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Tartan has long been a distinctive design of Scottish Highland clans. Affection for tartan cloth crossed the Atlantic first with Scottish regiments, who served garrison duty in Canada before Confederation, and later with the Scottish immigrants who settled in the Maritimes and United Canada.
In Tales of the Canadian Forest, a mid-19th-century Canadian novel, the hero promises a gift of tartan cloth to his true love: "... when I return I will bring you a present of a Campbell tartan-plaid, and then you will out-shine the fairest lady in the town."
Clan tartans are associated with a specific family name—the Campbell tartan is predominantly blue and green—but there are also regimental tartans, initially associated with Scottish Highland units but now adopted by many military groups. The Black Watch tartan, perhaps the best known, was named for the Highland companies first raised in Britain in 1725, and that wore the black, green and blue government tartan. They were known as the Black Watch because of the tartan's dark colours.
District tartans reflect geographical areas and are the most relevant in Canada today. They link land and community through symbolic and imaginative use of colour. For example, the Maple Leaf tartan —an unofficial national pattern—incorporates into its weave the colours of the maple leaf through the seasons: green in summer, gold in early autumn, red at first frost and brown when the leaf has fallen.
Every province and territory, except Nunavut, possesses its own tartan. Some are official. Others are not. But the colours of the cloth represent distinctive characteristics associated with each region. Saskatchewan's tartan boasts seven colours: gold signifies the prairie wheat, brown the summer fallow, green the forests, red the prairie lily, yellow the rapeseed flower and sunflower, white the snow and black the oil and coal.
Caribou, Nova Scotia has chosen a tartan that features the colour red, symbolic of its sunsets, lobsters and fire trucks. Some tartans are more evocative, such as Boucherville, Quebec's design, which is based on the azure blue of loyalty, the silver grey of serenity, the gold of generosity, the green of hope and the white of purity and innocence.
The Ontario Northern Canadian district tartan's grey, white, blue, gold, green and reddish-brown conjure up the nickel-bearing rock, the snow, the sky and lakes, the precious metal, the forests and fields and the Aboriginal peoples.
Some groups wear their colours in corporate tartans: the Hudson's Bay Company has its own, as do the Royal Canadian Legion, the RCMP and the Salvation Army.