Do you wave flag?
The Canadian flag outside a hotel in Burnaby, B.C. on a windy morning May 28, 2010.
Yesterday I stood outside a hotel in Burnaby watching the Canadian flag flap in the wind.
Caught by powerful gusts, the flag snapped and whipped loudly, bound to the top of its pole by rope and rings. Beside it, the “Stars and Stripes” billowed and undulated like a hippie girl dancing at Woodstock, and I pondered the meaning of them as symbols.
But fear not. I’ll spare you my musings on nationalism or the Canada / U.S. relationship because this isn’t that kind of blog.
Instead, I’ll share some info on how these flags came into being. I learned and forgot much of this at some point, so I refreshed my memory with Google. Plus, I’d never seen Web resources when I covered these topics in school long ago.
The Maple Leaf
“The flag is the symbol of the nation’s unity, for it, beyond any doubt, represents all the citizens of Canada without distinction of race, language, belief or opinion.”
Wow! That’s quite the claim, eh? These were the words of Maurice Bourget, Speaker of the Senate, on February 15, 1965 when this new flag was inaugurated on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
The Maple Leaf flag as we know it today was designed in 1964 by George Stanley, who sketched a copy of his concept on a letter to the government’s “new flag” committee, headed by a Ontario Liberal MP John Matheson. After much discussion of the options (imagine a big, long meeting with designers but no one says “branding”) they chose the current design.
The National Flag website on the Canada government website has many more interesting facts about the flag.
Stars and Stripes fly outside a hotel in Burnaby, B.C. Canada
The original Star-Spangled Banner was made in 1813 by a 37-year-old widow in Baltimore, Maryland (not Betsy Ross, as the legend goes). Her name was Mary Pickersgill and she made colours and signal flags for ships in the port of Baltimore.
The Smithsonian website says Mary made the first U.S. flag with her 13-year-old daughter; two nieces (13 and 15); and a 13-year-old African American indentured servant named Grace Wisher.
I love to imagine what the teens and the mom talked about. And what about our Canadian historian in the 1960s scratching his design onto the bottom of a letter? Now their creations fly above hotels all over North America, inspiring all sorts of emotions and thoughts in people. Care to share yours?
We’ve got to have the quaintest flag in all of creation.