Carol Off: True Patriot Love
We sat down with Carol Off, former guest on the podcast and longtime co-host of CBC Radio’s As It Happens, to talk about her new book, True Patriot Love: Reporting from the Frontlines of Canadian Sovereignty. How does a reporter who watched nationalism tear apart the former Yugoslavia come to say, out loud, that she truly, patriotically loves this country?
We’re talking:
The difference between nationalism, built on shared blood and heritage, and civic patriotism, built on an idea
Why loving Canada has to include its colonial history and unfinished business rather than paper over it
Who speaks for Canada as separatist movements grow in Quebec and Alberta, and the anti-immigrant current Carol sees running through parts of both
Why cultural sovereignty (our own news, books, film and radio) matters as much as steel and oil
Carol traces her patriotism back to Mrs. Barchuk’s Grade 4 class in West Kildonan, where the students drew flag designs in crayon while Lester Pearson was being booed by veterans in Winnipeg for proposing a new one. Decades later, she sat on a bench outside the same school, looking at a flag that didn’t exist when she was a student there, and thought about everything it had come to carry: the convoy, Quebec’s rejection of it, its colonial weight for Indigenous peoples.
Her conclusion is that Canada’s defining trait is the ability to hold all of that at once. It’s also why visitors to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights sometimes leave frustrated that they couldn’t find a single national story. Carol’s answer: that is the story.
Episode Transcript
Stuart Murray 00:00 This podcast was recorded on the ancestral lands on Treaty One territory, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.
Matt Cundill 00:20 This is Humans, On Rights, a podcast advocating for the education of human rights. Here’s your host, Stuart Murray.
Stuart Murray 00:31 Welcome to Humans, On Rights. My guest today, born in Winnipeg, spent her first 10 years in the city before her family moved to Ottawa. She went on to report from war zones in Bosnia, Rwanda and Afghanistan, and for 16 years co-hosted CBC Radio’s As It Happens, conducting more than 25,000 interviews. She’s the author of Bitter Chocolate, the award-winning All We Leave Behind, and the number one bestseller At a Loss for Words. She’s also co-president of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, and her new book, True Patriot Love, is out. Carol Off, we’re going to explore that book of yours, which is really, really well written. But before we do that, as somebody who was born here, can you just share with our listeners a memory of Winnipeg?
Carol Off 01:20 My gosh. My memory of Winnipeg, and I write about it in the first chapters, is of a place I grew up in, West Kildonan, which was a lower-middle-class neighbourhood full of immigrants. And I was saying that if I took you back there in a time machine, you’d say, well, this is a very homogeneous society. It’s all just white people, European people, or people of European descent. And you’d be so wrong to think that this was just one big happy European family. I was born in 1955, so 10 years before I was born, these people were arriving from war, from nations that had hated each other, that had killed each other. There were Jews living in the neighbourhood with Germans, some of whom had been sympathetic with the Nazis. We had Poles and Ukrainians and Russians and everybody together, and yet we could come together in this community, and people just didn’t talk about those things. They shared their vegetable gardens. They shovelled snow together. And we, as kids, were privileged to live in that environment where they didn’t talk about these dark things. Maybe they did in their homes, but we were just kids hanging out with each other. And if you were a really, really clever kid, you could score big time on the festivals and the feast days that people were having, whether they were Jews or Orthodox Christians or Catholics, because every one of these cultures had cookies and sweets, and if you knew all the feast days, you could dash around and really score on the goodies. So that was how it was. We just lived in each other’s houses, and I think that generation became the melting pot that we appreciate so much today.
Stuart Murray 03:19 I love, of course, your personal story. As you say, you do write about it in the book, and I know you talk a lot about Mrs. Barchuk, one of your teachers. Carol, I’m going to say the incredible part about your book is how you’ve decided to break it down into various chapters, and then you do a deep dive in each chapter to solidify some of the changes and the challenges. And I’ll just say a couple of things. One is, I was very aware of the Canadian flag and some of the debate about it in terms of what went on in Canada. But I got completely [caught up in?] how you positioned Pearson, through his peace efforts and the Suez Canal, wanting to define at that point the difference between Canadians helping out versus everybody else, and therefore the desire for this flag. I just thought it was a brilliant way to bring that conversation forward, because I pride myself as somebody who knows a lot about Canada. That was a great reminder, and you do that constantly through this book. Tell us about the first impression you had as a young person when that flag went up the flagpole.
