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Canada is officially beyond parody. The latest development in Flagscam is that those Sheila Copps Maple Leafs – the flags needed to keep Quebec in Confederation, the flags only a $6 million Government program could organize, the flags whose $6 million Government program ballooned to $45 million, the flags whose free distribution wiped out the profits of Canadian flag retailers, the flags that no-one in Canada could make fast enough and so wound up being secretly imported from overseas, the flags for which millions of dollars were paid to well-connected Liberal Party middle-men for doing nothing, the flags for which the luckier Grit cronies got paid twice over for doing nothing – it turns out these flags don’t even fly.

On the CBC the other night, Doreen Braverman, who runs Canada’s biggest flag retailer, held up one of the Sheila Maple Leafs. No eyelets, no sleeve, no halyard line for your rope and toggle, no nothing. The Canadian taxpayers paid $45 per “flag” for a “flag” that can’t be flown. If what’s left of our armed forces ever gets round to seizing Hans Island back from the Danish imperialist aggressors and tearing down the viking marauders’ flag, I hope they don’t make the mistake of taking a Sheila $45 special to replace it with. One doesn’t want to think of the lads from JTF2 standing around on the barren windswept rock holding the Maple Leaf in position while someone radios back to base to ask if DND can parachute in a tube of Superglue.

Why do we need the government to spend $45 million on free flags? Well, go back to 1995. “We came within a few thousand votes of losing the greatest country in the world,” wrote Warren Kinsella a few weeks back in an impassioned defence of the Chretien years. “Under Brian Mulroney’s watch, there were no Canadian flags flying at post offices in Quebec… No flags in citizenship courts, even. Canada, as a concept, barely existed in the Province of Quebec.” It was one big no-fly zone.

Call me a pessimist, but I can’t think making a rural postmaster in the Gaspe lean a ladder up against the flagpole each morning so he can nail Sheila’s Maple Leaf into position is likely to endear him to the concept of Canada.

On the other hand, an unflyable flag is perhaps the very essence of the concept of Canada. I say that in part because I’ve never really cared for the Maple Leaf. If I had my way I’d go back to the Red Ensign, but even on this doughty publication I’ll bet the chaps aren’t that conservative. The Red Ensign was a boring flag but happy the nation secure enough in its sense of self to have a boring flag. Flag-changing is for unhappy countries – banana republics, ex-dictatorships. Consider two of the most famous flags in the world, the Stars & Stripes and the Union flag: for America, a star for each state and a stripe for each of the original colonies; for the United Kingdom, the cross of St George on the cross of St Patrick on the cross of St Andrew. These flags state, in the most plonkingly literal manner, this is who we are, this is whence we came. Canada’s, by contrast, is a fluffy evasion: it looks like a design, not an expression of national fact. The Stars & Stripes and Union flag are memorable not because they’re well-designed – no hotshot agency would come up with either design – but because the states they represent are memorable. The Maple Leaf is a logo in search of a product.

If Naomi Klein took that “No Logo” stuff seriously, she might launch a campaign against the Feds’ oppressive use of the flag. Neither London nor Washington plasters the national standard over each and every letter and envelope. Those Stars & Stripes fluttering in the front yards of rural Americans are a private sector activity. Likewise, their British equivalent - those Union Jack Y-fronts worn by every English soccer yobbo as he’s staggering drunk and trouserless through the streets of a Continental city vomiting down the sides of Renaults and Fiats. If Austin Powers were filmed in Canada, Elizabeth Hurley would be the Heritage Minister dispatched to make sure Austin was wearing the new 45-quid government-issue Union Jack Y-fronts – the ones without the Y.

The 1965 flag was the first of the great evasive reinventions that presaged the bright new dawn. How poignant that Trudeaupia’s decay into one-party kleptocracy should finally have tainted the original symbol of the new order. But, for those of us who thought it was hooey to begin with, the decision to opt for a logo instead of the ensign was very prescient. Look at what half these scams boil down to: a flag program, event sponsorship in Quebec, renting space on Jacques Villeneuve’s torso, sending the Governor-General and a bunch of CanLit deadbeats on the prestigious polar book-plug circuit. This is government as a self-promotion exercise. It’s dubious whether most of these activities have any claim on the public purse, even if they weren’t money laundering exercises. Looking at the occupations of these Liberal cronies, one understands that in the modern industrial democracies many government operatives advance to public relations firms and marketing consultancies. But in Canada that seems to be all they do while they’re in government.

David Suzuki wrote an absolutely hilarious column the other day. Not hilarious from his point of view, I hasten to add. He was pretty steamed. Kyoto and so forth. He started with a quote from a “climate expert”, Dr David Viner: “Climate change has stuck its head above the parapet – it’s not an issue politicians can hide from much longer.” The rest of the column was devoted to Suzuki’s disgust at how Paul Martin was doing just that – hiding from it.

“Yes, Canada adopted the Kyoto Protocol a couple years back, but we have done virtually nothing since,” he fumed, globally warming to his theme. “There is no plan to achieve our goals. There is no leadership. In spite of the widely held belief that we are good environmental stewards, Canada is actually one of the least efficient, most polluting countries in the developed world. Our rankings compared to the other member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development read like a shopping list of failure. Air pollution? Second worst. Water consumption? Ditto. Energy efficiency? Again, 28 out of 29.”

Poor old Suzuki. He thought M Chretien going to sign the Kyoto Treaty at the UN meant something. He believed him when he said Canada was a good “citizen of the world”. He didn’t realize it was just another Liberal promotional exercise. On Kyoto as on much else, the government aren’t men of action, they’re men of Groupaction. We’re the country too busy promoting ourselves as peacekeepers to do any.

Great marketing, no product. That’s why the unflyable flag is the defining Liberal Party idea. As the ideas boys on Madison Avenue used to say, let’s run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes. But, with a Liberal Party idea, you can’t even do that.