Alberta separatists, having run our uninspiring Tory Blue provincial flag up the metaphorical flagpole and declared it to be a symbol of independence and “absolutely gorgeous” to boot, have their knickers in a twist because the display of the flag in some businesses has become a topic of a teapot tempest.
Being a movement steeped in grievance, that subset of Albertans who have adopted independence as their raison d’être are now clutching their pearls over members of the largest private-sector union in Alberta filing a grievance over the flags hanging from the rafters of some Alberta Safeway stores.
While a strong argument can be made that the Alberta’s Boring Blue Banner flops on both inspirational and vexillographical grounds, no one in Alberta can deny that the blue flag is now irrevocably associated with the separatist movement.
This has been true since Convoy-adjacent pickup truck drivers here in Wild Rose Country replaced the black F-Trudeau flags that once snapped over their tailgates and truck nuts with the more pedestrian blue standard.
It may be possible for reasonable people to take the blue flag back eventually, as has happened in Alberta with Canada’s striking Maple Leaf Flag that for a spell after the Ottawa occupation was flown almost exclusively by the Maple MAGA set. But that will take time and effort, possibly more than it’s worth.
In the meantime, it’s hard to feel much sympathy for folks who have successfully turned the Alberta flag into a symbol of separatism and are now suffering the vapours because others are associating it with, uh, the same thing.
As befits a group also known for firearms fetishism, separatists seem to have adopted the familiar sounding refrain that flags don’t annoy people, people annoy people. (Sure, but tell that to a mom with young readers in the house whose neighbour insists on flying an F-Carney pennant from his balcony.)
Which brings us back to the actual grievance by members of United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 401. As you probably suspected, there’s a backstory.
Safeway employees represented by UFCW 401 are in bargaining with Nova-Scotia-based Sobeys Inc., which acquired Canada Safeway in 2013.
In the midst of a tough round of bargaining – and bargaining with grocery chains is always tough for working people – the company took to complaining that sales aren’t strong enough to give the workers what they’re seeking. It was about then that for reasons unknown the blue bunting started appearing, suspended from the rafters of Alberta Safeway stores.
The company said it was part of an effort to promote Alberta products. Some customers said, nope, you’re supporting separatism. Employees wondered why the hell their employer was adopting a marketing strategy that had the potential to drive away more customers than it attracted.
“While the Employer complains about the competitive nature of the retail grocery environment, they themselves make Safeway uncompetitive,” the employees’ grievance reads in part.
It continues: “It is a simple hard truth that the Alberta flag has become a symbol of the Alberta Independence Movement. The effect of Employer’s conduct is to politicize the workplace, stigmatize its business, and associate the enterprise with the Independence Movement. This is embarrassing and hurtful to employees.”
Moreover, UFCW members worry about getting caught up in conflict between customers over the Alberta Government’s irresponsible separation referendum, which the employer’s flag waving seems likely to provoke.
In a statement on UFCW 401’s website, the union said: “Online commentary by customers has also started to reveal that shoppers are starting to get angry at Safeway for presenting Alberta flags in their stores. At a time when workers need more hours, full-time jobs, and more pay, why is Sobeys threatening their business by betting on a losing cause?”
The union noted in the same piece it had polled its own members and found that more than 80 per cent oppose separation.
Meanwhile, the statement noted, as of last week, UFCW 401 Safeway members and Sobeys were back at the bargaining table with the help of a government-appointed mediator. “Like the Alberta flag issue, there has been zero movement on the issues that are critically important to you and your family,” the union told its members. There will likely be a strike vote in September, it said.
As for the merits of Alberta’s “gorgeous” flag, while there is no universal law that says a flag must be designed in a particular way, there are certainly generally agreed upon conventions of flag design.
To summarize various sources, a good flag should be simple enough for a child to draw from memory, use no more than three colours, use meaningful symbolism in a distinctive way, and avoid complicated crests, seals or words on the fabric. Plus, it shouldn’t look like another flag. On all these grounds, at least, Alberta’s flag had flopped before it flapped!
Alberta’s flag was officially adopted in June 1968 in the wake of Canada’s national flag debate of 1963 and 1964, during which Conservatives, naturally, opposed our distinctive Maple Leaf Flag. To this day they complain it is Liberal Red and imagine a dark conspiracy to make it so.
Conservatives had demanded that instead we hang onto the Canadian Red Ensign – essentially the ensign of the British Merchant Navy with a Canadian coat of arms slapped on it. It’s weird, though: the same people still complaining about the Maple Leaf being red seem to have forgotten that the Red Ensign was, well, also red.
