imperialism – NeoFlags

Saskatchewan

Canada’s provincial flags include some real trainwrecks, but Saskatchewan’s isn’t one of them.

Saskatchewan’s flag does, however, commit the sin of shoving a coat of arms into the corner, which becomes too small to read as soon as you get any distance from it, and just makes the flag look bad. The arms also includes an English lion, which is leftover imperialism, and Canada really needs to get over that.

But this was easy peasy to fix: take out the crest. To fix the visual balance, I adjusted the size and position of the flower, which is a prairie lily, native to the region. The design of the flower is a little overly detailed for a flag, but it’s stylized fairly well, so I left it for the sake of tradition. The green and yellow background represents the province’s forests and its wheat fields (which is why we don’t need the bales of wheat in the coat of arms).

Nova Scotia

This post is at half-mast out of respect for those killed in the recent mass shooting in Nova Scotia. 🙁

The flag of Nova Scotia is trying to explain to people what Nova Scotia means: It’s Latin for New Scotland. To make the point extra clear, they doubled down on it:

- First: the red and yellow shield in the middle is Scotland’s royal coat of arms.
- Second: the background is a reversal of the national flag of Scotland. Instead of a white saltire on a blue field, it’s a blue saltire on a white field. (It isn’t an exact copy: for some reason, Canadian flags are all wider than your typical flags.)

(The Scottish flag is better known as part of the UK’s “Union Jack”, which combines the flags of England, Scotland, and (Northern) Ireland into that blue-white-and-red crisscross mess. It uses a different shade of blue, however.)

As readers of this blog know, I hate shields on flags. So fixing this flag was really, really simple: ditch the overly detailed, clashing-colors coat of arms of a country it isn’t formally connected to… and there you go, New Scotland: you’re done. It’s a simple, elegant design, and if you’re trying to say “we’re a wee bit like Scotland, but no’ actually Scotland”… that’s the way to do it.

Prince Edward Island

If there’s any set of flags proportionally worse than American state flags, it’s Canadian provincial flags. I have family in Canada, so I feel I’m obligated to fix that problem too.

The flag of Prince Edward Island is a “what the fuck is going on here?” flag. Especially if you view it on a white background (which I’m doing as I type this… I gave this web site a gray background for this very reason), it doesn’t even make sense. That alternating red/white border on three sides with the red and white backgrounds is just… inscrutable. It doesn’t work, at all.

The interior is then simply a bunch of symbolic “huh?” At the top is an English royal lion (passant and or, on a gules field) a heraldry symbol of the Prince Edward the place is named for), and the main portion is a drawing of little island with three little oak trees (symbolizing the three geographic sections of Prince Edward Island) and a big strong oak tree (Great Britain) protecting them. Way to suck up to the royals, Edwardians.

I don’t know if anyone has mentioned this, but Canada is no longer ruled or protected or mentored in any way by Great Britain. They’ve kept the old queen on, calling her the Queen of Canada, but that’s not at all the same thing. It’s long past time for the Canadian provinces to drop the various emblems of the former British Empire… and also any sucking-up, while we’re at it.

We start by eliminating the damn lion, of course. And since we’re dealing with a troublesome white field, we need to reinforce that red border a bit… top and bottom will do. That leaves us with the baby-oak-trees parable, which at this point is best chucked into the Atlantic. PEI (or at least Canada as a whole) can take care of itself now, so here it is represented by the silhouette of a singular oak leaf, on its own. Does this remind you of any other flags related to Canada in some way?

(Now, if you have really bad eyesight and squint, you might see the outline of Prince Edward Island in the oak leaf. On the other hand, if you have normal vision, you will see nothing of the sort: PEI looks nothing like this – and it looks even less like the island shown in the old flag. Which is good, because flags should not include maps. Yes, Cyprus: I’m looking at you.)