Which country has the maple leaf on its flag?

Canada, and the flag is younger than a great many Canadians - adopted in February 1965 after a parliamentary fight so bitter it is remembered as the Great Flag Debate. The previous flag carried the Union Jack, and the argument over replacing it ran for months and had to be ended by closure.

The design is unusually disciplined. Two red bands and a white square in the middle, with a stylised leaf reduced to eleven points - not because any maple has eleven, but because early wind-tunnel testing found that fewer, simpler points stayed legible when the flag was moving. It is one of the few national flags that was actually tested rather than merely drawn.

The maple was a symbol long before it was official, from the sugar maple's importance to Indigenous peoples and then to settlers, and it appeared on regimental badges and coins for a century first. Canada still produces something like three quarters of the world's maple syrup, most of it from Quebec, and holds a strategic reserve of it - a warehouse of stockpiled syrup to stabilise prices, from which about 3,000 tonnes was stolen in 2011 and 2012 in a theft that took months to notice.