Flag of Canada
The national flag of Canada, popularly referred to as the Maple Leaf, consists of a red field with a white square at its centre in the ratio of, in which is featured one stylized, red, 11-pointed maple leaf charged in the centre. It is the first flag to have been adopted by both houses of Parliament and officially proclaimed by the Canadian monarch as the country's official national flag. The flag has become the predominant and most recognizable national symbol of Canada.
In 1964, Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson formed a committee to resolve the ongoing issue of the lack of an official Canadian flag, sparking a debate about a flag change to replace the Union Flag. Out of three choices, the maple leaf design by Mount Allison University historian George Stanley, based on the flag of the Royal Military College of Canada, was selected. The flag officially appeared on February 15, 1965; the date is now celebrated annually as National Flag of Canada Day.
Before 1965, the Canadian Red Ensign had been in unofficial use since the 1860s and was later officially approved by a 1945 Order in Council for use "wherever place or occasion may make it desirable to fly a distinctive Canadian flag". Also, the Royal Union Flag remains an official flag in Canada, to symbolize Canada's allegiance to the monarch and membership in the Commonwealth of Nations. There is no law dictating how the national flag is to be treated, but there are conventions and protocols to guide how it is to be displayed and its place in the order of precedence of flags, which gives it primacy over the aforementioned and most other flags.
Many different flags created by Canadian officials, government bodies, and military forces contain the maple leaf motif in some fashion, either by having the Canadian flag charged in the canton or by including maple leaves in the design. The Canadian flag also appears on the government's wordmark.
Origins and design
The flag is horizontally symmetric, so the obverse and reverse sides appear identical. The width of the Maple Leaf flag is twice the height. The white field is a Canadian pale ; each bordering red field is exactly half its size and it bears a stylized red maple leaf at its centre. In heraldic terminology, the flag's blazon as outlined on the original royal proclamation is "gules on a Canadian pale argent a maple leaf of the first".The maple leaf has been a Canadian emblem since the 19th century. It was first used as a national symbol in 1868 when it appeared on the coat of arms of both Ontario and Quebec. In 1867, Alexander Muir composed the patriotic song "The Maple Leaf Forever", which became an unofficial anthem in English-speaking Canada. The maple leaf was later added to the Canadian coat of arms in 1921. From 1876 until 1901, the leaf appeared on all Canadian coins and remained on the penny after 1901. The use of the maple leaf by the 100th Regiment of Foot as a regimental symbol extended back to 1860. During the First and Second World Wars, badges of the Canadian forces were often based on a maple leaf design. The maple leaf would eventually adorn the tombstones of Canadian military graves.
By proclaiming the Royal Arms of Canada, King George V in 1921 made red and white the official colours of Canada; the former came from Saint George's Cross and the latter from the French royal emblem since King Charles VII. These colours became "entrenched" as the national colours of Canada upon the proclamation of the Queen's personal Canadian flag in 1962. The Department of Canadian Heritage has listed the various colour shades for printing ink that should be used when reproducing the Canadian flag; these include:
- FIP red: General Printing Ink, No. 0-712;
- Inmont Canada Ltd., No. 4T51577;
- Monarch Inks, No. 62539/0
- Rieger Inks, No. 25564
- Sinclair and Valentine, No. RL163929/0.
The image of the maple leaf used on the flag was designed by Jacques Saint-Cyr; Jack Cook claims that this stylized eleven-point maple leaf was lifted from a copyrighted design owned by a Canadian craft shop in Ottawa. The colours 0/100/100/0 in the CMYK process, PMS 032, or PMS 485 in the Pantone colour specifier can be used when reproducing the flag. For the Federal Identity Program, the red tone of the standard flag has an RGB value of 255–0–0. In 1984, the National Flag of Canada Manufacturing Standards Act was passed to unify the manufacturing standards for flags used in both indoor and outdoor conditions.
The flag of Canada is represented as the Unicode emoji sequence,.
History
Early flags
The Saint George's Cross was carried by John Cabot when he reached the later-named Newfoundland in 1497. In 1534, Jacques Cartier planted a cross in Gaspé bearing the French royal coat of arms with the fleurs-de-lis. The Royal Banner of France or "Bourbon Flag" held a position of some prominence in New France, with the evolving variations of French military flags being used over time.File:Flag of the United Empire Loyalists.svg|thumb|The United Empire Loyalist flag, which is similar to the flag of Great Britain, but in a 1:2 ratio. The flag is still used in loyalist settlements within Canada.
As the de facto British national flag, the Union Flag was used similarly in Canada from the time of British settlement in Nova Scotia after 1621. Its use continued after Canada's legislative independence from the United Kingdom in 1931 until the adoption of the current flag in 1965. The United Empire Loyalist flag, that is very similar to the Union Jack, was used by immigrants who remained loyal to the British crown during the American Revolutionary War. In present-day Canada, the United Empire Loyalist flag continues to be used as symbol of pride and heritage for loyalist townships and organizations.
Shortly after Canadian Confederation in 1867, the need for distinctive Canadian flags emerged. The first Canadian flag was then used as the flag of the governor general of Canada, a Union Flag with a shield in the centre bearing the quartered arms of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, surrounded by a wreath of maple leaves. In 1870, the Red Ensign, with the addition of the Canadian composite shield in the fly, began to be used unofficially on land and sea and was known as the Canadian Red Ensign. As new provinces joined the Confederation, their arms were added to the shield. In 1892, the British admiralty approved the use of the Red Ensign for Canadian use at sea.