Carol Off 04:34 We were in Mrs. Barchuk’s class, and every person, I hope, has had a Mrs. Barchuk somewhere in their schooling. She had heard that there was to be a contest for the flag, and so she decided that all these kids in her Grade 4 class would take out their crayons and we would create the flag. So we had all kinds of ideas that we sent in, and thousands of people across the country sent ideas. But there was tremendous resistance from people who had lost so many people. Tens of thousands of Canadians and Newfoundlanders died in those two wars that we had just fought. You had the veterans, and when Pearson first introduced this, he did it in front of the veterans at the Capitol Cinema in downtown Winnipeg, and they booed and they yelled and they were just so angry. And yet Pearson’s idea was that in the war, when we’d gone to be peacekeepers, we had not had our own distinct flag. And yet the resistance was coming from people who had been in war. War at that time so much defined us, and I think continues to. And for me, seeing that flag go up for the first time as a kid, and then within a year not being able to imagine a time when that flag didn’t exist. It just so quickly became ubiquitous. And then [all through?] my life, through all the different iterations and all the careers and everything, to be travelling with Canadian soldiers in countries like Yugoslavia and Afghanistan and to see that flag, to me it was this burning symbol of who we are. It was so thrilling and so important each time I would see it abroad, or see it with our Canadian forces, and realize what it represented to me.
Stuart Murray 06:31 Carol, I was very fortunate to have you on to talk about your previous book, At a Loss for Words, and the notion of weaponizing words. And I think at that time, the flag was being weaponized in a way that, as you explained, was not in any way, shape or form what we as Canadians felt the Canadian flag should be. So I’m interested, as you’ve put your thoughts into this book, True Patriot Love. The word “patriot” is a word that some might say, well, is that not a word we can weaponize? You did talk about the difference, and I read it. But in your words, the difference between a patriot and a nationalist, I think, is really key to the argument you make in your book about how you came to love this country.
Carol Off 07:24 What I came to think through was, first, nationalism. I had seen it abroad in the former Yugoslavia and different places I covered, where ethnic hatred would turn people against their neighbours, and how frightening that was. I had come to understand nationalism that way. There are less violent iterations of it, but nationalism is all based on this idea that you build your country, your nation, upon a shared ethnicity, a shared heritage. It’s a blood-and-soil version of things. Whereas patriotism, I came to understand, is about an idea. Nationalism is about an identity; patriotism is about an idea. And Canadian patriotism, civic patriotism, is about the idea of Canada, not an ethnicity, because we don’t have one. There’s no such thing as an ethnic Canadian. There are many ethnicities, but we’re just people. So with this idea of civic patriotism, I’ve come to love this idea of Canada. But at the same time, and so importantly, that doesn’t mean I deny some of its uglier legacies. I have to be able to say I love the country, I’m a patriot, without denying what’s happened with First Nations, with Indigenous peoples, without denying the differences between provinces wanting to feel a greater part of the federal project. I couldn’t deny that there was racism, colonialism, all these things. These things are all facts. They’re all part of Canada. So to be a Canadian patriot, in my view, is to embrace and have fidelity to this idea of Canada. It also includes all the things that are still unresolved and need fixing and attention in the country, and being dedicated to advancing those things. But it’s not about being a people. It’s not about an identity. It’s about an idea, the idea of Canada.
