New Flag for British Columbia

This week is part two of my Canada appreciation month (I guess, or at least until I get bored with it).  On the docket today; British Columbia, land of Sasquatch, the Winter Olympics, and probably other stuff too:

This is a great flag.  It's busy, but there are only four key elements, each with an important link to the province, so the problem is too much detail rather than too much going on. 

1) The setting sun, denoting BC as Canada's westernmost province
2) The wavy blue and white lines, representing the provinces position between the Rockies and the Pacific
3) and 4) The Union Jack and the crown, both linking BC as a former colony within the British Empire.

Straightforward and distinctive, but not very easy to draw.  I toyed with a number of ideas, including removing the Union Jack, simplifying the sun, and starting from scratch, but none seemed right.  However, I recently stumbled across a site that advocates independence for the Pacific Northwest under the name the Republic of Cascadia (http://zapatopi.net/cascadia/), an intriguing idea to say the least.  The website which is fairly tongue-in-cheek (the Cascadia Defense Force would be made up of 2,000 bigfoots (bigfeet?)) states that they wish to see British Columbia and the states of Washington and Oregon break away, reminiscent of Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia.  What makes the site relevant to this blog was the flag proposed for the future nation:

Their proposal looks really good.  I might take issue with the way the top stripe gets cut off, but straightening the stripes out would make it look an awful lot like the Utah flag I recently proposed.  This flag combines a number of of the symbols of the old BC flag, but in a simplified manor, disposing of the British imagery.  Using this flag as the template, I would only make a few changes:

As you can see, I've kept the basic design, but toned it down a little.  Some of the main elements from the original flag are still present, but the royal symbols have been discarded.  The green is meant to stand for the temperate rainforests of the province, but could also work for the many other vague ideas green tends to indicated on flags (agricultural, prosperity, etc.).  Were I more talented, I would replace the pine cone with something more species specific but I'll leave that to someone who isn't using Paint.