Puneet Luthra has always taken advantage of the Canadian flags that her local MP’s office gives away so she can raise one at her home in Toronto.
“I just think it looks great. I think it’s beautiful,” he said.
But this year, he said, it feels different.
“The sad part is that sometimes I wonder what people will think if I put up the flag,” Luthra said. “People might think I’m someone with marginal ideas, like anti-vaxxers and stuff like that.”
The country is usually flooded with red and white during the national holiday, but this year people across Canada are reflecting on their relationship with Maple Leaf.
Demonstrations of the “Freedom Convoy” that stranded the streets of Ottawa in February may seem distant in the July sun, but the memory of the protesters surrounded by flags, waving them as they sang the national anthem and hanging them of the trucks whose horns sounded. day and night it is still cool for the locals.
Ottawa is preparing for a new round of protests, and police say this Canada Day will be “unprecedented and unique” with a security stance never seen before.
“People have made everyone confused about the value, impact and power of the Canadian flag and that’s pretty sad,” Luthra said.
Blaine Chalk said he has felt a shift in his feelings about the meaning of the flag since the convoy protests, during which flags were used for what he called “extreme patriotism.” While leaving his son at a recent birthday party, he saw a truck pass by with Canadian flags and convoy-related stickers.
“It’s having a connotation of: the people who are strongest are always the ones who wave the flag,” said Chalk, who lives in London, Ont.
But Megan Ball Rigden said it is the country’s complicated colonial history that makes her hesitate to embrace white and red.
“I don’t think one would shake it, regardless of the convoy, frankly,” he said.
Ball Rigden said people of his mother’s generation chose the Canadian flag, and he is very close to them to be representative of the “good things we are.”
He said there is a front yard in his hometown of Windsor, Ontario, which is “red and white with hundreds of flags.”
“This person does it with just love, but I understand that it can definitely mean a lot more to a lot of people,” he said.
During the 1964 flag debate, the Maple Leaf was adopted as a kind of symbolic gesture of decolonization with Francophones in mind, to illustrate an egalitarian association with English and French Canada, said Paul Litt, professor of history at Carleton University studying Canadian nationalism and culture.
“Conservative reactionary forces were totally opposed to the Maple Leaf,” Litt said, adding that they wanted to keep the Red Ensign as the nation’s flag because of its symbolism of Canadian tradition and its ties to Britain.
At the time, English and French Canadians were called the “two founding peoples,” he said. “You don’t do it anymore.”
Nearly 60 years later, the people of Canada are beginning to see their country and its foundation in a different way.
“The passage of time has really changed our perspective of ourselves,” Ball Ridgen said.
He considers the flag to be representative of a political system that oversaw the colonization of indigenous peoples, highlighting the discoveries of unmarked tombs in residential schools across the country.
“I think people are realizing that we’ve really done a good job of branding ourselves in Canada as kind and loving all the time. But, like anyone else, we’ve had our moments of being the oppressor, ”he said.
It is this account of Canada’s past that led Chalk to buy an Indigenous Canadian flag last year, designed by Kwakwaka’wakw artist Curtis Wilson.
“I felt weird waving the Canadian flag after all these events,” Chalk said.
“I felt strongly that I would rather fly this. I’m still proud to be Canadian, but I think we’ve left Indigenous peoples on the road for a long time.”
“It’s not perfect … but I could try it too.”
Maple Leaf’s current moment reflects a general problem with public discourse, Litt said, where there are “extremist” factions at both ends of the political spectrum.
While people on the right may seem to be appropriating the flag, as has been seen with the convoy protesters, he said those on the left “prepared for it” by rejecting many sacred national symbols. .
“If they’re going to be unpatriotic, then we’re going to be super patriotic,” Litt said of right-wing thinking.
Canada’s national identity has always been controversial and people can strongly identify with the flag because they project themselves onto this imagined national community, Litt said.
“The reason they love the country so much is because they see that the country represents them,” he said.
“When you start having these dramatic incidents where there’s evidence that maybe Canada means something different than you imagined it was, an extension of yourself, that has great potential for dissonance.”
Ball Ridgen said he understands that the flag can be a detrimental symbol for some and a symbol to be proud of for others.
“Until as a country we analyze it together, I guess we need to have a little bit of‘ Canadian understanding ’about how we all see it,” he said.
“I think now there’s room for a bigger conversation. So in that sense, maybe the convoy did something really good for all of us.”
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on June 30, 2022.
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This story was produced with the financial assistance of Meta and the Canadian Press News Fellowship.