One of the stupidest arguments to emerge during Canada’s pandemic experience was the idea that by flying the Canadian flag, the Freedom Convoy types had ruined the Canadian flag for everyone else. And that Canadians, as a result, were hesitant to display the flag lest they be thought of as anti-vaxxers, COVID-deniers or outright Nazis.
It’s not true, and the idea was completely absurd. If you’re driving through, say, Vermont and see the stars and stripes flying on someone’s front lawn, do you assume they supported the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol? When you see the St. George’s Cross waved at an English soccer game, do you assume the flag-waver supports the English Defence League? When you see the French tricolour do you instantly think of Marine Le Pen and the far-right Front National?
You don’t, because that would be stupid. People advancing causes that they feel to be of national importance tend to deploy national flags. Rarely are those causes universally supported. Few causes are.
At the time I ascribed the narrative mostly to COVID-induced hysteria. The Globe and Mail’s and Toronto Star’s comment pages always reflect a somewhat, shall we say, limited perspective on Canadian society. But the pandemic trapped opinion writers behind their keyboards and in their online echo chambers more than ever before. It was febrile. People across the political spectrum went just a bit nuts, and I don’t exclude myself.
But with the pandemic behind us, with the keyboard class mostly resigned-to-happy with how it went (better than America is all that really counts, right?) I was a bit surprised to see this narrative exhumed, dressed up in a Hawaiian shirt and dragged around town for Canada Day in triumph. The narrative: We have our flag back!
“The dissidents stole our flag,”
. “They flew our flag from their trucks. They hung it over their encampments. By the end, many Canadians associated the red-and-white Maple Leaf with the so-called Freedom Convoy.
“For a long time after, whenever you saw a truck going down the street bearing a Canadian flag, you likely thought: Freedom Convoy lover,” wrote Mason. “Many of us were afraid to hang a flag outside our home on Canada Day for fear of being associated with the bunch who had occupied our capital and tried to bully our government.”
The flag “is no longer languishing on the extreme right to the exclusion of everyone else,”
Martin Regg Cohn wrote in the Star
. “The Maple Leaf has become a totem in a titanic struggle against tariffs and hegemony, aggression and subjugation. Canadians are rallying to the flag, which has become emblematic not of extremism but an existential struggle against external threats.”
“Canadians reclaim Maple Leaf flag amid Trump threats,”
. “Flying the flag is no longer raising the same sorts of suspicions that the person displaying it harbours sympathies for right-wing causes,” University of Guelph history professor Matthew Hayday told the network.
Without wishing to be impolite at this time of ant-Trump solidarity, this is unhinged. Normal people did not haul down their Canadian flags for fear of being seen as right-wing extremists (which not all Freedom Convoy participants were, of course, but culture wars need their caricatures).
The only poll I’m aware of on the subject
came from Counsel Public Affairs on the occasion of Canada Day 2022
, when flag angst should have been at its peak. It found that a not-so-whopping 14 per cent of Canadians would not be “proud to fly the Canadian flag,” while 76 per cent would be proud to.
Respondents who opposed the Freedom Convoy were actually
slightly prouder
to fly the flag than those who supported it: 78 per cent versus 76.
So the whole narrative is garbage. It’s not a real thing, except in the decadent, idle minds of the most precious Canadians who saw pushback against lockdowns as something akin to the fall of Rome. That poll showed that, even amidst a divisive crisis, the flag remained popular and a source of pride. It’s frankly disturbing to see such obvious nonsense hold sway in Canadian media, which are supposed to be anti-nonsense.
If we want to talk about divisive national symbols and how to fix them, we might do better to turn our attention to the Order of Canada. This week, Governor General Mary Simon
announced 83 appointments to and promotions within the order.
Seventeen of them were from Quebec; of those, 16 were from Montreal or the Montreal area. (One of them is Prime Minister Mark Carney’s chief of staff, Marc-André Blanchard, which isn’t a great look.) Forty of them were from Ontario; of those, seven were from somewhere other than the Toronto or Ottawa area.
That’s roughly 70 per cent of the appointments for roughly 60 per cent of the population — and we all know the sort of person who gets the order and the sort of person who doesn’t. Don Cherry, for example, is the sort who doesn’t. Henry Morgentaler is the sort who does. That’s more divisive than Canada’s quite excellent flag ever will be.
National Post
cselley@postmedia.com
