“Taking a leaf from Canada’s flag debate”

The NZ Herald has published an article today by historian Grant McLachlan with his opinions about the flag process. I’d previously been curating examples of the local media coverage, but had not discussed it of late. This pause was mainly due to the numerous self-promotion pieces surrounding particular flag submissions and a general lack of in-depth reporting critiquing the process, our identity and the flag designs. Thus, it was pleasing to see some interesting points made in McLachlan’s piece.

McLachlan starts off by highlighting the symbols present in the Canadian submissions and their similarities to the themes seen in the New Zealand process.

In Canada during 1964, initial designs proposed by a “special flag committee” were rejected. Canadians had submitted 3541 designs. Of those, 2136 contained the maple leaf (their silver fern), 408 contained Union Jacks, 389 contained beavers (their Kiwi), and 359 contained Fleurs-de-lys (their Koru/Southern Cross).

This is a fascinating example of another country’s struggle with a bias towards existing symbols and how they subsequently featured prominently in the Canadian submissions.

The flag.govt.nz team provided some “insights on flag designs” from the New Zealand submissions where we can see the themes and ideas used to represent “what we stand for” or more appropriately our people, country and culture. Unsurprisingly these themes (for example; peace, multiculturalism, independence growth, strength and sport), were illustrated with symbols influenced by their existing usage in New Zealand’s visual language. The Southern Cross (featured in 2919 submissions), Koru (1397) and Fern (1375) made up roughly a third of the submissions, with the Kiwi (440) trailing behind with the Union Jack (461). Note: of a total of 10,000+ submissions, many featured more than one symbol.

The flagpost.nz site by Thomas Le Bas & Design Democracy provides further in-depth analysis of the symbols and colours used in the submissions.

The public mind has offered up a vast variety of icons and symbols; Moa, Matariki, Waka, and even the odd laser-Kiwi and bicycle. However, the most common symbols across the flag submissions have been quite clear. These have been the Southern Cross, the Fern, and the Koru.

You can read more about the insights related to the submissions symbols & meanings along with a detailed breakdown of the use of colour throughout the designs on flagpost.nz.

Unlike New Zealand, the sentiment for change in Canada was very different. As usual, Wikipedia has plenty of information about “The Great Canadian Flag Debate”:

In 1958, an extensive poll was taken of the attitudes that adult Canadians held toward the flag. Of those who expressed opinions, over 80% wanted a national flag entirely different from that of any other nation, and 60% wanted their flag to bear the maple leaf.

It was still controversial, yet the majority of those who wanted a new flag were aligned with the idea of using the maple leaf. However, as McLachlan points out, the public mood changed on the announcement of the process.

Canada’s popular opinion was as fickle as ours. It went from being strongly in favour of a flag change to being strongly against when their Prime Minister announced the process to consider alternatives.

In this YouTube video titled “Canadian Flag Design Jeered” you can see the controversy captured by the media at the time.

One of the most amusing sections in McLachlan’s article is his opinions on our Prime Minister John Key’s (flip-flop) views in support of different designs. They illustrate how political both the process in New Zealand and Canada became, despite attempts to position it as anything but…

Key’s inconsistent public comments are the result of internal party rumblings. His original “doodle” was a silver fern on a black flag. He then strangely surrendered his support for a black flag due to Isis also having one.

Key surrendered our national colours to terrorists.

What I suspect really happened was that the National Party hierarchy protested at the removal of the Southern Cross from the flag, which appears on their party logo, at the expense of a silver fern, which appears on Labour’s.

I’ll write more about the use of black and the ISIS flag at some other point, for now though I find McLachlan’s thoughts about the potential impact of political party logos hilarious.

Finally, the thing that stood out the most and with which I whole-heartedly agree with McLachlan on is the irony that many of the final forty flags do not meet the published guidelines:

The greatest flaw in the process is that, of the 40 flag designs selected by the Flag Consideration Panel, only a handful meet the criteria of their design guide and their video describing “What makes a good flag design.”

Here’s part of the transcript from the “what makes a good flag design” video that DINZ helped create with the Flag Consideration Panel:

The Designers Institute of New Zealand have outlined five principles of design and how they can be applied to flags.

These five principles are: simplicity, colour, the rule of thirds, symmetry and asymmetry, and context.

The first is simplicity.

Flag design is an exercise in simplicity: the composition of basic elements in a defined field, a reduced colour palette, and no language.

The process should be reductive. It’s as much about what’s not included as what is.

No doubt there will be further critique of the process and finalists on the “long-list”. For now, the parallels to The Great Canadian Flag Debate are interesting to consider.