Isabelle Bourgeault-Tassé is a franco-Ontarian native of Sudbury, Ont. She currently lives in Toronto.
On the day of the protest on a Saturday afternoon in December, my father quietly retrieved a musty, green-and-white franco-Ontarian flag from a filing cabinet in the basement, stringing it to a makeshift mast.
My father joined more than 14,000 francophones and francophiles who gathered across the province and Canada to protest dashed hopes of a much-heralded franco-Ontarian university and the decision to abolish the Office of the French Language Services Commissioner.
Above his head, and like many around him, he brandished his flag with pride. As protest chants echoed across a crowd of hundreds in Sudbury clad in green and white, my father turned to my sister and her six-month-old daughter – he had a story to tell them and the generations protesting alongside him.
What he recounted reminds us of why we must continue the fight to preserve and expand our community, connecting ourselves to each other and to our history of resistance through our symbols and language.
The flag he was hoisting and waving was one of the original franco-Ontarian flags, first flown in 1975.
It was a flag he had helped create, born in a shining decade of political, artistic and educational revolution in French Ontario. In 1970s Ontario, important battles for our fundamental linguistic rights were being waged and won. And across the province, youth were redefining what it meant to be franco-Ontarian.
Born of Ontarian, Québécois and Abenaki roots, the founders of the franco-Ontarian flag were a young, spirited band of friends with dreams of creating a political front who also wrote patriotic hymns in their spare time.
Led by Dr. Gaétan Gervais, then a young history professor, the flag’s creation committee comprised Laurentian University students and employees Donald Obonsawin, Normand Rainville, Michel Dupuis and my father, Yves Tassé. An idealist, he quoted Karl Marx from memory, wrote fiery op-eds for the local francophone newspaper and would eventually marry my mother, a radical feminist.
Throughout 1975, the group met often, typically over morning coffee at Laurentian University’s Grand Salon. Talk always turned to symbols, colours, and identity. They made sketches, fashioning the first prototype of the flag with textile purchased from a shop lodged between a Catholic gift shop and a seedy hotel in downtown Sudbury. Jacline England, an administrative assistant at Laurentian, was promptly enlisted to sew the first franco-Ontarian flag by hand.
The flag’s colours were evocative of the landscapes franco-Ontarians had been settling for the past 400 years. Green, for the lush leaves of summer forests; white, for the snowy expanses of our interminable winters.
But as my father recounted to me recently, it was not enough to create a flag. The community, which had previously rejected other provincial flags, had to rally around it and take it up as its own.
The flag creators agreed they would not reveal their names, political, religious or cultural affiliations to the public for the following decades, in the hopes that the community would adopt the flag on its own. It was a poorly kept secret, as the group immediately hit the road, promoting the flag at various franco-Ontarian summits with humility, passion and vigour. Their political tactics sometimes reflected their youthful, rebellious spirit, such as an early-morning guerilla flag-raising on Laurentian University’s campus. My father along with other instigators helped pull down the Ontario flag and put the franco-Ontarian flag up in its place. Shortly afterward, the university locked its flag poles.
Over the decades, the flag has become a rallying point for the franco-Ontarian community. It was celebrated in primary and secondary classrooms as part of a franco-Ontarian cultural curriculum; was determinedly clenched in the fists of protesters during SOS Montfort, a historical battle to save Hôpital Montfort, Ontario’s only French-language university hospital in Ottawa; and after tumultuous battles for recognition, namely in Sudbury, the flag floated above civic buildings across the province.
It is prophetic that the founders of the franco-Ontarian flag are from communities rooted in and outside Ontario and in traditional Indigenous territories, mirroring the way in which our community has grown and thrived. Waves of franco-Ontarians have roots in Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and places in between.
Sociologist Roger Bernard writes “On ne nait pas franco-Ontarien. On le devient.” Which means, we are not born franco-Ontarian, we acquire franco-Ontarian identity. We become it.
This duality of identity, rooted in the two flowers represented on the flag, is what we bring to Canada’s Francophonie: a community with origin stories from both here and elsewhere. That is the lasting legacy of the franco-Ontarian flag.