Long before there was Christy Clark and “her” Family Day, long before Manitoba’s Louis Riel Day and even long before the 1996 proclamation of National Flag of Canada Day, there was my Uncle Ed.

Relegated by political history to a trivia question at best (Who sent Ray Perrault packing to the Canadian Senate?), Uncle Ed remains a forgotten figure amid all the hoopla over the 50^th anniversary of the good old Canadian flag.

Yet it was Ed Nelson who stood in the House of Commons in the late afternoon of Feb. 15, 1973 to introduce private member’s bill C-136. That bill brought forward by the guy lucky enough to have married my mom’s sister marked the first official effort to have Feb. 15 proclaimed as a national holiday in celebration of the Canadian flag.

If the parliamentarians of the day had had the wisdom to pass Uncle Ed’s bill…