RED ENSIGN

I was moved by recent pieces by Mark Steyn and others about how Canada needs to return to some of its pre-Trudeau values in order to regain its place in the world. One of the frustrating things about being a conservative Canadian is that a large part of the population and media seem to think conservatism is anti-Canadian. 

While conservatives generally shun the anti-American impulses of most of our fellow countrymen, we are very pro-Canada. Our vision of the country is different.  It's also better.

As Steyn noted:

I want Canada to be big again. It can’t be as big as it was in 1945, when the Royal Canadian Navy had the third largest surface fleet in the world, and we had a better claim, in terms of our relative contributions to victory, to one of the Big Five permanent votes on the new UN Security Council than either France or Chiang Kai-Shek’s China. We were denied it because of the political problems that would have arisen from giving His Britannic Majesty a second seat and the Anglophone democracies a majority, but we were regarded as the major second-rank power and on the way up....
 
My favourite Reagan line is one I’ve been quoting a lot these last few weeks: “We are a nation that has a government - not the other way around.” In Canada, we’ve got it the other way round: even our national flag is a registered trademark of the government. It’s easy, if you’re a member of the Liberal Party, to mistake the bigness of the government for the bigness of the country. But big government is shrinking our free speech, shrinking our armed forces, shrinking the quality of our health care. A great nation is not great because of the size of its bureaucracy.

I share Steyn's vision of a bigger Canada, and thus I found Flea's Red Ensign  campaign seductive.

Being a supporter of stronger provincial rights, however, I couldn't completely bring myself to fly the Canadian Red Ensign. This isn't Newfoundland nationalism on my part. I accept fully that Newfoundland politicians have been far worse than their federal counterparts. Trudeaupia, for all of its flaws, is still damn better than any Smallwood Socialist Republic would ever have been.

However, as people are flying the flag Canada used in the great wars as a symbol of national pride – I feel it's more appropriate for me to fly my own pre-1945 symbol.


The early 20th century Newfoundland Red Ensign.