History
The Maple Leaf flag replaced the Canadian Red Ensign, which had been, with various successive alterations, in conventional use as a Canadian national flag since 1868. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Lester Pearson, resolutions recommending the new flag were passed by the House of Commons on December 15, 1964, and by the Senate two days later. The flag was proclaimed by Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada, on January 28, 1965, and took effect "upon, from and after" February 15.
National Flag of Canada Day was instituted in 1996 by an Order in Council from Governor General Roméo LeBlanc, on the initiative of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. At the first Flag Day ceremony in Hull, Quebec, Chrétien was confronted by demonstrators against proposed cuts to the unemployment insurance system, and while walking through the crowd grabbed by the neck and pushed aside a protester who had approached him. In 2010, on the flag's 45th anniversary, federal ceremonies were held to mark Flag Day at Winnipeg, St. John's, Ottawa, and at Whistler and Vancouver in conjunction with the XXI Olympic Winter Games. In 2011, Prime Minister Stephen Harper observed Flag Day by presenting two citizens, whose work honoured the military, with Canadian flags which had flown over the Peace Tower. It was announced as inaugurating an annual recognition of patriotism.
Read more about this topic: National Flag Of Canada Day
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)