I Guess We're Talking About Flag-Jacking Now

I used to think it was funny, but now it's supremely irritating

Wrapping yourself in our flag doesn’t make you Canadian. | Photo by Ksenia Makagonova on Unsplash

I’ve had a busy few weeks. Between my writing here, my part-time job and prepping for my wedding, I’ve been running nonstop and struggling to keep up with the creators I follow.

Sorry, guys. I’ll do better when it’s not so crazy!

But I had a bit of breathing room today, so I was taking a minute to catch up on videos from a fellow Canadian over on YouTube — Guard the Leaf, if anyone is looking for more Canadians to follow.

Tell him I sent you, eh? We need to network and support each other as much as possible these days. He does a great job of helping to promote Canadian creators, and I’d love to pay him back for that good work.

Anyway, as I was getting caught up on videos I missed, I stumbled on one where he discussed the ol’ standby for U.S. citizens traveling abroad. That is, the habit of slapping Canadian Maple leaves on everything and pretending to be one of us.

Now, as he correctly points out, this is not a new phenomenon. This has been going on for a long time.

We’ve got our own anecdotes in my family about being mistaken for ‘Americans’ while traveling and how people in other countries respond; it’s night and day, with many apologies and well-wishes after being told that we’re actually Canadian and not just faking it.

So from that perspective, I used to think it was funny and telling that some U.S. travellers choose to hide behind our flag; I get it. You get better treatment, people are more polite, you’re less likely to get accosted in the street. Understandable.

That said, with everything going on, I’m finding it a lot less funny and a lot more insulting.

We’ve heard over and over again from southern visitors that their country, the United States, is the very best in the whole world. I’ve been told that everyone wants to be ‘American,’ and that’s why people immigrate there from all over.

I’ve been told that U.S. citizens are proud, patriotic and love their flag.

If that’s true, then why do so many feel the need to hide behind mine?

We just took down the Canada mugs, totes and wallet display at my store. Nobody here in Canada buys that stuff; it’s tourist bait. | Photo by Andre Furtado on Unsplash

Canadians weren’t particularly nationalistic before Trump lit the proverbial powder keg with his ‘51st State’ rhetoric.

We’re a largely disconnected people. We’re just as likely to identify ourselves as belonging to a particular region of Canada rather than saying that we’re Canadian when asked.

For example, I used to self-identify as a Maritimer before explaining that I’m from Canada when people would ask where I’m from.

There are a lot of distinctions between a Maritimer and someone born over on the West Coast or Prairies, so that sort of thing matters here. It’s a bit more nuanced than the North-South distinction in the U.S.

Our communities are small, spread out and isolated, and there are divisions along linguistic lines — we have regional dialects that combine two or three languages in some small towns. Someone from Ontario visiting my home town would genuinely struggle to talk to the locals.

Someone from small-town New England in the States can still easily talk with someone from big-city California without much issue, y’know? Not so, here.

We’re a lot more diverse than I think a lot of Americans realize.

Traveling through the United States of America, you see U.S. flags and red-white-and-blue everywhere you look.

Here, you see the Canadian flag on government buildings. You see more Pride flags, Ukrainian flags and Provincial flags than you see the maple leaf.

Thanks to Trump, that’s changing. We now have two or three red and white Canadian flags flying in my neighbourhood, and they’re popping up throughout the city as well.

That’s new. Canadian pride is rising, and it’s a very strange feeling for most of us.

You’re seeing maple leaf stickers on Canadian products at the grocery store, so people know which brands to buy and which ones — the American brands — to avoid. Travel and tourism to the U.S. is dropping like bricks flung off a skyscraper.

The boycott is not a government suggestion, it’s a purely grassroots movement among Canadians.

It’s our way of laying out the battle lines against a country we once saw as friends and allies, and now recognize as a legitimate danger to our safety. As it turns out, the fastest and most effective way to unify Canada was to present us with a foreign threat.

So, thanks for that, Trump. I’m sorry to have to thank you for anything at all.

But because we weren’t all that nationalistic before, it actually wasn’t very common to see Canadians walking around other countries wearing our flag and outwardly advertising ourselves as being from Canada.

We just didn’t tend to think that way; why would we bother?

But for U.S. citizens, things were different. The U.S. doesn’t always have a warm and fuzzy reputation abroad, especially for tourists. There are loads of anecdotes of people being mistreated and verbally abused because they’re from the States, which isn’t cool.

But since Canada’s reputation is a lot nicer, temporarily hijacking our flag and passing yourself off as Canadian used to be seen as an easy way to avoid trouble.

I’ve heard about people doing it for decades.

But in light of the actions of the Trump administration and the rise of fascism in the United States, I think I speak for most Canadians when I say: knock it off.

Leave us out of it. Wave your own flag, our maple leaf is not yours to claim.

Buy Canadian, support Canada, and help us protect ourselves from the threat of Donald Trump’s economic warfare. | Photo by Community Archives of Belleville and Hastings County on Unsplash

Flag-jacking is not a particularly common occurance, thankfully.

It’s historically been an occasional one-off, something someone did because they read it was safer and made for smoother trips. But in the age of Trump, it’s becoming more common and a lot more of an issue.

People are doing it out of embarassment.

I mean heck, during Trump’s first term I found out one of my regulars at the coffee shop I used to work at was born in the States. He lied about being from here just to avoid having to answer awkward political questions.

Again, understandable. And since he actually lives here, I don’t mind all that much.

If he didn’t, I’d have much more serious issues with that kind of lie.

Back in the day, the occasional anecdote about U.S. citizens using our flag to be safe didn’t bug me. I even recommended it to a few of my American friends because I’d seen evidence of how poorly some U.S. travellers were treated outside of the U.S.

I was fully sympathetic back then, as invidual citizens aren’t responsible for the reputation of the entire country. You shouldn’t be talked down to or over-charged or sneered at just because of where you were born; that’s not cool.

We used to be strong allies, so I didn’t mind if you borrowed our flag to be safer when you were on the road.

But now? Our countries are no longer friends. Your country is threatening ours, so hiding behind our flag is no longer cool. Now, it comes across as feeling entitled to use our reputation to protect yourself when you have no right to do so.

And that’s if you’re a sane, progressive person. If you’re a Trump voter, I find it downright offensive.

You don’t get to vote for the man who threatened my country with annexation, said he plans to destroy our economy to make us easier to conquer and regularly insults us as ‘not a valid country,’ only to turn around and hide behind us to avoid getting the treatment you deserve.

If you love your country, then own where you come from. You’re proud to be American, right MAGA?

If you aren’t proud of it, ask yourself why. Then own it and be gracious in the face of other countries’ reaction to you. Own it and accept it. That’s the price of living and voting in a country that elected somebody like Trump.

It’s shitty, but there it is. Resolve to make your national reputation better in the future.

You can start by getting the Tangerine Tyrant out of power. For a start.

But don’t you dare lie about being Canadian. I used to let it slide, but I won’t anymore. If I see people doing this out in the wild, I plan to call them out. I plan to tell them exactly what I think, and why what they’re doing is offensive.

Don’t worry. I’ll do it politely, eh?

Solidarity wins.

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