Review by C.P. Champion
Flags of Canada. Stephen Harper. Illustrations by Greg Stoicoiu. Sutherland House, 2025.
STEPHEN HARPER was goaded on the hustings for declining to wear his heart on his sleeve. Where Paul Martin shouted (and Justin Trudeau simpered) “I love Canada,” Harper eschewed such political virtue-signalling. Instead he would say understatedly, “Canada is a great country,” like the stolid English Canadian he is, and many of us respected him for it.
Mr. Harper dedicates this book, a history of flags flown throughout Canadian history, “to my future — Ben and Rachel.” Flags are a family affair but undemonstratively so. “My brother, Grant, discovered a lapel button from 1899 advocating an ‘Independence of Canada’ flag.” More like a commercial logo, it appears in this book as figure 40. “It is not too many steps from that design,” Harper adds, “to our eventual national flag.” Their father, Joseph Harris Harper (1927-2003), “the person who encouraged my interest in this field from an early age,” in 1992 co-authored a definitive study of military flags with Frank J. Dunbar, CD, of the Royal Ontario Museum, Old Colours Never Die, reissued in 2013. Flags are in the blood.
Flags of Canada is 136 pages long, of which 80 are text, endnotes, and a good bibliography. If done as a catalogue, a book like this might treat flags as cold artifacts without spiritual essence or power, but that is not the case here. Rather than (as Mr. Harper says) recycle photographs from the internet, he has commissioned 50 fresh coloured-pencil drawings from Greg Stoicoiu, a research assistant on A Great Game (Harper’s 2013 hockey book) who is legally blind. The handsome series of original drawings, done in Prismacolors with a cheerful light touch, are as understated as Harper’s writing. Importantly, children can be intrigued and enchanted by the illustrations even if they won’t fully understand all the words until they are older.
The first quarter of the text, and the first 15 illustrations, are devoted to the flags of New France and Quebec. “The core of the viceroyalty of New France is now the heart of the province of Quebec, where the symbols of royal France endure,” Harper writes. Unknown to most Canadians, another quintessentially Canadian flag quite literally displayed a heart: the Sacred Heart of Jesus with thorns, fire, cross, and maple garlands. It was called the Carillon Sacré-Coeur (fig. 10), a product of 19th century neo-baroque piety. The heart’s surgical removal by Premier Maurice Duplessis to create the Quebec flag of 1948 (fig. 11), is eerily emblematic of the clergy and people’s loss of faith, the hollowing out of Quebec nationalism by herd regression from Catholicism to paganism. Thus can the evolution of a flag design both reveal and conceal deeper meanings that Quebec historians studiously and revealingly ignore.
When it comes to the maple leaf flag, I should disclose that I regard the 1964 debate and its outcome as a much more severe wound to the national psyche than does Mr. Harper, who is inclined to let bygones be bygones. I hold the committee flag to be the case par excellence of the officially-engineered dumbing down of our traditions to which the citizenry was subjected decade after decade by central Canadian anglophone bien pensants who, as Toronto Telegram columnist Judith Robinson predicted in 1953, would not rest until “every Canadian child waves a flag that looks like a packing-house trademark.” Compounding the tragedy, injustice, and loss of memory and connection with lived reality in the suppression of Canada’s unique Red Ensign is that Ontarians and Westerners blamed the “pea-soupers” for it — and thus Pearson struck a blow at English-French harmony while intending the opposite. (Again, this is hidden history that Harper does not care to be dragged into.)
STILL, Harper does issue a number of correctives to received flag history. Anyone who reads Hansard in 1964 can find government MPs repeatedly tarnishing the 250-year-old Canadian flag (the ensign) as “essentially the flag of another country” and “not Canadian.”
But as Harper observes, that claim
ignores the historical context. Red Ensigns of various types have flown over Canada for centuries. For that reason, the design has become a distinct symbol of Canada in the eyes of many. Nowhere is this truer than in Ontario and Manitoba, where such flags have waved the longest, from the earliest days of the fur trade.
For 180 years before Confederation the Hudson’s Bay Company flew the Red Ensign (fig. 24) at its posts. Today Alberta’s Tsuut’ina First Nation, known to history as the Sarcee, allies of the Blackfoot, flies a distinctive Red Ensign, not illustrated in the book but carried, together with Union Jacks, during the so-called “Idle No More” protest in Ottawa in 2013. Photographs appeared in the press.
If we dispense with the Liberals’ 1964 talking points (some of which Harper seems to accept as truth), it must be understood no other country used a red ensign as its official flag. If anything Harper goes too far in identifying it with “British-Canadians.”
… the identification of British-Canadians with the Red Ensign only deepened after Confederation. That flag, with the addition of Canada’s evolving shield, became the unofficial banner of the country. When the national flag was finally adopted in 1965, it was opposed by a large minority of the population in English-speaking Canada. Most of those had argued for the Canadian Red Ensign instead.
Ontario art historian Scott Symons put it best in 1965: “Many intelligent people told me that the flag issue was a small matter but I knew that it was not.” Rather, Symons believed, “it put everything into question.” Everything that touched on identity, embodied heritage, collective memory, the French-English accommodation under the Crown, political and legal traditions, the Indian treaties symbolized by the Union Jack, lived experience in peace and war — all of it was upended.
