MAPLE LEAF HAS BEEN THROUGH A LOT THESE LAST FEW YEARS

It's still an image of inclusion, peace and equality, writes Randy Boswell.

If you're a proud Canadian hesitating about expressing your true patriot love this July 1, don't hold back. If you've got a flag and you're tempted to show your colours, go ahead and wave it. Display it.

Raise it.

Wear it.

Canada is hardly perfect, but it's the envy of nations around the world. It's a land of promise and welcome for immigrants seeking a better life. It's a place of prosperity, of almost boundless natural beauty, of powerful charitable impulses.

Canadians, by and large, care deeply for each other. In the face of devastating storms, fires and floods — no country escapes nature's fury — our differences dissolve and resilient communities rally to overcome hardship and tragedy.

The last few years have been tough. A once-in-acentury global pandemic has tested Canada in countless ways. And we've suffered terrible losses, had failings exposed.

But again, we're emerging from the COVID-19 crisis relatively well compared to most countries. The vast majority of Canadians understood what was at stake and acted sensibly and sympathetically, guided by science and a sense of duty, to protect themselves and others.

And Canada's front-line health-care workers, who have waged an exhausting, epic battle against an ever-evolving enemy, have become this era's war heroes.

For these reasons and many more, if you've got a Canadian flag — unfurl it. Flap it. Fly it.

This is a country we should get pumped up about.

But whatever you decide to do with the Maple Leaf this Canada Day, don't be afraid you'll be mistaken for a friend of the Freedom Convoy crowd that occupied the nation's capital this winter and is threatening to do so again this weekend.

Yes, Ottawa's hostage-takers appropriated the flag in February to give their aggravated assault on Canadian values the veneer of something noble. Many of the illegal blockaders and their enablers in hard-right politics and social media made a point of draping themselves in red and white, literally or figuratively, to disguise their belligerence and narrow self-interest as some kind of patriotism.

Call it red-and-whitewashing. Or just hogwash. It fooled no one, even before the desecration of the National War Memorial, the waving of a Confederate banner and the abusing of the statue of Terry Fox (with an upside-down Canadian flag) made it clear that national pride had nothing to do with the siege of Parliament Hill.

Bullies who reject the concept of collective well-being, who denounce prudent public health measures at the height of a planetary plague, who call for the overthrow of a democratically elected government and who demand their own absolute freedom at the expense of others' rights don't really get Canada — and certainly don't own the Canadian flag.

And they need to be reminded of what our national emblem really symbolizes.

It was heartening, just a few weeks after the occupation was belatedly but mercifully brought to an end, that the Maple Leaf enjoyed an astonishing, soul-restoring moment in the spotlight.

In late March, when the Canadian men's soccer team made history by qualifying for the World Cup for the first time in 36 years, the stands in the Toronto stadium were transformed into an undulating sea of Canadian flags as frenzied fans cheered the home team's 4-0 win over Jamaica. Whatever momentary taint the Maple Leaf had suffered during the Ottawa occupation was washed away in an instant.

In that explosion of pure joy, the hundreds upon hundreds of flag-wavers among the game's 29,000 ecstatic spectators signalled their support not only for Team Canada's monumental achievement, but also for what a team powered largely by immigrant stars represents about the nation itself.

“Canada is a multicultural country,” our Yugoslavia-born goalkeeper, Milan Borjan, said during the team's dazzling campaign for a World Cup berth.

“We fight for what's given to us. Canada gave us peace, better schools, a better life ... better everything. This is just the way of us to return it to Canada.”

Who wouldn't raise a flag to that? Perhaps only the likes of the convoy brigade.

But their angry, fearmongering voices should be drowned out, on Canada Day and always, by those who see this country as a place of peace, order and optimism, where “good government” is not an oxymoron but a constitutionally entrenched aspiration.

It's worth remembering, too, that Canada's flag was designed in the mid-1960s in large part to better capture the nation's modern multicultural reality. The cluttered old Canadian Red Ensign, with its mini Union Jack and other heraldic references to the country's colonial roots, was officially replaced by the Maple Leaf in 1965 to offer all Canadians — regardless of their ethnocultural heritage — a simple, stylish, unencumbered symbol to rally around.

Canada at its best is a bastion of tolerance and inclusion, where people look out for each other — especially our most vulnerable — and believe in honest democratic dialogue to express ideas and advance society, not loopy conspiracy theories punctuated by deafening air horn blasts.

Our flag has come through a particularly challenging time. Before the convoy occupation tried to commandeer the Maple Leaf to serve its agenda of invented grievances, thuggery and U.S.-style polarization, the flag had weathered months in a half-mast shadow of shame following new revelations about the horrors of the Indian residential schools that so deeply darken Canada's history.

Last year, after heart-rending discoveries of hundreds of probable unmarked children's graves at former Indigenous residential school sites, there was a broad consensus that a subdued Canada Day with a minimum of patriotic flag-fluttering was warranted in that moment of shared guilt and grief.

Those sentiments were only reinforced by the continuing racial reckoning in Canada sparked by the widespread Black Lives Matter protests of the summer before.

Many of us are now on a steep learning curve about the country we thought we knew — its past and its present.

A year later, on the eve of another Canada Day, we might wonder: Can shame and pride coexist in the “glowing hearts” that the national anthem says our country should inspire?

They can. No nation on Earth is without tragic chapters of history, contemporary injustices and colossal challenges to face in the future. The important question is whether a country with unhealed wounds and unresolved wrongs is treating the trauma and facing its failures.

Are we genuinely striving to be a better Canada or are we caught in a spiral of self-justification, defensiveness and denial? In short, are we progressing?

For those who respond “Yes” and see Canada as a nation gamely striving for ever more hope, opportunity, equality and — in the truest sense of the word — freedom, then this is a country to celebrate.

Canada at its best is a bastion of tolerance and inclusion, where people look out for each other — especially our most vulnerable.