Ontario may have the second-to-worst provincial flag according to NAVA’s recent survey, but the beautiful Franco-Ontarian flag was just recognized by vote on June 21 2001 in Queen's Park (Ontario's provincial parliament) as representing the province's francophone community.   Members of all political parties voted for the motion presented by Liberal Member of Parliament Jean-Marc Lalonde (opposition).  The flag will be raised on the Parliament building on June 24 2001, Saint-Jean-Baptist Day, patron saint of French-Canadians.  Ontario will thus become the second province to fly its francophone minority's flag, after New Brunswick, which flies the Acadian flag on its Legislative Assembly.

The event was well received by the community, although some influential members expressed the wish that the Conservative government do more than symbolic actions for the promotion of French In Ontario.  Indeed, recently, two events made the Franco-Ontarians angry against their government.  The one that mobilized most people was the government's decision to appeal a court judgment that declared unconstitutional the decision to close down the province's only French-language hospital (in Ottawa).  The second was the lack of political will by the government to declare officially bilingual the new city of Ottawa (created by the merger of Ottawa with its immediate suburbs), Canada's capital and an important cultural center for the Franco-Ontarians. (In the end, the city did declare itself bilingual, but without sanction by Queen's Park).  Not to mention frustration caused by the refusal of large department stores in Ottawa to put up bilingual signs, although the same stores did so in Montreal to accommodate the anglophone minority there.  Franco-Ontarians still remember when the government tried to take their language out of their schools during the First World War.

This official recognition of the flag comes three weeks before the Games of the Francophonie, which will be held in the federal capital region of Ottawa-Hull.  The Franco-Ontarian flag is a vertical 1:2 green and white (representing the Ontarian Summer and Winter), with a white fleur de lis in the center of the hoist square with obvious symbolism and a green styl­ized trillium (the official provincial flower is the white trillium) in the center of the fly square.  The flag was first flown at the French-language Universitè de Sudbury (today called Universitè Laurentienne).  It was designed by a group of students from that university on the initiative of their history professor, Gaètan Gervais, and in the honor of Camille Lemieux, an editorialist, who had pledged for the adoption of a distinctive Franco-Ontarian flag in the 1950s, shortly after Quebec's flag was adopted.

Until 1948, French-Canadians in Quebec, New England, Ontario and Western Canada made use of the Carillon flag, ancestor of Quebec's current Fleurdelys6. (A common faux pas is to confuse French-Canadians and the Acadians of Atlantic Canada and Maine, who's culture and history is significantly separate). Quebec's move was in line with the shift in identity that was operating from French-Canadians to Quèbècois.  As a result, the concept of a large French-Canadian nation dissolved and local francophone flags were adopted in North America.  In 1977, the French-Canadian Association of Ontario (ACFO) adopted the flag created in 1975 and it has since flown in every French-speaking villages and towns in front of schools, Desjardins financial coops, community centers and private homes, often next to the Canadian and Ontarian flags.

Americans are often puzzled by the importance given to French speakers in Canada; a past NAVA president even once told me he didn't understand why provincial French-Canadian associations bothered to adopt flags, while Italian-Canadians or other groups didn't.  One has to understand that in many parts of the country as well as parts of the Northern US, French­Canadians were the first explorers if not the first settlers (hence the many French place names in the Midwest like Des Moines, Joliet, Racine, Detroit, etc.). The French presence in Ontario dates back 350 years.  French-Canadians never experienced the French revolution because they were under British rule by then, hence the insignificance of modern French symbols to them.  In fact, the word French-Canadian itself is fairly recent; the original meaning of "Canadian" being a French descendant born in Canada. 

Although Ontario's native French-speaking population represents only about 5% of the province's total population (compare New Brunswick where Acadians represent close to the third), there are strong francophone concentrations in the Eastern and Northern parts of the province.  More important, the half million strong Franco-Ontarian community represents just over half of Canada's francophone population outside Quebec and is twice as large as New Brunswick's.