A home in Ottawa’s Centretown Neighbourhood reclaims the Canadian Flag, February 2022 (Photo: Robert J. Talbot)
Forrest Pass
The first time a Canadian maple leaf appeared on a flag, it was flown in the final days of a violent protest. At the Battle of Saint-Eustache in 1837, Patriote fighters carried a white banner charged with a Maskinongé fish, pinecones, the initials “C” and “JB” (for “Canada” and “Jean-Baptiste” respectively), and a branch of green maple leaves. To its creators, this makeshift maple-leaf flag was a symbol of patriotic resistance to British colonial oppression.
I draw no equivalence, of course, between the anti-colonial cause of the Lower Canadian Patriotes and the various grievances of the so-called “Freedom Convoy”. But the use of maple leaf flags unites these two movements. Like many Canadians generally and Ottawans specifically, I have found the use of the Canadian flag during the recent anti-vaccination mandate demonstrations unsettling. Yet as an historian who studies past flag use in Canada, I also see historical echoes and continuities in the demonstrators’ use of the national emblem. Considering the history of Canadian “flag culture” – the circumstances in which societies display their flags and the rules and rituals that surround this use – helps us make sense of the demonstrators’ American-style deployment of the flag, and the evolving political resonance of our most familiar national symbol.
On July 29, 1987, the Supreme Court of Canada issued its ruling in the case 
As a child, William Dumas’ father told him the story of European fur traders arriving on what is now commonly referred to as Hudson Bay. The encounter between the Asiniskaw Ithiniwak (Rocky Cree) people and the Europeans resulted in an endemic, greatly reducing the local population. In telling the story, Dumas’ father explained how elder âhâsiw procured medicine from the little people, who are legendary beings in the Rocky Cree tradition.