The Red Ensign, which was never officially Canada’s flag, still has a few whiny defenders.
“The left smeared the beautiful and historic Red Ensign as a symbol of white nationalism, despite 115,000 war dead having given their lives under the Ensign, notably in the defeat of fascism,” whinged the always annoying Jason Kenney, Alberta’s premier from the spring 2019 to the fall of 2022, in a tweet last week. With a name like Red Ensign, though, you’d think lefties would have loved it!
Reality check: The left, and a good many on the right and in the centre too, wanted to strike the Red Ensign because it wasn’t distinctly Canadian. Moreover, it is an undeniable fact that the Red Ensign has been adopted in recent years as a symbol by far-right hate groups.
At any rate, since Ernest Manning was Social Credit premier when the Legislature approved Alberta’s timid design, although not for much longer, I don’t suppose even lefties will blame Conservatives for the fact it inconveniently displays their party colour. A petition calling for a provincial flag was submitted to Mr. Manning by the Women’s Auxiliaries of the Alberta Social Credit League in 1966. And if memory serves, Social Credit preferred the colour green.
By the way, only Nova Scotia’s, Quebec’s, British Columbia’s and Prince Edward Island’s provincial flags predate Canada’s adoption of the Maple Leaf Flag on Feb. 15, 1965.
That may be a factor in why they all have more striking designs than several of the flags adopted in the wake of the national debate.
New Brunswick adopted its flag less than two weeks later. Ontario and Manitoba rebranded the Red Ensign with their provincial crests in May 1965. Saskatchewan adopted its evocative green-and-yellow flag in 1969, and Newfoundland and Labrador reinterpreted Britain’s Union Flag and adopted the result in 1980. Nova Scotia made the flag it had used informally since 1858 official in 2013.
The territorial flags of Yukon (1968) and the Northwest Territories (1969) also date to the post Flag Debate period. Nunavut’s became official at the time of the territory’s formation on April 1, 1999.
In 2001, the North American Vexillological Association rated all state, provincial and territorial flags on the continent and ranked Alberta’s 35th out of 72. Midway is better than the bottom, I suppose, but it is not a recommendation. Out of the Canadian flags, NAVA ranked only Manitoba’s and Ontario’s lower – I’ll leave it to you, dear readers, to figure out why.
Perhaps since Alberta’s separatists have ruined it for the rest of us anyway, we should make a future project of designing a better Alberta flag in a better colour. Readers are invited to submit tasteful designs.
Flag fetishists are just plain weirdos. Seriously, who is obsessed with flags for anything other than peaceful purposes? There is no one.
Those who obsess over flags are warlike and emotionally inadequate in every conceivable way. If you’re whole personality is wrapped up in a boring piece of cloth, I suspect you never had much of a personality to begin with.
It’s like with the American flag. There’s one on every front in any American home or business. Why? Because Americans have no personality. They are wrapped up in manufactured myths that they are the wisest, the bravest, the most giving, and the most caring. America is a cult, and soon this cult will fall.
In the wrong town if you don’t have Old Glory fluttering from your front porch someone might knock on the door demanding to know if you’re a closet Commie.
I humbly submit a plain white surrender flag with a silhouette of a pump jack as the official flag of Alberta.
That sums things up perfectly.
Let us boycott Safeway and you will see how fast those flags come down. Money is their religion.
Hold off on boycotting Safeway until there’s a strike. That, of course, is exactly what the UFCW members are trying to prevent. DJC
“”Excellent! I cried. “Elementary,” said he.”:
“Sheldon Cooper presents Fun with Flags: Episode 1”
Flag re-design suggestion: edit the mountains to show what they will look like after strip-mining.
good one
When I see an Alberta flag in a yard, or on the hi-way, I do think separatist. I think it’s because, every time I see a separatist rally, they’re waving the Alberta flag. And it’s not just one, it’s multiple flags. So for people to associate the flag, with the movement, is understandable…, could even be subconscious. It’s sad, but unfortunately true.
Let us not forget that the premier of Alberta spent $280,000 on red carpet for her office. She loves red that much. Maybe she thinks she’s important, too.
Safeway suddenly took an interest in promoting Alberta produce? Perhaps they sell Alberta grapes to go along with those Canadian oranges I saw earlier this year. Will they hang those Alberta flags upside down now?
Vexillological – what a great word! Cultural appropriation of our flag by separatists is indeed vexing and not at all logical. They should design their own damned flag and leave our flag – however inadequate – alone.
