For non-Canadian readers (which last time I bothered to check were the absolute majority of readers), it’s perhaps not clear why flying of the Canadian national flag is an ongoing issue here in the dysfunctional Dominion. In short, Prime Minister Trudeau ordered the flag to be flown at half-staff at federal government and military sites after the publicization of unmarked graves of First Nations children who died during their stay at various residential schools across the country. (I must note that this wasn’t actually unknown beforehand … it just got enough media attention that PM Look-at-my-socks Photo-op decided it was a good idea to ostentatiously pretend that this was previously unknown and (to some) provided further evidence of the “ongoing genocide” of Canada’s problematic relations with First Nations people. The flag-lowering was ordered in May and no end date was specified to the observance. Like ritualistic “land acknowledgements” this did absolutely nothing to actually improve the living conditions of any members of First Nations bands, but was balm to the soul of virtue-signallers across the country. In Friday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh updates us on the state of play:

This morning the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) made its much-anticipated move in the chess game that has developed over the display of the Canadian flag on federal government buildings. As you will recall, the flags on all these buildings, including those abroad, were lowered to half-mast in May, when unmarked graves were discovered on the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., and have stayed there ever since. The prime minister said then that, although the lowering of the flags is his exclusive responsibility, he wouldn’t allow them to be flown normally again until “Indigenous communities and leadership” agreed that they could go back up.

Was this elliptical, confounding phrase intended to refer to the AFN? We wondered at the time who was capable of giving the necessary permission, if not the AFN: it appears, quite naturally, to have accepted the position, which is bound to be controversial if made explicit, that it is the exclusive political instrument for Indigenous communities.

In any case the AFN announced its solution to the stalemate this morning. Its executive committee, after consulting with elders, suggests raising the Maple Leaf on Sunday alongside an orange “Every Child Matters” banner. Both flags would go to half-mast on Monday, Nov. 8, this being Indigenous Veterans Day. The flags then go back up, and the Canadian one comes down again on Nov. 11, according to the usual tradition. From then on, both flags fly until “all of our children are recovered, named and symbolically or physically returned to their homelands with proper ceremony.”

There are Canadians who have no use for a national flag; some, no doubt, dream of carrying national self-abnegation to the point of having a fully transparent flag. But even these progressives would have to admit that it is hard to imagine a sequence of events allowing some future prime minister and some future AFN executive to get together and say, “Great job, everybody, the orange one can come down now.” This is a proposed permanent adoption of two national flags (and who is to say it won’t catch on among private citizens?). Yet it could still be argued that the AFN is letting the prime minister off the hook lightly, in exchange for a symbolic political victory of its own.

With the approach of Remembrance Day, the flag flying at half-mast was becoming a symbol, not of Canadian remorse, but of one politician’s daft impulsiveness and inability to act with even the immediate future in mind. As much as some approved of the original gesture, the prime minister should never have been allowed to treat the flag as personal property or as a subject for political negotiation.

In what other country would this be contemplated? Where else could a head of government do something like this without being warned or grimaced at or, outside the pages of the National Post, castigated very much? Indeed, how was this particular power of jerking the flag up and down on government buildings ever assigned to a prime minister in the first place? It is a little anomalous that this file doesn’t belong to the Governor General, who wrangles other flag-like symbols like medals and heraldry.