The Newfoundland Tricolour

I just last night learned an amazing bit of Canadian history, something of which we should be proud. But perhaps there are many other Canadians who, like me, had never heard this. I learned that the flag of Ireland is based on the traditional Newfoundland tricolour--I had assumed the influence was the other way around. But no, the Newfoundland flag, of green, white, and pink, originated in 1843. The Irish flag, green, white, and orange, dates from 1922--and was designed by a man whose father was from Newfoundland.

This summer, I was in Turkey, and visited the Gallipoli battlefields. These have become a national shrine to Australians and New Zealanders, who arrive each summer in their tens of thousands. But one Australian who toured them with me expressed chagrin that he had never learned, in his history classes back home, that the Turkish commander facing his countrymen was the great Kemal Mustafa Ataturk, who became the founder of modern Turkey. He discovered that he had always been told only one side of the story.

For my part, though, my greatest surprise was to discover that beside the Australians and New Zealanders on the Gallipoli beaches stood the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. Granted, there were far fewer men involved; but I, as a Canadian, in hearing much about Gallipoli and the sacrifices of the Australians and New Zealanders, had never heard that there were incipient Canadians involved.

But that's Canada; our history texts tend to the opposite flaw from those of other countries. We ignore our own history in favour of that of other lands.

One more striking example: for a few years in Toronto, I had an apartment that was almost across the street from the site of the Battle of York in the War of !812. This was a significant engagement: the Americans won, and burned down the Upper Canadian capital. It was in retaliation that the British Navy took Washington and burned down the presidential mansion, ever after called the "White House" --reputedly from the whitewash used to cover the scorch marks.

But it took a good bit of research on my part to discover this. There is no monument; not even a plaque. Or rather, there is a monument--to the Katyn Massacre. On this site of a crucial event in Canadian history, our city fathers had seen fit to put instead a memorial to a massacre of Poles in Russia.

This is the Canadian colonial mentality: nothing is important unless it happens outside Canada. Today, we call this "multiculturalism." But it is just Gallipoli over again. Deaths do not matter if they happen in the colonies, to colonials.

It's time we flew our own flags.