Flags are tribal symbols, plain and simple. Always have been, always will be. Since tribalism in all forms gives me the willies, I’m deeply wary of anybody who wants to fly any flag, anywhere, anytime, for any ostensible reason – with the POSSIBLE exception of oppressed groups, the problem being that people can twist/distort claims of “oppression”. Flags are very dangerous things. (But I very much appreciate the tangential discussion of vexillology and highly recommend the 99% Invisible episode on the subject: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/vexillology-revisited-fixing-worst-civic-flag-designs-america/ )
Ted Morton, Preston Manning, Stephen Harper, and even Danielle Smith (as the Wildrose leader) all supported the Firewall Agenda, which also connects to Alberta separation. Peter Lougheed shot the idea right down, because he could see how bad it was. Despite Ralph Klein’s many flaws as premier of Alberta, he didn’t support the Firewall Agenda either. As the premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith is back to supporting the separatists, while claiming she isn’t one. Her own chief of staff, and former Wildrose floor crossing colleague, Rob Anderson, had a hand in composing The Free Alberta Strategy. Danielle Smith is letting the separatists have their way, while she and the UCP still don’t care about the Forever Canada petition, from Thomas Lukaszuk. We need to dump the UCP, because they are so bad.
This flag kerfuffle is likely just a preview of all the weird silliness we will be forced to endure over the next several months. I hope we can eventually get back to the place where people can just happily fly both the Canadian and Alberta flags together without there being some overt political message, but that is not where we are at now. Referendums like the ones being imposed on us now are very socially divisive and corrosive.
Perhaps the grocery chain not being locally run and politically astute didn’t realize the political minefield they were getting into with this, so now it has become difficult and embarrassing for them to climb down. However, unless they are even dumber that I believe, they must have by now at least realized this is not going to help their sales. It may do the opposite by seeming to put a sentiment forward that the majority are not keen on.
I don’t have a problem with the Alberta flag, except how it has now been hijacked for a political cause. The Red Ensign was fine too, although really not relevant to modern Canada and it hasn’t been for a long time now. However, it is sad to see it taken over like some Canadian version of the Confederate flag by people who seem to have big problems with diversity. This was not what those who fought in our great wars with it were fighting for.
Since there is no legal or constitutional way for any province to secede from the Canadian federation, I’ve been inclined to think of the “separatist” referendum as political tantrum akin to “hold-my-bweff-til-I-turn-bwoo” in hopes of getting some kind of “distinct society” advantage like many Albertans think Quebec got during Lévesque and Parizeau’s bête noire period (remind that all provinces already have “sovereignty association” and that Quebec is and was always distinct without further adieu).
Naturally many if not most secessionists sincerely believe they will win independence if a simple majority of Albertans vote to secede, but that’s an ideal so extremely partisan that it can’t properly be called politics if politics be how public policy gets done.
Politics has to work to be politics—as in, “the art of the possible,” in this case what’s legally and constitutionally possible. On top of that the separatists don’t even have what’s psephologically possible—that is, there aren’t enough of them to win a referendum anyway. But even if they did, it still wouldn’t be enough to amend the Constitution so’s to allow secession. And, as we know, if it ain’t constitutional, it can’t be legal, at least not without— in a limited number of cases of which secession isn’t one— resort to the temporary “notwithstanding clause.” You could say the referendum is therefore at least ‘triple-mooted.’ But, hey!— assign each one a different hue and you got the basis of a pretty good tricolour flag, no?
Hafta concede that some ostensible separatists think if they pretend hard enough to hold Canadian unity ransom, they’ll get some kind of reward for the performance, and that would hafta be conceded as politics of a kind, perhaps perverse, but not more. The referendum has about it an unmistakable whiff of Freedom Convoy 2022 when, as we recall, the truckers wished to present the Governor General a manifesto which interpreted the Constitution in a way that would allow the overthrow of Trudeau’s four-month-old Liberal government and replace it with a provisional government of their own design that Her Excellency Mary Simon could, they maintained, legally recognize. Just one of the reasons the Jan6-copycat performance was soon rebranded “Freedumb Convoy,” a good four years before the Orange-Goo-Tanned tRump seized upon the “b” in “dumb” and added it to his repertoire ad nauseam. If this be “politics” at all, it has to be very nearly the lowest level.
