Flag Turns 50 Transcript

[Music]

[Opening bars of “Oh Canada”]

0:00:20
People in Canada who had very strong ties, and people are adverse to change.

So there’s talk of the flag as a symbol of the country, it had been the Red Ensign which had been linked to Britain, had a Union Jack on it, had been Canada’s flag more or less informally since the 1920s and then more formally after the 1940s. And I think people believed that changing it was somehow going against Canadian tradition and history, and that makes people very nervous. That would be the main reason I think.

0:01:00
John Diefenbaker, was the Progressive Conservative opposition leader, he didn’t want a flag, he was pro-Red Ensign, he sided with the veterans in the country as well, so he made life miserable for Pearson.

But when the government started debating whether there should be a new flag there was a committee formed by the Pearson, Lester Pearson’s Liberal minority government headed by a guy named John Matheson one of the MPs, an MP who had some experience in symbols.

So he decided to open up this competition, and of course, when you ask people for an opinion about something they’re going to give it to you — even back then before social media, and the Internet and so forth. And people flooded them with ideas and most of them, to be honest, all sort of crazy ideas. Fleur-de-lis, beavers, bears, maple leafs in all its various manifestations and combinations thereof.

Some had the Union Jack, some had combinations of fleur-de-lis, maple leaves and beavers and every other possible Canadian symbol.

0:02:00
Some were more professionally designed, some look like paintings, some crayon-colored things that kids had done, but in the end I mean there were really only two possible choices.

Pearson had designed, initially introduced the idea that he and other people had come up with — this tri-colour red maple leaf in the middle with two vertical blue bars. This was caustically referred to as the “Pearson Pennant,” which he really did not like.

Over time Matheson had also consulted with a historian G.F. Stanley, and he advised something a little different which is essentially what we have today, the red and white Maple Leaf. He thought that was a better, simpler kind of design and that’s what was ultimately chosen by the committee.

0:03:00
We tend to forget about the British connection and that emotional attachment that people had because it’s so natural now, it’s Canada’s flag, we cheer it on. The generations of university students that have sewn it on their backpacks crossing Europe and so forth, and we cheer it at the Olympics and no one thinks twice about it.

At the time, I guess, it was seen as something new, and as I said, Canada was coming of age and that’s how it was perceived. I think the kind of emotional opposition to it died down fairly quickly. People accepted it by the time they rose it at the flag-raising ceremony in February 1965, I think most people were fine and soon became quite proud of Canada’s new symbol.