Today@Dal

Published Sunday, Feb. 15 by CBC online:

Fifty years ago today, the red-and-white Maple Leaf design Hughes carried into the stadium became Canada's new national flag.

And in the five decades since, the image… seems to have captured a country, in large part perhaps because its unique iconography arrived just as Canada was coming into its own as a nation.

…

Shirley Tillotson, a Canadian history professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, also isn't sure about the symbolism the Maple Leaf holds today on the world stage.

"I think that gets made and remade with successive foreign policy and military behaviour," she says.

"I don't know how long memories are in different parts of the world about how well we've done since the 1960s in terms of our international citizenship, but it certainly doesn't have the complicated heritages of the Stars and Stripes or the Union Jack, so it's a little cleaner."

…

Still, Tillotson argues the Maple Leaf has succeeded as a flag, something that doesn't always happen with modernist designs.

It's a solid, bold, simple, design that references nature and the wilderness and the kinds of things Canadians like, she says.

"It’s not militaristic or religious, so it's not divisive on these kinds of grounds either."

Read the rest of this story online.