Stuart Murray 09:31 As we look at how things change, and as you write about in the book, there is an awakening with the election of a new president down south and a new prime minister in Canada, and some of these elements have allowed us to kind of wake up a bit. A lot of people have said, and former prime minister Chrétien indicated in his own only-Chrétien-like way, that we should give him the Order of Canada for what he’s done for Canada, except we can’t give it to criminals. But having said that, Carol, I’d love your take on this. You’ve travelled the world, you’ve been on the front lines with Canadian peacekeepers, you’ve been on the front lines with Canadians in theatres of war. You’ve seen what Canada has done, and all of those challenges internationally, and sometimes we forget about them when we’re at home. Along comes this president, and there’s this so-called waking up of Canada. Just share what that did to you. Carney uses the term “elbows up.” What would Carol Off say to somebody: “This is what it did for me. My prime minister used his elbows up. I’m telling you what Carol Off feels about the awakening of my understanding of patriotism for this country.”
Carol Off 10:52 The word that almost immediately came to me as I reacted to what Donald Trump was saying, and his idea of annexing Canada as the 51st state, was the idea of resistance, of resisting, because that’s essentially what peacekeeping is. It’s a resistance to war. What I had seen in so many different iterations of Canada was resisting the tendency toward racism or toward hatred of any kind. It’s what [Jean-Claude? unclear] said: “Don’t confuse our kindness for weakness.” That we could be kind and yet strong. And this idea of resisting these forces that are out there, not just coming from Donald Trump. We’re seeing these forces of nationalism in Europe. We saw J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio over talking to Europeans, just as Mark Carney was. But they’re talking to Europeans and saying, “Look, let’s have our shared Euro-ethnic identity. Let’s keep Europe pure, and Canada and the United States pure. Let’s safeguard our Judeo-Christian nationalism, the family. Let’s share those ideas and share those values.” And there were standing ovations for them in Europe. So these forces are there through politics in Europe, and definitely through the MAGA movement in the United States. Again, this blood-and-soil nationalism, this idea of building the state upon a very narrow definition of who gets to be considered part of your nation. These forces are everywhere, and they’re creeping into Canadian politics. So for me it’s not just a matter of resisting Donald Trump and his plans or desire to annex us, and that resistance taking whatever shape it would take. I’m sure you heard, as I heard, many people say, “I will take up arms. I will fight. I will die to not let him do that.” But it’s also resisting within our own sphere these anti-immigrant ideas, which just keep cropping up everywhere because it’s cheap politics and demagoguery to try and whip up this hatred of the other, to create these divisions and adversarial positions. The resistance is to resist these dark movements in the country and around the world, but also to resist Donald Trump.
Stuart Murray 13:19 I think Canadians as a whole have done that. But I want to get your thoughts on something. You talk a little bit in your book about some of the elements around sport, the Olympics, the Canadian flag. We have an issue here in Winnipeg, Carol, where one of our hockey players played for the American team in the Olympics, and they won the gold medal, and so he went down to visit the White House and was given the Medal of Freedom by the president. And it has made his life very difficult in Winnipeg. Some people don’t want to see the fact that he was an American. Some people want to say, well, why would he do that? Everybody has an opinion. You can try to separate politics from sport, and it’s very difficult. But I dare say that in Canada, when that 4 Nations tournament was on and we won it, I sat with a group of people who don’t know a lot about hockey who were hugging each other and yelling from the rooftops and celebrating simply because Canada, with this maple leaf, had achieved something. That’s not necessarily a sense of love, but it’s a sense of trying to say who we are as a nation. And yes, a lot of people identify us as hockey players. There’s obviously a lot more depth than that. And one of the things I wanted to talk with you about today, Carol, was your travels across Canada. You’ve had such a tremendous career sitting behind a mic interviewing people, but you decided to go on the road. Part of that, I think, was when you went out to promote your previous book, which again, I love to say I enjoyed, and I’ll give it another plug, At a Loss for Words, because it’s important. But now you’re out listening to people. You don’t have a producer in your ear saying, “Carol, wrap this conversation up.” You’re literally sitting at a kitchen table or wherever it may be. Share that experience, because that’s a different model than what you were such a professional at for so many years, sitting behind a mic.
