Flag Canada

What is the significance of the maple leaf on Canada’s flag?

Even though the maple tree is only found in the eastern provinces of Canada, it was adopted as a national symbol from the days of the Canadian Army Corps that fought in the First World War.

In 1914 Canada was a dominion within the British Empire and had very little control of it’s foriegn policy. That menat when the British declared war on the Germans, Canada automatically was involved and began to prepare troops to send to the field. Given there was an emerging sense of nationalism at the time however, the political leadership in Ottawa demanded the ability to send all their recruits into an all Canadian formation with the larger British Army and the leadership was glad to accomodate them. Now because the Canadian Corps’ uniforms were the same as the British, the political leadership had set themselves to the task of developing the Corps needed to find some way to distinguish the formation to help build unit solidarity. They started with several different ideas, the most popular of which were symbols based around the much wider spread icon of the beaver. Problem was they just couldn’t seem to make those symbols simple enough to be easily recognized. To remedy that, they settled on the less popular, less wide spread icon of the maple leaf and that ended up being what the soldiers ended up wearing on their lapels and in their hats in Europe. Small brass button maple leafs.

Now this may seem kinda odd to Americans who know WWII much more as “the war” but for Canada, it was much more the Great War that defined our country. It was the first great unifing national project and something for everyone to be equally proud of. Almost one tenth of our population served in uniform in Europe with losses that were even greater than what the Americans took with a population over ten times the size. It was from those days in Europe, in the trenches that the Maple Leaf gained its power as a symbol that ultimately put it on our flag in 1965.

Canadian Flag- CFL Game in Hamilton

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