Red Deer’s flag turns 40

It was 40 years ago the City of Red Deer asked its residents to submit designs for a new flag.

On August 26, 1977, the new official flag of Red Deer was dedicated by city council in a ceremony at City Hall Park – but the process to get there wasn’t as simple as the City had hoped.

City Historian Michael Dawe explains several entries were received for the contest, but they weren’t exactly up to snuff.

“Unfortunately, the Civic Development Committee was not excited about the submissions,” he says. “The Committee recommended that the three prizes be awarded, but could not recommend that any one of the entries be adopted as the official flag.”

Enter Sybren Spyksma, who worked 36 years for the City of Red Deer before retiring in 2005. At the time of the flag contest, Spyksma was the Drafting Supervisor.

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“Mayor Roy McGregor came to see me to have my staff and I prepare some [new] designs for a flag for the city. I prepared a number of them and we submitted them and the one that was approved is the one you see today,” he says. “We were given a very short period of time, one or two days to come up with a design. We had to drop all our other projects and tackle that one.  We were working on all the city developments at the time because there was no private development around.”

Spyksma says when it came to picking and choosing the elements of the flag, they wanted to ensure it represented Red Deer’s place in the province of Alberta.

“So we chose the three colours — the red, white and blue — red was for federal, blue was for provincial and the white was the sky in between and it was sort of based on the colours of the old red ensign which is the red, white and blue. It had nothing to do with the new Canadian flag,” he points out. “Then we put the maple leaf on the one [side] and the red rose on the other. What we did is put the centre line of the flag on a horizontal plane and split it into three equal parts — then we did the 30 degree slashes across the white panel and came up with the colours.”

Spyksma recalls once the design was approved, the City was in such a rush to have handheld flags produced, a printing error occurred which caused a white border to be seen around part of the rose – something you can still see on some flags produced today, he adds.

Spyksma and his three colleagues, Bart Presley, Mike Flikkema and Don Oliver were each given a letter of recognition and bottle of Crown Royal for their work.

Although none of the contest entries were chosen, winners were still selected and awarded prizes of $50, $25 and $10.