To many Canadians now, the U.S. flag is about as welcome as the plague flag that quarantine ships once flew.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
One day last week, on a pole outside city hall in Canada’s capital there fluttered the flag of a foreign nation. That’s not the problem, though. Ceremonial flag-raisings can occur for any number of diplomatic and celebratory reasons. The issue was which flag it was: the U.S. Stars and Stripes.
The U.S. flag is a symbol of patriotism to many Americans. It may be remembered as a banner of freedom and resolve during the Second World War and Cold War. Until recently, it was the calling card of a close ally.
To many Canadians now, though, it’s about as welcome as the plague flag that quarantine ships once flew.
How could this have happened, readers might reasonably wonder? The answer, as self-serving as it is unsatisfying, is: that’s what the rules were.
This is why the flag-raising is of a piece with recent swimming pool shutdowns during searing heat in Toronto. Both stemmed from a blind adherence to process rather than the outcome, leading to a ludicrous result.
According to the City of Ottawa, the flag-raising was nothing unusual. The city’s protocol allows foreign flags to be flown on those country’s national days. The U.S. flag was raised on July 4.
But the policy allows for opt-outs. A 2022 request by Russia to fly its flag at city hall was denied as “outrageous” by the then-mayor Jim Watson, who was showing solidarity with Ukraine. So did not the current mayor, Mark Sutcliffe, consider the optics of a U.S. flag in this nation’s capital in 2025?
Apparently he did not, and nor did it occur to anyone to update the protocol. Not six months ago, when Donald Trump started floating his desire for a national takeover. And not a few weeks ago, when a Canadian died in U.S. immigration custody.
A similar lack of forethought was at the heart of the pool problems in Toronto. The city has undergone a series of heat waves and official advice was for residents to find places to stay cool, including at municipal pools. The only problem, no one seems to have prepared for the fact that lifeguards will also get hot.
At several pools the staff became overheated and decided to go off duty. According to Mayor Olivia Chow, this determination is left to the individual. When that happened, pools had to close for safety reasons.
The city reacted by boosting staffing, so that lifeguards could spell each other off, and adding shade and medical support. Those are perfectly good solutions. But this should have been a contingency plan that was ready to be triggered as soon as the mercury hit a certain threshold. Proactively, not reactively.
One can’t blame the people actually on the ground in Ottawa or Toronto. It would be wrong if a random municipal worker at city hall was making unilateral decisions over which flags he or she deemed suitable. And the person who is sweltering in the heat is probably, in fact, the best judge of how incapacitated they are.
The real problem is the lack of imagination among their bosses. They should have foreseen where the policies could lead and then prepared for it. But no one had the inclination to think ahead.
The City of Ottawa could, instead of letting the mayor opt out, make the city’s top politician accountable by putting the onus on them to approve explicitly any flag being raised. Or staff could prepare a list of hostile countries whose flags aren’t welcome. If putting the United States on such a list is a diplomatic bridge too far, in spite of Mr. Trump’s drumbeat of hostility, perhaps end the practice of flying foreign flags at city hall.
Toronto council, which unanimously declared a climate emergency in 2019, should think more about how the city must adapt to hotter summers. Pools need to stay open longer, especially during a heat wave. Another obvious gap: knowing that people will take refuge in parks on warm evenings, fix water fountains and stop locking toilets at night.
The situations in both Ottawa and Toronto garnered floods of criticism because the public instinctively grasped what the bureaucracy had missed. The point was not that the correct process had been followed.
The outcome mattered: pools shouldn’t close in a heat wave and the flag of country aiming to harm Canada shouldn’t fly at city hall.