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Mexico’s flag was chosen by presidential decree. The U.K.’s Union Jack simply mushed together the Scottish, Irish and English flags. But Canada had the doomed task of trusting a multipartisan committee to pick its flag. Flag designers knew this, which is why most of the submissions were awkward totems to compromise. In this typical submission, there’s a Union Jack for anglophones, a fleur-de-lys for francophones and a maple leaf for everyone else.

An Ontario watercolourist was so displeased with Lester B. Pearson’s three-leaf design that they dared declare that it was “for the birds.” Other Pearson-haters filled the flag committee’s mailbox with letters claiming the three-leaf design was a “dull childlike banner” or a “pawn shop sign.” One flag submission was simply an image of the Pearson flag clipped out of the newspaper with the words “poison ivy” scrawled across it.

St. George’s Cross, a fleur-de-lys_and a crude representation of the Fab Four, who were only weeks away from their first and only Canadian tour. It is debatable whether Diefenbaker even knew who the Beatles were, but if this design had passed muster, Canada would have been one of only two countries with recognizable human figures on its flag. The other is Malta, which has a tiny image of St. George.

This isn’t so much a flag as an exhaustive primer in Canadian geography. The top strip is for the Rocky Mountains, the yellow strip honours our grain-growing prairies and the fish strip is for Canada’s “untold numbers of rivers and thousands of lakes.” If this had made the cut, Canada would have pulled ahead of Belize to claim the world record for most distinct colours on a national flag.