As Trudeau falls, the flag rises again
National Post, 15 February 2025
The PM's denigration of Canada as a genocidal enterprise lacking a core identity has run its course
Sleepy Flag Day is waking up for the Maple Leaf’s 60th birthday.
The new Canadian flag was inaugurated on Feb. 15, 1965, and the date was declared Flag Day in 1996.
Flag Day has usually been a rather flaccid affair, but it got off to a muscular start at the first observance in 1996. It was a time of fiscal crisis and the federal response had been dramatic. Upon egress from the event, prime minister Jean Chrétien was approached by a man protesting the spending cuts in Paul Martin’s 1995 budget. Chrétien throttled him in what became known as the “Shawinigan Handshake.”
Muscularity and economic crisis are back in 2025. Pierre Poilievre, sensing that campaigning in slogan-printed T-shirts is not equal to the Trump tariff moment, is staging an Ottawa rally to rebrand his anti-Trudeau, carbon tax election — a matter of some urgency given that the Liberal party is now as anti-Trudeau and anti-carbon tax as he is.
It will be a remarkable sight — a Conservative campaign launch on Flag Day, for the new flag is at the heart of the Liberal party dominance of federal politics.
When John George Diefenbaker won his thumping Conservative majority in 1958 — the largest ever in Canadian history, and still the only man to win more than 75 per cent of the seats in the federal House of Commons — it was a shock to the prevailing order.
While today Diefenbaker is considered just another white male, at the time his Germanic background (on his father’s side) was a novelty. The premiership was held, astonishingly, by neither the Scottish/English/Irish or the French. When Diefenbaker eliminated racial criteria from Canada’s immigration policy, it was not so much an opening to black and brown races as eliminating discrimination against those who were neither English nor French.
The Liberals were worried. They had been the dominant party since Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s first win in 1896, and were the archetype of the central Canadian consensus, alternating between French and English leaders, as they still do to this day. Would the Grits be able to dominate in this emerging Canada, represented by the Prairie eruption of Diefenbaker, with his Canadian nationalism and his Bill of Rights?
So Lester Pearson, elected prime minister in 1963, and his colleagues set out to fashion a new Canadian identity upon which they could put the Liberal stamp. This required, in Pearson’s view, a partial but real break with Canada’s British past in favour of bilingualism and what would eventually become multiculturalism.
Dief the Chief, not unusually for those from immigrant families, was a passionate defender of Canada’s history as being capacious enough to welcome newcomers. Dief did not go back entirely to “The Old Flag, The Old Policy, The Old Leader” slogan of Sir John A. Macdonald’s last election campaign in 1891, but that was the spirit.
This mighty struggle with its unexpected roles for the leading characters was detailed in Christian Champion’s 2010 book, The Strange Demise of British Canada.
The heart of the clash was over the new flag, with the Maple Leaf brandmark, as it would be called today, replacing the traditional vexillology of stripes, crests and heraldic images. The Union Jack in the Red Ensign had to go. A new Canada needed a new flag.
Diefenbaker lost, and at his 1979 funeral the casket was draped with both flags, an apt symbol of the struggle over symbols.
The Liberals went from strength to strength under their new flag. Critics ridiculed it as the “Pearson pennant,” but the joke was on them. The flag was enormously popular and ahead of its time — the world of branding was on the horizon. From 1963 to 1984 the Liberals were in power, save for the nine-month Clarkus interruptus of 1979.
In those 21 years, they introduced national bilingualism, fended off the separatists in Quebec, entrenched themselves as the preference of immigrant voters and patriated the Constitution. It was a mighty run, with Pierre Elliott Trudeau able to wrap himself in Pearson’s flag.
Thus it was fitting that Trudeau the Greater’s lieutenant, Chrétien, declared Flag Day in the aftermath of the near-death 1995 separatism referendum. He fondly recalled the heady days of the 1960s flag debate.
The reconstitution of Canadian identity in a manner congenial to the Liberal party lost its way with the ascent of Trudeau the Lesser in 2015, 50 years after the new flag. Justin Trudeau made his now infamous declaration to The New York Timesthat “there is no core identity in Canada,” which he hymned as the “first post-national state.’’
As the end of the Lesser’s tenure approaches, his entire agenda is now in tatters.
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