Harper caught a glimpse of that emotion as a child and is characteristically even-handed, not to say indifferent, about it here:
What I learned was that the preference for one flag option over another was seldom about the design. To use terms I discovered when I was much older, it was really about identity, history, and the collective narratives in which one believed.
My purpose is not to push anyone into embracing a particular narrative around a flag design or about the system it represents. … Otherwise fine histories of Canadian flags have been marred by narrative-centric tales. These have portrayed the advocates of certain designs as heroes, while those preferring other designs come across as villains or deluded naysayers. These caricatures are a disservice to history. They obscure the nuances and complexities of historical truth. … Of course, readers are free to embrace these, or any other narratives.
WHERE Mr. Harper does have misgivings is in the Pearson government’s decision, ratified in a Dec. 15, 1964 vote in the House of Commons, to make the Union Jack the official flag of the Crown and Commonwealth in Canada rather than the Red Ensign. Given how important the Red Ensign had been for centuries, its acceptance as a unique Canadian flag by the mid-1960s, Harper thinks that the “second flag” status should have been given to the Red Ensign instead:
The more regrettable part of the story was the Pearson government’s decision to retain no official role for the Canadian Red Ensign. Contrary to the wishes of most of the opposition, the Royal Union Flag, or Union Jack, was designated in law as a secondary flag. It would continue to be used when appropriate to express Canada’s enduring ties to the Crown and the Commonwealth …
Why was this objectionable? To put it simply, having so strongly argued that the Canadian Red Ensign was insufficiently ‘Canadian,’ it was truly disingenuous to assert that the national flag of Britain could in some way represent Canada. The alternatives were obvious. Canada’s loyalty to the Crown would be better represented by a generic Canadian Royal Standard. And the flag to represent its place in the Commonwealth would indeed have been the Canadian Red Ensign.
If Harper takes a shot in this book it is this: “That would have been an honourable compromise on Lester Pearson’s part.” Touché! But wasn’t Pearson the great compromiser? Harper’s rebuke may surprise readers who actually believe the maple leaf represented a compromise in 1964, such as those with a superficial knowledge of the flag committee proceedings.
Why did Pearson not make official the traditional Canadian flag rather than another flag most obviously identified with Great Britain? Harper says we don’t know. “It is impossible to know the answers to these questions,” he writes.
But we do know. Pearson had no interest in compromise. His minority government was scandal-ridden and he himself perceived as weak and stressed out. He still feared Diefenbaker and needed a distraction and a win — a rout from which there could be no going back — and by media manipulation, committee intrigue, and parliamentary cloture, he got it.
Walking through the Senate foyer in about 2008 soon before he retired, I crossed paths with Senator Marcel Prud’homme (1934-2017). He had been a Liberal MP in 1964 during the flag debate and had voted for the committee flag. So I asked Sen. Prud’homme, “Why did the Government officialize the Union Jack at the same time as the new Canadian flag?” His unguarded response gave away the game completely: “You see, we had to eliminate the Red Ensign.”
“Eliminate” the Red Ensign, eh? The Pearson government most certainly did not admit to that in the Commons at the time. (I published the exchange in the National Post on Jun. 29, 2017 but its significance has been little noticed.) [Author note: When working on this review for the print edition, I could not find my original notes from the conversation with Prud’homme. When I found them, they indicated that he had said "eliminate" not "kill" as was published in the print version of the DR. The National Post version was correct as I was working from my notes at the time. I apologize for the error. - CPC]
AS WELCOME as this excellent book is, it is not the first attempt to popularize historical flags. In 2007 Jason Kenney, in his capacity as Secretary of State for Canadian Identity, partnered with the Canadian Heraldic Authority to produce a series of six full-colour posters of the “Historical Flags of Canada” (“Flags of the French Régime,” “Evolution of the Canadian Red Ensign,” “Proposed Flags of Canada,” etc.) which Canadian Heritage is supposed to have sent to 70,000 schools. Still available online, they are not mentioned in this book. But Kenney’s purpose at the time (I was working in his office as a policy advisor) directly overlaps with Harper’s: to enchant and inform young Canadians with the pageant of our history.
Mr. Harper kindly consulted me last year about one of my articles, and names me in the acknowledgments. But I would like to have seen the draft before it hit the printers. Discussing the use of three maple leaves on a single stem in heraldry, Harper writes, “After all, maple leaves do not actually grow in threes.” But they do. Pressed in one of my books, I have just such a stem of three, picked up two decades ago on maple-lined Blvd. Édouard-Montpetit, formerly Maplewood Ave., in Montreal.
Mr. Harper has created a superb educational resource, a must-have for homes and schools, introducing a new generation to flags known and unknown, and to terminology such as “blazon” “defaced,” “vexillologist,” and “saltire.” Every intelligent reader would enjoy the book. Flags of Canada offers a wealth of learning and edification for all ages.
As for the flag debate itself, the full tragicomedy remains to be told.