Nathan VanderKlippe
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Sep 18/02) - You've seen big cheques, the kind that lottery corporations hand out to smiling winners.

But Donald Potter has a ticket the likes of which you may not have seen before. It's 10 metres long and looks like a bunch of flags sewn together. Which, in fact, it is. Potter calls it a unity flag.

And it's gotten him and his 13-year-old son Alex a free ride in airplanes and into hotel rooms across the country.

Potter's unity flag is Canadian red-and-white rimmed by the flags of the country's provinces and territories.

Pulling a small RV with a huge black SUV -- massive flag always in tow -- the father and son team have made their way across the country for two summers on what Donald calls a unity tour.

A typical stop works like this: Potter pulls into a community like Yellowknife and gets in touch with as many people as he can.

He calls the mayor, the schools, the fire department, the legislative assembly and tries to arrange photos with them.

In Yellowknife, that meant an unscheduled hour-long conversation with the mayor. It also meant free flights to Iqaluit, Fort Liard and Wha Ti, where he displayed his flag at the initialling of the Dogrib final agreement. Last Friday, he was at Ecole St. Joseph School.

Along the way, he talks Canadian unity, or at least his brand of it.

A non-francophone who speaks French with a heavy English accent, Potter's home is in St. Hubert, Que., a place he describes as being "99.98 per cent francophone."

During rallies before the 1995 Quebec separation vote, he proudly displayed his flag. In exchange, he says he was faced with threats of violence.

After being injured in the line of duty as a police officer, he got the idea of waving his flag around the country, and taking his son for the ride.

Alex is respectful and quiet and does some of the grunt work for his father -- running after reporters to ask for an interview.

They both have similar things to say. Donald wants to prove to Quebeckers that they are not being mis-treated outside of the province. It's a Quebecois mis-conception he says he wants to clear up.

Judging by conversations he's had in Yellowknife, he's had an easy time convincing people. After all, his unity tour has happened almost exclusively outside of the province.

He's now headed back to St. Hubert, where Alex will go back to school.

The 13-year-old will have missed the first couple of weeks, of course, but that's OK. Alex is getting an education on the road that most people in this country will never get.