February 15, 1965: Canada Adopts the Maple Leaf Flag

February 15, 1965: Canada raises its new Maple Leaf Flag over Parliament Hill in the capital of Ottawa for the 1st time.

Shortly after Canadian Confederation in 1867, the need for distinctive Canadian flags emerged. The first Canadian flag was that then used as the flag of the Governor General of Canada, a Union Flag (a.k.a. the Union Jack, the national flag of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, as the country was then known), with a shield in the center, bearing the quartered arms of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, surrounded by a wreath of maple leaves.

This flag became known as the Red Ensign. As new Provinces joined the Confederation, their arms were added to the shield. The composite shield was replaced with the Coat of Arms of Canada upon its grant in 1921.

The Red Ensign

In 1925, with Canada's brave role in World War I still fresh in the nation's mind, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King established a committee to design a flag to be used at home, but it was dissolved before the final report could be delivered. Despite the failure of the committee to solve the issue, public sentiment in the 1920s was in favor of giving Canada a flag that didn't have the mother country's flag in it.

The question was, what would be the replacement? There was difficulty agreeing on a design. It has been suggested that the main reason that Australia still flies a flag with the Union Jack as the canton is that nobody can agree on what the replacement should be.

World War II generated a new wave of patriotism and national identity. The desire for a flag that was the nation's own, not a British flag, rose again. But, still, no one new design got much support. In 1963, the minority Liberal Party government of Lester Pearson gained power. Pearson had won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in negotiating a settlement to the Suez Crisis of 1956. At that time, he was disturbed when the Egyptian government objected to Canadian peacekeeping forces on the grounds that the Canadian flag (the Red Ensign) contained the same symbol (the Union Flag) also used as a flag by the United Kingdom, one of the belligerents.

Lester Pearson

So Prime Minister Pearson's goal was for the Canadian flag to be distinctive and unmistakably Canadian. The main opponent to changing the flag was the Leader of the Opposition, the previous Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker. His idea of Canadian nationalism was tied to the British Commonwealth, and he made keeping the Red Ensign a personal crusade. (To add a sports perspective, so did Conn Smythe, the general manager of the country's most famous sports team, the Toronto Maple Leafs.)

In February 1964, Pearson suggested a flag with 3 red maple leaves on a white background, bracketed by blue borders. This became known as the Pearson Pennant, and pretty much everybody but the Prime Minister hated it.

On March 23, 1964, historian George Stanley offered a new design, inspired by the flag of the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario -- the country's version of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. 

The flag of the Royal Military College of Canada

Diefenbaker told his Party to support the new design, figuring that the Liberal Party would stand with their Leader, Pearson, and reject it, thus forcing the keeping of the Red Ensign, at least for a while longer. But the Liberals liked the design, too. And so, on December 15, 1964, the House of Commons approved Stanley's Maple Leaf Flag by a majority vote. Two days later, the Senate approved it.

Pearson, more interested in having the debate settled and a distinctive flag agreed upon than in getting his own choice approved, approved it. On February 15, 1965, the Maple Leaf Flag was raised over the Peace Tower in Parliament. Pearson said:

May the land over which this new flag flies remain united in freedom and justice; a land of decent God-fearing people; fair and generous in all its dealings; sensitive, tolerant and compassionate towards all men; industrious, energetic, resolute; wise and just in the giving of security and opportunity equally to all its cultures, and strong it its adherence to those moral principles which are the only sure guide to greatness.

The Peace Tower

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February 15, 1965 was a Monday. Baseball and football were out of season. No games were scheduled for the NBA. You would think that, on such a day in Canada, there would be an NHL game scheduled. But there weren't any. So there were no scores on this historic day.