Canada: Their Own Flag at Last

The argument dragged on for six months, generated more than 270 windy speeches, produced the longest continuous session of Parliament in Canadian history, and all but divided a nation. Last week the debate over a national flag for Canada finally ended. By a vote of 163 to 78 in the House of Com mons, and 38 to 23 in the Senate, Canada’s Parliament approved what Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson calls a flag for all Canadians. All that remained was for Queen Elizabeth to proclaim the new flag as the official emblem of Canada. Then down will come the old Red Ensign with its British Union Jack in the corner. And over Ottawa’s Parliament Hill will fly the new banner —a single red maple leaf on a white field with heavy red bars on either side.

To the very end, Opposition Leader John Diefenbaker and his Conservatives fought bitterly against the maple-leaf flag, arguing that it was an affront to Mother Britain to replace the Red Ensign* that had flown for 19 years. Yet Pearson, head of an unsteady minority government desperately trying to unify Canada’s divided English and French-speaking populations, persisted and finally had to shut off debate by invoking closure for the first time since 1956.

As the clock ran out, Pearson and Diefenbaker leaped to their feet for one last speech. When Pearson got the floor, he offered half his time to Diefenbaker, who refused, raging: “When the Greeks produce gifts, we recognize what they mean.” Pearson was barely audible above the Conservative cat calls, but he got out a line that will join him in the history books as the man who gave Canada its own emblem: ‘This is a flag for the future.”

* a Canadianized version of the British merchant marine flag, the Red Ensign was first flown by Canadian merchant vessels in 1892, became Canada’s “unofficial” flag in 1945