Carol Off 15:27 When I set out on the book tour for At a Loss for Words, it was before Donald Trump was elected, so I left about this time in, was it 2016 [sic]. And the book, as you know, is very much about the United States, and it was kind of, this could happen, let’s hope it’s not going to happen, but if Donald Trump gets elected, then we’re going to go down this very, very dark slope. He won, and I wasn’t expecting that. And so when I’m out on the road during that period of time, the discussion went from interesting conversations about the differences between the United States and Canada, and then he’s elected, and Canadians were electrified by that. It became like town halls everywhere I went, and people wanted to know what they should do, how they should resist. The word “resistance” came up so often. How do we resist this man? And he starts talking about annexing the country, and I was thinking, wow, this is such a powerful conversation. They have so many questions, and I don’t have answers. And so I realized I have my own questions. I was going to have to try and come to understand my own feelings of love for the country. People said, “How do we meet the moment? How do we love Canada? How do we become patriots without becoming jingoistic? How do we do this without succumbing to the kind of ugly movements we see in other parts of the world, where they regard their country as superior to others? And how do we love the country and acknowledge that it has all this history and these flaws?” And I thought, I’m going to have to understand this for myself. So the conversations became not just an exploration of where I was going and who I was talking to, but I also had to go really deep in myself and figure out where my own feelings of nationhood begin. And that’s why I ended up in Mrs. Barchuk’s class at Victory School in West Kildonan in Winnipeg, trying to understand the origins of these feelings. It was this weirdly very emotional time. People were emotional. I didn’t have all the answers, and I had to start asking myself questions about what I was as a Canadian. What was my role in this country?
Stuart Murray 17:50 Carol, can you cast your mind back to those conversations? Going back to your teacher, Mrs. Barchuk, as you were travelling across Canada and engaging in all of these conversations and listening and trying to decide in your own mind where Carol Off’s patriotism comes from, was there a Barchuk conversation you had with somebody across Canada, or one or two, where you said, this really got me thinking in a different direction, or helped me clarify what I was thinking?
Carol Off 18:21 In an odd sort of way, I had the conversation with Mrs. Barchuk, because when I was in Winnipeg during some of these rounds, a couple of times I was back in Winnipeg talking to people, I took a taxi out to Victory School. And there’s a bench. There wasn’t a bench when I was there, but it was great to have a bench, because my old bones couldn’t take it anymore. And I sat on the bench, and the Canadian flag was up the pole. And I realized that it wasn’t there when I was in Mrs. Barchuk’s class. It didn’t exist. So I was sort of staring at this flag, thinking, “What does this flag actually mean for me?” Because we had seen it during the so-called Freedom Convoy, the truckers’ convoy, in many parts of the country but principally Ottawa, where the flag was a symbol of their rage and their anger toward the government and their desire to bring down the government. I’d seen Quebecers reject that flag when I was covering Quebec politics, because the fleur-de-lys was their flag, and this flag represented some kind of tyranny, some kind of opposition to their identity. I had definitely seen Indigenous peoples who said this flag can be our flag as Canadians, but it also represents the colonial history of the country. So I stared at that flag on a really beautiful day in the late fall, around this time of year, and thought, I have to understand what it means to me. And I thought, it means all of those things. I have to embrace all of those ideas. And I realized that the most important thing I understand about being a Canadian is this high, very high tolerance for contradiction. That we have this ability; it’s very important. It’s absolutely essential to our character as Canadians. We know that more than one thing can be true at the same time. That John A. Macdonald could have been a great prime minister and also a seriously flawed prime minister. That Canada can be a great country and a flawed country, and that this flag can be all these things I’m describing and still represent those things in a way that’s not exclusive of them, but inclusive of all of these different conflicts. That’s what I think Canadians are capable of more than Americans, and maybe other places. I’m sounding jingoistic when I say that, but I think we have a capacity to embrace those contradictions, and I think that’s essential, because we don’t have a single history. We have so many different histories, as the Museum for Human Rights demonstrates on every level and in every exhibit. You can’t exactly say what Canada is in a line. It’s so comforting to other countries; they know exactly what they can say. But at the museum, when I’m there, I’m thinking, this contradicts that, and this contradicts this. And I think that’s why that museum has such a hard time being something, because people wanted to say, well, what is this museum about? And it’s about all of those things, and Canada is about all of those things.
