New Canadian Coat of Arms! (Patreon)

Inspired by a silly little doodle I made on my first video, I decided to do a more professional-quality redesign of the Canadian coat of arms. The message here is basically that Canada sucks, and we ignore how much it sucks by constantly comparing ourselves to the US.

I’ve gone off about this in my videos a bit, but Canada is a settler colonial state with a long and continuing history of slavery, genocide, incarceration, foreign intervention, corruption and corporate greed that doesn’t gel with our reputation as being nice and polite. Most of the iconography on this coat of arms is probably self explanatory but I’ll outline a couple aspects:

-The shield itself depicts the RCMP, the oil industry, incarceration, and residential schools, all shameful parts of our country in their own right, and all related to the genocide of indigenous peoples in Canada

-Lion represents the military, unicorn represents prisoners

-The blue guy leering over the shield is Canada’s original Prime Minister, Sir John A MacDonald, an alcoholic with a swollen red nose (probably the coolest thing about him) who once said “[Residential] schools were designed to kill the Indian within the child.” Fuck that guy.

-My favourite part personally is the red demon wings and flame around Sir John A, which sort of form a Canadian maple leaf shape. I wanted the coat of arms to look patriotic from a distance and only reveal its horror elements from close up.

I tried to stick to the rules of heraldic design but they are ridiculous and impossible. The actual Canadian coat of arms violates the Rule of Tincture, not placing white and yellow (the metals) next to each other with the unicorn. At the very least I resisted using orange on the prisoners’ outfits out of respect for the heraldic code. Did you know you technically aren’t allowed to use the colour orange on a coat of arms? Probably Irish flag erasure.

Here's the official Canadian coat of arms for comparison: