Did you receive your “Home Idolatry Kit” in time for Canada Day? It’s a broadsheet-sized flyer, with two separate Maple Leaf flags to be cut out and taped in a window, courtesy of my federal member of Parliament.

The flyer features lots of trivia info-bites and “Did you Know?” information, all very good for appreciating the more innocuous bits of Canadian history. The overall tone is a turgid, “thumbs up”-type patriotism. (Did no one tell Stephen Harper what that symbolizes?)

The flyer asks us to compete to be the Most Patriotic Riding in Canada. A number of MPs launched this campaign to encourage demonstrations of pride. Households can report that they display their flags in the weeks leading up to Canada Day using a no-postage mail-back card.

There’s very little difference between ordering citizens to fly the flag and goading us to compare our loyalty to one another on a tote board.

In this officially sanctioned campaign, the flag becomes more than an attribute of citizenship and community. By a hair’s breadth, the flag falls into a role something like a religious idol, or a piece of currency.

The prohibition of idolatry is central to the Abrahamic tradition. In one of the most vivid images, Moses destroys the golden calf—gold was indistinguishable from money—that the Israelites worshipped during his absence on Mount Sinai. He then feeds the ashes to them as ironic punishment.

Even kids can understand the message: don’t make yourself subordinate to physical things like statues or money or flags, but to spirit, and love, and people. You cannot serve both God and Mammon.

A modern version of this sentiment is “Life is not coin operated”. It’s easy to see that the average person more-or-less still fundamentally believes this, in the results of the recent provincial election.

Andrew Coyne wrote, bravely, in the National Post that the Ontario election was a “[R]eferendum on fiscal conservatism, and the fiscal conservatives lost”.

Many fiscal conservatives are taking their Parthian shot, warning that the election result will trigger a sovereign credit downgrade. This would make our public debt more expensive to service.

They’re goading us to maintain our position on some of the world’s tote boards, warning us that Ontario isn’t flying enough flags of the “Austerity” nation.

It’s a serious warning, but it still misreads the public spirit that prompted the election result. The arguments for flying the Austerity flag in Ontario were perfectly rational and easily understood. But a preponderance of people decided Mammon should serve us, not the other way around.

Remember, it was dodgy, opaque debt ratings that got us into today’s lingering economic straits. The opinions and letter codes of the big bond rating agencies are nevertheless venerated like graven images; who will be grinding them up and feeding them to us?

In an interview with Wired UK, Annette Heuser of the Bertelsmann Foundation proposes a not-for-profit agency to supersede private ratings of sovereign debt. If emerging and developing economies deserve qualitative, less “coin operated” assessment criteria, third-world Ontario does too.

In the event of a downgrade now or later, Ontario should leverage the notoriety and take an international leadership role in forcing financial market reforms. Credit assessments are economic criminal records, and should be in public or quasi-public hands.

Whether it’s flags or finances, we must always keep them as tools in the service of human beings, and not idols to which we submit or sacrifice our energy or lives.

I’m proud to be Canadian, and Ontarian, but I’ve never been a flag waving person. In fact, one of the biggest reasons for my pride is that we don’t really idolize our flag. We venerate dollars far less than other nations, too. That’s an identity worth celebrating on Canada Day.