What Does A Flag Mean to Canadians Versus Others

 National Post platformed Nov 5 2021

"...THE ESCAPE HATCH OPENS

This morning the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) made its much-anticipated move in the chess game that has developed over the display of the Canadian flag on federal government buildings. As you will recall, the flags on all these buildings, including those abroad, were lowered to half-mast in May, when unmarked graves were discovered on the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., and have stayed there ever since. The prime minister said then that, although the lowering of the flags is his exclusive responsibility, he wouldn't allow them to be flown normally again until “Indigenous communities and leadership” agreed that they could go back up. 

Was this elliptical, confounding phrase intended to refer to the AFN? We wondered at the time who was capable of giving the necessary permission, if not the AFN: it appears, quite naturally, to have accepted the position, which is bound to be controversial if made explicit, that it is the exclusive political instrument for Indigenous communities. 

In any case the AFN announced its solution to the stalemate this morning. Its executive committee, after consulting with elders, suggests raising the Maple Leaf on Sunday alongside an orange “Every Child Matters” banner. Both flags would go to half-mast on Monday, Nov. 8, this being Indigenous Veterans Day. The flags then go back up, and the Canadian one comes down again on Nov. 11, according to the usual tradition. From then on, both flags fly until “all of our children are recovered, named and symbolically or physically returned to their homelands with proper ceremony.” 

There are Canadians who have no use for a national flag; some, no doubt, dream of carrying national self-abnegation to the point of having a fully transparent flag. But even these progressives would have to admit that it is hard to imagine a sequence of events allowing some future prime minister and some future AFN executive to get together and say, “Great job, everybody, the orange one can come down now.” This is a proposed permanent adoption of two national flags (and who is to say it won’t catch on among private citizens?). Yet it could still be argued that the AFN is letting the prime minister off the hook lightly, in exchange for a symbolic political victory of its own. 

With the approach of Remembrance Day, the flag flying at half-mast was becoming a symbol, not of Canadian remorse, but of one politician's daft impulsiveness and inability to act with even the immediate future in mind. As much as some approved of the original gesture, the prime minister should never have been allowed to treat the flag as personal property or as a subject for political negotiation. 

In what other country would this be contemplated? Where else could a head of government do something like this without being warned or grimaced at or, outside the pages of the National Post, castigated very much? Indeed, how was this particular power of jerking the flag up and down on government buildings ever assigned to a prime minister in the first place? It is a little anomalous that this file doesn't belong to the Governor General, who wrangles other flag-like symbols like medals and heraldry. 

This isn't really about First Nations, and nobody should criticize the AFN for exploiting the political opportunity that the prime minister handed it. (Its right to represent First Nations as a single collectivity is a separate question.) NP Platformed would call attention to the constantly growing number of occasions on which the flag is lowered, including annual fixed dates in honour of firefighters, police, victims of violence against women, victims of terrorism and “persons killed or injured in the workplace.” 

Each one of these exceptions was carved out by some politician creeping around for votes: these were small insults to the permanence and status of the flag made in exchange for temporary goodwill long since expended. Now the AFN is making its own withdrawal from the fund. Who would dare tell them that their bona fides might command less in compensation than those of cops or injured workers? How can the rule that the flag should normally be flown as other countries' are be retrieved or re-established when we abandoned it through apathy long ago?

(Last-minute update: As we were preparing to attach winglets to this newsletter so that it can make its way to your inbox, CBC’s Olivia Stefanovich inconveniently reported the next move in the chess match. If Stefanovich’s information is correct, the flags will do the up-down-up-down shimmy that the AFN requested between now and Remembrance Day, and will go back up for good on the 12th. But the prime minister is not surrendering altogether; he has apparently undertaken to “find a place in the parliamentary precincts” for permanent display of a “survivors’ flag” endorsed by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. This falls short of the AFN’s condition, so all we can do for now is await another chess move. Don’t you love government by impulse?..."