What does the flag stir in my heart today?

Pretty easy to be caught up in the Flag Day patriotism that has swept across Canada.  So, yes, happy 60th to the Maple Leaf.

But then, I pause.

For I, like many Canadians have had a fraught relationship with the flag in recent years. The lowering of the flag, after the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation shared news of the discovery of more than 200 graves on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in 2021, started us down a long-needed road of reckoning about our country’s story of genocide, along which the Maple Leaf does not have pride of place. That journey is far from over and that flag is not yet ready to fly high.

Then there was the cooption and weaponization of the flag during the 2022 Convoy Occupation in downtown Ottawa, and other horn-blasting locales across the country. That ugly time imbued and tainted the Maple Leaf with virulent hate and conspiratorial intolerance. Still, I see a flag on a passing truck and I shudder.

So I ask myself, what does the flag stir in my heart today; and why?

Most certainly it is not chest-pounding, testosterone-driven roars of being the greatest nation on earth, ever and forever, à la south of the border. In fact, that ugly, imperial and unfounded (now more than ever) American boasting is precisely what we must adamantly eschew today and every day.

It is also, at least for me, not a sense of triumphalism, of shouting out in red and white to Trump, Musk, Vance, Rubio, Hegseth, Bondi, Noem, Homan, Kennedy, Gabbard, Leavitt, Miller and the rest of that absurdist troupe of fascist bullies, narcissists and sycophants, that we are better than them. (Even though we are.) Where does that take us? Hollering, whether it is yelling or waving flags, and even when virtue and truth is on our side, is in the end just a lot more noise.

No, today the flag represents three things for me.

First, I fly my flag with a sense of deep distress, but also conviction. How can I not? So much around us is in crisis and collapse: witnessing and enabling genocide, unapologetic contempt for human rights, catastrophic climate injustice, eroding assaults on democratic institutions, emboldened fascism and bigotry, and the prospect of tariff-driven economic calamity. Today the flag is my way of saying I see, I know, and I will not turn away from the struggles we must all face. Struggles which will be hard and will inescapably mean sacrifice.

Second, I fly my flag with a yearning ache for expanded solidarity and renewed, shared purpose.  Like never before we need to reach out, to long-time friends and to new allies. Above all, we must stand with and stand for the peoples and communities whose hurt and vulnerability is the greatest. That incredible force of community and communities is our greatest power. Today, rallying to and embracing the flag is one such moment of common cause. That solidarity must run deep, it must run wide, and it must run far.

And third, I fly my flag with abiding determination that we can chart a better path. I say can, but I mean will; for truly there is no other way forward. We do so by holding on to hope, and by having and showing faith in one another.  When despair takes its toll, I often remind myself of the opening article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Today, my flag is for all of us.

Fly the flag, yes. But we must do the work that shows we get it, and we mean it. Conviction, solidarity and a better world. That flag has never mattered more.