File:Postcard of Maisonneuve Monument and Coronation.JPG|thumb|left|A Canadian postcard marking the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary in 1911, depicting a Canadian Red Ensign with a crowned composite shield of Canada in the fly, and the Union Flag below it
The composite shield was replaced with the coat of arms of Canada upon its grant in 1921, and in 1924, an Order in Council approved its use for Canadian government buildings abroad. In 1925, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King established a committee to design a flag to be used at home, but it was dissolved before the final report could be delivered. Despite the failure of the committee to solve the issue, public sentiment in the 1920s was in favour of fixing the flag problem for Canada. New designs were proposed in 1927, 1931, and 1939.
By the Second World War, the Red Ensign was viewed as Canada's de facto national flag. A joint committee of the Senate and House of Commons was appointed on November 8, 1945, to recommend a national flag to officially adopt. It received 2,409 designs from the public and was addressed by the director of the Historical Section of the Canadian Army, Archer Fortescue Duguid, who pointed out that red and white were Canada's official colours and there was already an emblem representing the country: three joined maple leaves seen on the escutcheon of the Canadian coat of arms. By May 9 the following year, the committee reported back with a recommendation "that the national flag of Canada should be the Canadian red ensign with a maple leaf in autumn golden colours in a bordered background of white". The Legislative Assembly of Quebec had urged the committee not to include any of what it deemed as "foreign symbols", including the Union Flag, and Mackenzie King, then still prime minister, declined to act on the report; fearing it may lead to political instability. As a result, the Union Flag was kept as a national flag, and the order to fly the Canadian Red Ensign at government buildings was maintained.
Great Flag Debate
By the 1960s, the debate for an official Canadian flag intensified and became controversial, culminating in the Great Flag Debate of 1964. In 1963, the minority Liberal government of Lester B. Pearson gained power and decided to adopt a flag through parliamentary debate. The principal political proponent of the change was Pearson. He had been a significant broker during the Suez Crisis of 1956, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. During the crisis, Pearson was disturbed when the Egyptian government objected to Canadian peacekeeping forces because the Canadian flag contained the same symbol also used by the United Kingdom, one of the belligerents. Pearson's goal was to create a flag that was distinctive and unmistakably Canadian. The main opponent to changing the flag was John Diefenbaker, leader of the opposition and former prime minister, who eventually made the subject a personal crusade.File:Canada Pearson Pennant 1964.svg|right|thumb|A flag design created by Alan Beddoe, and dubbed the Pearson Pennant, being Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson's favoured design
In 1961, when Leader of the Opposition, Pearson asked John Ross Matheson, a fellow Liberal MP, to begin researching what it would take for Canada to have a new flag. By April 1963, Pearson was prime minister in a minority government and risked losing power over the issue. He formed a 15-member multi-party parliamentary committee in 1963 to select a new design, despite opposition leader Diefenbaker's demands for a referendum on the issue. On May 27, 1964, Pearson's cabinet introduced a motion to parliament for the adoption of his favourite design, presented to him by Alan Beddoe, an artist and heraldic advisor, of a "sea to sea" flag with blue borders and three conjoined red maple leaves on a white field. This motion led to weeks of acrimonious debate in the House of Commons, and the design came to be known as the "Pearson Pennant", derided by the media and viewed as a "concession to Quebec".
A new all-party committee was formed in September 1964, comprising seven Liberals, five Conservatives, one New Democrat, one Social Crediter, and one Créditiste, with Herman Batten as chairman, while John Matheson acted as Pearson's right-hand man. Among those who gave their opinions to the group was Duguid, expressing the same views as he had in 1945, insisting on a design using three maple leaves; Arthur R. M. Lower, stressing the need for a distinctly Canadian emblem; Marcel Trudel, arguing for symbols of Canada's founding nations, which did not include the maple leaf ; and A. Y. Jackson, providing his own suggested designs. A steering committee also considered about 2,000 suggestions from the public, in addition to 3,900 others that included, according to Library and Archives Canada, "those that had accumulated in the Department of the Secretary of State and those from a parliamentary flag committee of 1945–1946". Through six weeks of study with political manoeuvring, the committee took a vote on the two finalists: the Pearson Pennant and the current design. Believing the Liberal members would vote for the prime minister's preference, the Conservatives voted for the single-leaf design. The Liberals, though, all voted for the single-leaf design, as did the members from the other two parties, giving a unanimous 15 to 0 vote for the option created by George Stanley and inspired by the flag of the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario.
There, near the parade square, in March 1964, while viewing the college flag atop the Mackenzie Building, Stanley, RMC's Dean of Arts, first suggested to Matheson that the RMC flag should form the basis of the national flag. The suggestion was followed by Stanley's memorandum of March 23, 1964, on the history of Canada's emblems, in which he warned that any new flag "must avoid the use of national or racial symbols that are of a divisive nature" and that it would be "clearly inadvisable" to create a flag that carried the Union Flag or a fleur-de-lis. According to Matheson, Pearson's "paramount and desperate objective" in introducing the new flag was keeping Quebec in Canada. It was Stanley's idea that the new flag should be red and white and that it should feature the single maple leaf; his memorandum included the first sketch of what would become the flag of Canada. Stanley and Matheson collaborated on a design that was, after six months of debate and 308 speeches, passed by a majority vote in the House of Commons on December 15, 1964. Just after this, at 2 am, Matheson wrote to Stanley: "Your proposed flag has just now been approved by the Commons 163 to 78. Congratulations. I believe it is an excellent flag that will serve Canada well." The Senate added its approval two days later.