What is the significance of the color white in Canada?

White, the central colour of the Canadian flag, represents the snow-covered northern landscape, peace, and Canada's French heritage. King George V proclaimed red and white as the country's official national colours on November 21, 1921 by royal proclamation, the same day he granted the Canadian coat of arms. White is the historic colour of royal France: the standard of the Bourbon kings was a plain white field, sometimes embroidered with golden fleurs-de-lys, that French regiments carried into battle from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

On the 1965 flag the central white square is the field on which the red maple leaf sits. The square is exactly half the width of the entire flag, making it the largest single area of any national flag of comparable design and the most legible field for the leaf. Designers George F. G. Stanley and Jacques Saint-Cyr chose this proportion so the flag would be recognisable at a distance, even in poor weather.

White also appears as the dominant colour of the Royal Canadian Navy's ensign and on the white-and-red ribbon of the Order of Canada. In Quebec the fleur-de-lys flag uses a white cross on a blue field, with white standing for the historic colour of France. Outside official heraldry, white evokes the Canadian winter, snow, the Arctic, and the country's vast northern reaches.

Snow itself is bound to Canadian identity. About 80 per cent of the country's land area receives measurable snowfall, and Inuit Nunangat, the homeland of the Inuit across the Arctic, is among the snowiest regions of the world. The white field of the flag carries this geography as much as its heraldic meaning.