John Matheson: Today’s Canadian flag waves because of a fateful decision in ‘43
Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen
29 Dec 2013-12-31
KINGSTON — Young John Matheson thought a beret was “cooler” than a helmet, but one day in Italy in 1943 he wore the helmet instead.
It saved his life at Ortona. Without it, Canada wouldn’t have the flag we fly today or the Order of Canada.
But the exploding German shell still hurt him. Six little pieces of metal were deep in his brain and could never be removed.
“I couldn’t move or speak or talk. … Why I survived I don’t know, because I didn’t try to,” he said in a 2007 interview.
Matheson didn’t give up. He recovered partial use of his legs and went on to graduate from law school, marry, serve as a Member of Parliament (for Leeds) and later a judge, and help to choose Canada’s flag.
He called himself the “main flag-bearer” for Prime Minister Lester Pearson in the 1960s, part of his role as Parliamentary Secretary for symbolism.
Matheson died Friday in Kingston at the age of 96.
He left the army as a colonel and met his future wife, Edith Bickley, when she was his radiologist’s assistant at a Montreal hospital after the war.
“She got intrigued by this skull that showed six little fragments of steel in it, and she wanted to meet me. And so, she did,” Matheson told the Queen’s University Journal in 2007.
He graduated from Osgoode Law School in the late 1940s and became the Liberal MP for Leeds in 1961, serving until 1968. In that year, he lost to the Conservative challenger by four votes, a margin of 0.01376 per cent.
His most visible legacy is the flag.
He was a leader of the multi-party parliamentary committee that chose a new flag design, and Matheson’s own sketches played a part. He later showed in a CBC interview how he sketched out a simple concept — a stripe on each side, a simple Canadian symbol in the centre. It came at a time when people were suggesting complex assortments of beavers and eagles, and multi-colour emblems.
Besides his flag work, Matheson was a founder of the Order of Canada. He felt that symbols are important to a country, but said Pierre Trudeau didn’t always feel the same way.
“At the same time the flag was going through, we had a secret project … the Order of Canada, which was modelled on … the Tricolour Society (at Queen’s) and some of my Masonic background, which gave me an idea of what an Order was all about,” he said in 2007.
The emblem of the Order, a stylized snowflake, is based on his own design.
Matheson had originally practised law in Brockville, and after he left Parliament he became a judge in the Judicial District of Ottawa-Carleton and later in Lanark County. He retired from the Ontario Court of Justice in 1992.
As a judge, he said his proudest moment was in 1982 when he ruled that a young man named Justin Clark was competent to live on his own.
Clark had cerebral palsy and had lived in the Rideau Regional Centre in Smiths Falls since he was 17 months old. When he was 20, Matheson ruled that he could make his own decisions.
He later told the CBC that while Clark’s physical condition wouldn’t change, “certainly his mind could and his spirit and his soul could. It would be wrong to think of him as being a limited human being.”
Matheson himself became an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1993.
