"Select Submissions to the Canadian National Flag Committee (1964)" print

On the 15th of February, 1965, Canada's maple leaf flag was first hung on Parliament Hill and we've gotten to know it well since then. Getting there, though, involved more than 3541 citizen-conceived flag ideas mailed to Parliament's 15-member Flag Committee in 1964. This print collects my favourites and credits the original artists where possible. And yes, I've taken some of the roughly-drawn submissions and fleshed them out completely, giving them the final sheen required of a national flag. 

You might be wondering, "is this legal?" I think it is. Theoretically, all idea submissions became property of the Federal Government, which means Crown Copyright covered the submissions from 1964 to 2014. After that, the government did commit a few select submissions to the Public Register of Arms, Flags, and Badges of Canada, but the ones I've selected for this print were not. Oh, and also I'd like to give special thanks to Library & Archives Canada, the University of Saskatchewan Archives, and a few private historians for preserving as many submissions as they could.