Great Canadian Flag Debate on December 15, 1964. It resulted in the adoption of the "Maple Leaf" as the Canadian national flag. The flag was inaugurated on February 15, 1965, and since 1996, February 15 has been commemorated as National Flag of Canada Day. For much of its post-Confederation history, Canada used both the Royal Union Flag (Union Jack) as its national flag, and the Canadian Red Ensign as a popularly recognized and distinctive Canadian flag. The first Canadian Red Ensigns were used in Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald's time. The Governor General at the time of Macdonald's death, Lord Stanley, wrote to
The King and Country debate ignored British demands. Martin Ceadel, reviewing the German coverage of the "King and Country Debate", notes that although it was widely covered in Germany, the Nazis did not seem to have made political capital out of it: "indeed, the London correspondent of the "Völkischer Beobachter" was in 1933 stressing rather the militarism of British youth". Shortly before the outbreak of war in 1939, the "Völkischer Beobachter" was still "insisting that the Oxford debate was insignificant". Churchill would, after the war, write on how Japan and Germany too took note of the Joad resolution, which altered their way of thinking about