag debate I remember particularly. Pearson was opposed by John Diefenbaker, who was leader of the Progressive Conservative Party and had been Prime Minister earlier. Diefenbaker was a traditionalist who felt the old red ensign flag was fine for Canada with its ties to the union jack in one corner.

 

The flag we now wave was not Pearson’s first choice. He originally envisioned a flag with a branch of three maple leaves in the middle with two bands of blue on the edge, representing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

 

The debate fluctuated back and forth for months. Eventually other proposals were considered. Finally, in something of a compromise, the current flag was proposed by historian George Stanley, and the minority government supported it and managed to get enough votes to have it adopted after weeks of heated debate.

 

As a teenager, I remember the pride I felt as the new flag was run up the flagpole that day, Feb. 15, 1965. I’m not sure about other students, but I was a young nationalist. I remember, too, refusing to rise when the principal played “God Save the Queen”, at the time still our national anthem, to start off the school day. It was 1980 under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau that “O Canada” became our national anthem, 100 years after it was first sung in 1880.

 

Despite my joy on the adoption of the new flag, the feeling was far from unanimous. The Royal Canadian Legion was opposed, arguing two generations of young Canadians fought under the red ensign and Union Jack. It took years before the Legion became comfortable with the new flag.

 

That was the one thing, for me, that brought humour to the situation when people who opposed laws that encouraged us to get the vaccine to prevent COVID-19 infection flew the maple leaf flag. Vaccine opponents west of Blyth nailed the maple leaf flags to their fence posts, claiming they were the true patriots. 

 

I couldn’t help wondering if they realized that people with similar political views had opposed the same flag a half-century earlier.
It’s hard for younger Canadians to realize how much the country changed in the late 1960s as Canada marked its centennial with parades in pretty well every community and people organized trips to Expo ’67.

 

Take theatre as an example. Professional theatre in the 1960s featured Shakespearian plays at Stratford, British plays by George Bernard Shaw at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake and Broadway shows in summer theatres in places like Muskoka.
But in the increasingly patriotic atmosphere, beginning with the Centennial, Canadian theatres began popping up. In the summer of 1972, Paul Thompson and Theatre Passe Muraille, decided to do a play about his background growing up in Atwood when he brought actors to an abandoned farmhouse west of Clinton, then went out and visited neighbouring farmers and created The Farm Show.

 

When The Farm Show was first presented to an audience of the farmers in the old barn on the farm where the actors lived, I too was part of that audience. Also in the audience, but unknown to me, was James Roy, a young York University theatre student from Clinton.

 

In the spring of 1975, 50 years ago next month, James Roy wrote to me about starting a summer theatre in Blyth. There were still few Canadian plays in 1975, so James turned to the novels of West Wawanosh writer (and member of the Canadian Radio and Television Commission) Harry J. Boyle for the first play ever presented at the Blyth Summer Festival: Mostly in Clover.

 

So much has changed since then. The Blyth Festival (we lost the “summer” in the title long ago) has presented more than 150 world premieres of Canadian plays. Canadian theatres have been born, worked for years successfully, and sometimes died.
And Canada has become a different place, as seen by the patriotic response when recently U.S. President Donald Trump suggested Canada should become the 51st state of the union.