Paul Keeling: We should not let ‘freedom convoy’ protest claim the Canadian flag

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The last two weekends in Vancouver it has been difficult to get around the city due to pods of “freedom convoy” vehicles bottling up main intersections.

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While the number of vehicles was relatively small, they seemed to be everywhere: Big rigs and jacked-up pickup trucks and SUV’s, honking their horns, wrapped in anti-government signage and flying large Canadian flags mounted on hockey sticks. “It’s Canada Day!” my 10-year-old son joked Saturday, as we waited for a noisy flotilla of Maple-Leafed vehicles to pass.

My son had actually noticed something important about the freedom convoy: Its co-optation of the Canadian flag.

As an American expat, I know firsthand how this works. In the US, Republican Party supporters have owned the American flag for decades. Now it is in the hands of Trump supporters, Q-anon conspiracy theorists and capitol rioters. This has happened because everybody else in the country allowed it to happen.

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Canadians should take a lesson from the States and not repeat the same mistake. Many people, for understandable reasons of history, are reflexively wary of “nationalism.” And for many Canadians in recent years (for some, many years) there have been good reasons for Canadian flag hesitancy. Last year, after shocking revelations of unmarked children’s graves in former Canadian residential schools, many communities across Canada canceled their Canada Day festivities. Teach-ins and marches replaced parades. It was a day to listen, learn and reflect. In Vancouver, where I live, there was a noticeable death of Maple Leaf flags.

But for those of us who supported and participated in last year’s alternative to Canada Day, the present takeover of the Canadian flag by the “freedom convoys” may be an example of unintended consequences. There is a risk that a worthy critique of Canada has also ceded the Canadian flag — a complex, contestable, but nonetheless national symbol — to a vocal minority faction and given them exclusive claim to it. Canada’s problematic past and present is no justification for this relinquishment.

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The current Winter Olympic Games in Beijing gives occasion for waving the Canadian flag, but there is a much more important reason: The protesters’ tactic is to tie up traffic by driving around in vehicles (often large, muscular ones) displaying the Canadian flag, as if they are the “real Canadians.” It would be a powerful response if everyone else flew the Canadian flag from their vehicles.

In Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches on the Beaches, the “Star-bellied” Sneetches arrogantly distinguish themselves from the rest by having Stars upon their bellies, until Sylvester McMonkey McBean ingeniously puts stars on the bellies of all the others. As a result, “neither the Plain nor the Star-bellies knew whether this one was that one … or that one was this one … or which one was what one … or what one was who.”

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If, next weekend, every vehicle on the road displayed a prominent Canadian flag, it would be an effective, non-confrontational and even elegant way of undermining the co-optation of the Canadian flag by a minority faction. It would be a kind of political Judo, using the strength and impact of the protesters’ own tactics against them.

The freedom convoy protest claims to be about a lot of things. But we should not let it claim the Canadian flag. Some may say, “Let them have the flag… it is a symbol of colonialism and European dominion anyway.” But they should be careful what they wish for. We may regret that we did not take back the Canadian flag sooner.

Paul Keeling (MA, Philosophy) is a writer based in Vancouver. He has authored articles for Earth Island Journal, Orion (spring 2022), Philosophy Now, Globe and Mail and The Tyee, and the academic, peer-reviewed journals Environmental Values, Environmental Ethics, Wilderness, and International Journal of Wilderness.

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