Sixty years as a Canadian beacon The quiet strength of a small maple leaf By: Editorial Posted: 3:17 PM CST Friday, Feb. 14, 2025

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/02/2025 (523 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you’re a first-generation Canadian, you’ve almost certainly seen them in your parent’s house. Somewhere. They’re probably still there.

Inobtrusive. Understated. A polite but important recognition.

A lot like Canadians often are.

Maybe swimming among the coins in the shallow dish where the pocket change ends up. In the drawer where the less-useful kitchen tools go — in with the beer opener that didn’t anticipate screw-caps, the candle-snuffer that douses candles once or twice a year, the bright coloured unpushed pushpins and the lonesome small ball of white string.

Or maybe it’s still pinned to an old light jacket that only gets worn once or twice in spring.

They’re not the sort of thing you ever just throw out.

The silliest of little things — but also pressingly significant.

On the back, a brass-coloured clasp with jaws that clutch their appointed, pointed post: on the front, a small, bright, red-and-white plastic Canadian flag.

Our unique, and oddly most hopeful, of flags. It was among the things you used to be handed — and maybe still are — as you left the citizenship ceremony that officially made you Canadian.

Saturday is the 60th anniversary of the raising of the red-and-white maple leaf flag for the very first time on Parliament Hill.

The flag was, like many things Canadian, the result of compromise. A 15-member parliamentary committee considered a few thousand concepts, before landing on three, and eventually, on one.

“May the land over which this new flag flies remain united in freedom and justice … sensitive, tolerant and compassionate towards all.”–Lester Pearson

For Canadians that were born here, and Canadians who weren’t, it’s become a powerful symbol.

It’s a symbol of the things Canadians have done in this world, the mark we have left, the people we are and will continue to be.

The maple leaf at its centre had been symbolic of Canadian identity for years before it graced this flag, especially during the First and Second World Wars, when a single maple leaf marked each fallen Canadian soldier’s headstone.

Leaves that fall in autumn, and return anew in spring.

As then-prime minister Lester Pearson said in a speech as the new flag was raised, “May the land over which this new flag flies remain united in freedom and justice … sensitive, tolerant and compassionate towards all.”

It hasn’t always been smooth: it’s hard to forget that, as recently as a few years ago, a convoy descended on the nation’s capital, waving that same flag — sometimes upside-down and sometimes, horribly defaced — claiming patriotism as they sought to make their point about the primacy of their personal rights over the rights of everyone else.

Maybe now the majority of Canadians are on the brink of getting their own flag back.

It’s strangely fitting that the 60th anniversary should come just now, when our relationship with one of our dearest neighbours has turned sour, when the president of the United States of America has apparently decided that we’re not even worthy of being a country.

It’s time to carry a flag that represents not only values that have long served us well, but values we will need to resist the economic and existential threats to this country.

These are not easy times. They actually promise to be even more difficult, and even more challenging, in the months and years ahead.

Now, our country, a country that has long practised a quiet patriotism, needs to recognize that it’s time to carry a flag that represents not only values that have long served us well, but values we will need to resist the economic and existential threats to this country.

Maybe find one of those little flags in your parents’ house or in your own home, that small, bright hopeful red-and-white spark adrift in among the silver-coloured sea of quarters and dimes, and find a place for it on your lapel, out in the sun and storm of Manitoba winter weather, saying proudly who we are, and what we can be.

Small, polite and steadfast — but underestimated at others’ peril.

Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter

Head Start

Weekday Mornings

A quick glance at the news for the upcoming day.

Sign up for Head Start

Sign Up

I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement.