Carol Off spent almost 16 years co-hosting the multi-award-winning CBC radio program, As It Happens. Before that, she covered news and current affairs in Canada and around the world. As a radio correspondent, she reported on politics in Ottawa and Quebec. As a television journalist, she covered the break-up of Yugoslavia; the 9/11 attack on the United States; the election of Vladimir Putin; and politics, conflicts and culture throughout Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. Her first bestselling book, The Lion, The Fox and the Eagle: A Story of Generals and Justice in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, was published in 2000. Since then, she’s written four more award-winning works of narrative non-fiction, including, most recently, At a Loss for Words and All We Leave Behind: A Reporter’s Journey into the Lives of Others, winner of the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.
From the #1 bestselling author of At a Loss for Words, an urgent, timely and powerful primer on who we are as Canadians, where we’re going, and what role Canada is destined to play on the world stage.
We find ourselves in a moment of profound reckoning. We either cease to exist as a country, and Canadians seem determined not to allow that to happen, or we become something we’ve never been before—a truly independent nation, defined and shaped on our own terms, with a firm grip on our identity.
Since she stepped down from As It Happens, Carol Off has been on the road talking to Canadians and listening to their ever-pressing questions about the country’s future. With True Patriot Love: Reporting from the Frontlines of Canadian Sovereignty, she’s ready to offer answers, drawing on lessons from the crises, over the past 50 years, where Canadians tried and often failed to define ourselves. She witnessed these defining moments firsthand as a journalist: the flag debate; the first wave of Canadian cultural nationalism in the 1970s; the Shamrock Summit and the original free trade deal with the U.S.; Meech Lake and the country’s ongoing relationship with First Peoples; and our shifting identity as international peacekeepers.
In True Patriot Love, Off remembers this history as she calls us toward our unspoken values and shows us that there is a positive identity to be claimed from all our efforts—imperfect as they may be—to make an identity out of our compassionate, caring and accommodating impulses, our desire to include and not exclude, to welcome and encompass rather than reject and demonize.
Canadians aren’t saintly, as Off writes, but we have mostly tried to be decent. And, she argues, in this new world order rocked by the belligerent and autocratic president to the south, that is a rock worthy of building a national identity upon.
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
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