Patriotism Means More Than Waving Flags

A Commentary by Doug Draper

As we join our American neighbours in celebrating another Canada Day and Fourth of July, this dispatch comes to you from ‘Canada’s most patriotic city’.

That’s right! This column comes to you from my home office in the heart of Thorold – a city that has for the past half decade or so crowned itself Canada’s most patriotic city because, on a per capita basis at least, we apparently fly more Canadian flags here during the Canada Day celebrations than any other city in the country.

I put out my Canadian flags too, just as I have long before this patriotic city contest, or whatever it is, got started.  And it does seem to be true, if you take a cruise through Thorold’s downtown and some of the streets leading in to the downtown area, that there is a lot of red and white flapping in the wind out there. According to a report published around this time last year in one of the local papers, a total of 6,179 flags were unfurled within Thorold’s city limits – a pretty impressive number in a municipality with a population of slightly over 18,000.

That’s about one flag for every three people and I can’t help but wonder how they go about tallying up the number of flags right down to the last 179. Do they have the people going around reading our water meters counting flags now too? If so, maybe those meter readers ought to get a raise.

Forget about scratching any more hair out of your head wondering if the number of flags we’ve got out there is real, though. It’s all in the spirit of fun and the more power to Thorold if this annual flag fest thing does even more than the ‘the ships that climb the mountain’ (up and down those Welland Canal flight locks on the Niagara Escarpment) to put our community on the map.

The only question I’ve always had is this as I join each year in the festivities. I’m not so sure all of this flag waving makes the people of my municipality any more patriotic than people living in Niagara Falls, Port Colborne, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Grimsby or Fort Erie or any other community across this region or country. And let me give you at least one reason why I have my doubts. If instead of flag waving, you measured patriotism by the number of grown-up people who bother to go out and exercise one of their most important responsibilities, and I’m talking about voting in elections, slightly more than 38 per cent of the eligible voters in Thorold cast a ballot in last fall’s municipal elections.

That more or less matches the pathetic turnout in most other municipalities, but you would think that in Canada’s most patriotic city, at least half of those who have the privilege to do something people in other parts of the world are literally putting their lives on the line to do – participate in a democratic election – at least 50 per cent of the eligible voters would take a few minutes out of their day to visit their polling station.

This is not about jumping on a community that has been my home for the better party of 30 years and has a lot of good things going for it. Thorold probably isn’t much different than any other community in this province or country where token gestures like waving flags and standing up for the national anthem are passed off as just about all one has to do as a citizen other than watching Canadian Idol and grumbling about paying taxes.

Take this spring’s federal election in Canada, where barely more than 60 per cent of the eligible voters across this region and country – one of the lowest turnouts for a federal election in Canadian history – bothered to vote. There was a real show of patriotism for you and I am already wondering how many people who didn’t vote will be complaining if the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, which now has a majority, cuts some of the services  (and the government has already warned it is going to be cutting) they feel are important to the quality of their lives.

This Oct. 6 we will be having what is arguably one of the most important provincial elections in recent history. There is a lot at stake, including our health care, how we are going to generate and pay for energy in the decades ahead, saving good paying jobs, and on and on. But if the 2007 Ontario election is any benchmark, where there was a record-low turnout for a provincial election of 53 per cent – many of us won’t be walking the walk when it comes to patriotism again

Get engaged in what is going on people. There is more to patriotism than waving flags. And remember this, even if it has become a kind of bumper sticker slogan – ‘If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.’

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