New Westminster to remove U.S. flag from Queen’s Park Arena

The U.S. flag will soon be removed from Queen’s Park Arena in New Westminster.

The American flag has hung inside New Westminster’s Queen’s Park Arena for decades.

It is a permanent fixture that sits alongside historic championship banners from glory days past, and a vintage scoreboard that, this week, New Westminster city council has voted to take it down.

The decision came after a councillor was put off by a moment during the anthems at a recent youth hockey tournament.

“It just struck me as almost inappropriate that the kids were having to look up [during the anthem] when their country is being told it’s a 51st state,” city councillor Daniel Fontaine told CTV News on Tuesday outside the arena.

“It isn’t even a real country and the kids are singing O Canada, and they’re singing it to an American flag, and I just thought, the timing has come for us to remove a very old tradition.”

The flag will be replaced by a City of New Westminster flag.

Fontaine notes American teams rarely come to the civic arena these days, and a U.S. flag could be used on a temporary basis when needed.

“For me, it was more about our arena, our community, our civic facility, than it was necessarily about what other facilities are doing,” Fontaine said. “If they choose to keep an American flag up, I’m not here to judge them.”

As for when the flag is coming down, no exact date has been set as of yet.

Staff will remove it quietly in the coming weeks in what Fontaine describes as a “Canadian way,” with little fanfare.