But as long as they’re only pretending secession is probable if not nearly impossible, it’s fitting to use the official vexillological symbol of a federated Canadian province to represent an independence movement that’s really only for show—otherwise a true independence flag would be something different—maybe something in black like the battle flag of Diagolon, say. I get that the official flag is supposed to assuage voters’ fear of change, to present a soothing familiarity, and to imply that a Dumbfederate State of Albetar wouldn’t be much different than federation within Canada. But if you allow one repurposing of the official flag it would be hypocritical not to allow any other repurposing by, say, the United Food and Commercial Workers’ Union Local 401. The triple-irony here probably deserves its own, unique tricolour. (One wonders if the UCP will legislate something like the prohibiting rival parties from using the name “conservative” on their various regalia.)
Now that the jig has been run up the pole of controversy and confusion, perhaps the separatists ought to consider Canada’s black&white “stealth ensign”—maybe with a lone star in the canton to distinguish it from the red&white Maple Leaf canton I wish every Canadian provincial ensign should display. Just a thought…
Danielle Smith of course became premier by agreeing like a brazen hussy on the price of diagonal disco with the Take-Back-Alberta faction which commandeered the UCP for the room—uh—I mean, the purpose. Hafta give it to her that while her position is probably more superficially partisan than she would like, while the delicacy of her present situation has exceeded or will soon exceed her political capacity, while just because she has access to powerful political tools and processes doesn’t mean she can use them well, and that hers is a record of exceptionally bad politics —having helped destroy two parties of the right and likely to make it three—, she is nonetheless doing politics, admittedly somewhat more like getting policy done than her most chauvinististic separatist supporters can do. It’s not good policy to do the Quebec bête noire so amateurishly (it would be better if she was a true connoisseur), and her resorts to dishonesty, duplicity, and deception are only politics in the basest sense.
But I have to retract some of my previous characterizations of her as “gormless” because she has at least heeded potential prosecution for sedition and/or treason by not boasting like separatist leaders that negotiations for financial help to secede are already underway with the tRump administration. No, instead she heads down to MAGA Logo for photo-ops with The Donald because, you know, a picture is worth a thousand words—especially ones wisely left unsaid in public.
The precarity of her dilemma is matched only by its complexity. As Nenshi observes, she plays a separatist to her TBA benefactors but a federalist to the general electorate. It can’t be easy so she’ll get another retraction from me if she can successfully walk this high wire. She knows more about the various factions of separatists —the Mavericks, the Buffalos, the Wexiteers, the APP, the street-preachers and convoy truckers, &c, than I do, but here we’re talking of quartering in the heraldic sense, not cantoning in the vexillogical sense. Let’s just say that somewhere below the tinfoil helm of the UCP arms should be a motto only Donald F tRump could suggest: Referendumb on Dumbocracy.
If the seppies wished to use a piece of cloth as a rallying symbol as well as something to make their blue eyes pop they should have gone with a sky blue pachmina shawl. They could wave it like a flag if need be or wrap it tastefully around their shoulders on those chilly rally mornings.
No doubt if Dingy Smith gets her way, by Order in Council just before a long weekend, the Cross of St. George at the top of the flag will soon be replaced with the star and stripes from the other side of the 49th parallel. Maybe they will throw a real twist by having 50 stars and one tiny maple leaf?
I suppose there’s an argument for making one-quarter of the flag black to represent petroleum’s share of our GDP. As for the rest, rainbows and unicorns would be fine with me.
A redesigned ‘banner of arms’ flag for Alberta: https://krikienoid.github.io/flagwaver/#?src=https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FcSHCIC9.png
Not bad, Ryan. Personally, I’d drop the cross. Too Christian! DJC
Why do the separatists love that flag so much?
“The red St. George’s cross on a white background is an allusion to the arms of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which once controlled what is now Alberta, as well as to the English origin of the Company.”
https://www.gg.ca/en/heraldry/public-register/project/1206
I think it goes further than that, right back to the Crusades. Certain separatists use images of crusading knights all the time in their social media. They are warrior saints in their own minds, on a mission from God to convert the heathens and seize territory that is not rightfully theirs. They aspire to use whatever means necessary to achieve this end, including bloody battle. It might sound a bit delusional because it is. Modern-day numpties sitting in their basements have delusions of grandeur that make them very dangerous. This could lead to violence in real life but it will not end in personal glory for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George%27s_Cross
Some see themselves as Roman Centurions and display Ottawa Senators logos. Maybe they’re fans. According to Wikipedia, “The club’s logo is the head of a Roman general, a member of the Senate of the Roman Republic in a gold semi-circle.” Some use a combination of all this imagery. Maybe it makes sense in their minds. One thing’s certain. They want a fight.
We definitely need a new Alberta flag when the dust settles. This one is tainted. Maybe dust is the perfect symbol of modern Alberta.