Stuart Murray 21:35 Right. Having spent some of my career at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, one of the things that I was very passionate about, not me personally but the whole team, was understanding that we took a very [unclear] approach: in this discussion, there’s no such thing as who’s right or who’s wrong. It’s about education, education about understanding differences of opinion. Those differences of opinion will strengthen us if we embrace them, or they’ll tear us apart if we decide we don’t want to listen to the other side. So thank you for bringing that forward. I really appreciate that. Peter Gzowski. I’m reading your book, and of course, right on the very first page, somebody who was so iconic as a Canadian. What fascinates me, and I’d love to get your thoughts on this, Carol, from your professional background and where you’ve come from, is you look at Peter Gzowski and you look at the Johnny Carsons, and how well shaped and put together they were. There wasn’t a hair out of place with Johnny Carson or Jack Paar and these people. Gzowski, I’m sure somebody said, “Go to makeup,” and he said, “I’m just going to sit down and do my thing.” His intellect and his ability to engage and his desire to really be Canadian was exemplary. So if I were to ask your perspective: we’ve got this incredible Canadian who is intelligent and amazing in all aspects, and you want to curl up and listen to him. Why would we choose the same format that the Americans use for that presentation? In other words, a talk show. It seemed to me that if somebody had said to Gzowski, “What would you like to do?” he would have done something so Canadian. And when he asked that question, “As Canadian as what?” As Canadian as Peter Gzowski. He was amazing.
Carol Off 23:40 Peter Gzowski ran this contest before Morningside, on This Country in the Morning. He ran the contest to ask Canadians to finish the phrase “as Canadian as…” People sent in things like “as Canadian as tobogganing” and toques and maple syrup and all those sort of predictable things, and the person who won was a 17-year-old who sent in “as Canadian as possible under the circumstances.”
Stuart Murray 24:09 Exactly.
Carol Off 24:10 And that’s, to this day, what we are. I guess I didn’t see that because I was working at the CBC while Gzowski was doing his program. If you saw him, just shuffling around with cigarette ashes all over him and his greasy hair flying around. But he wasn’t the only one like that. There were all these characters, and we were in this old girls’ school that was infested with mice and even rats, and it had broken-up furniture. But you could see these legendary people walking around, like Peter Gzowski, and it was just so disheveled and homey at the same time. These people were so smart, so incisive, and they were scary, because they could cut you down in a flash if you said something stupid. I guess I didn’t see it as a kind of Jack Paar ripoff with bad hair. I just saw it as so Canadian. It was such a Canadian experience to hang out and to be there in those days, in what the CBC called the renewal of CBC Radio, when it took on that talk-show format and had no commercials. It’s a commercial-free radio system to this day, and it was just extraordinary to work there at that time.
Stuart Murray 25:34 Yeah, and I’m glad you brought it up. Pierre Berton. The book is full of so many incredible anecdotes, Carol, and these are people who are colleagues of yours, and you know them and you’ve worked with them, so it’s wonderful for you to bring them into how you talk about true patriot love, and what that means, and what it looks like. I said to you at the outset that I’d love to spend a bit of time on two particular areas. There’s just so much to cover here. One of them is who speaks for Canada, and I thought it was poignant, because the way you wrote it, there were issues around Meech Lake, there were issues around René Lévesque, there were all sorts of issues that we have lived with. But it’s interesting that today we have a prime minister who, through a lot of effort, has really tried to give Canada a sense of who he might be by going to Davos and making a speech that got a standing ovation, something that is iconic and I think will go down in history. When you look at who speaks for Canada today, I think most people would say, “Well, isn’t it the prime minister?” And I think that’s the correct answer. Having said that, we have just seen a new Péquiste government come into Quebec, even though it’s a minority government. Somebody made a very gentle crack, saying they’d finally found a minority they like. So you’ve got that minority government in Quebec, and then you’ve got this referendum that is live as we speak in Alberta. From your perspective, and it’s not a matter of saying this person, but there’s a voice: what’s the Canadian voice that needs to be there, under the guise of being patriotic to this country?
Carol Off 27:22 During the Quebec referendum of 1990 [sic], shortly after the Charlottetown Accord failed, the PQ government got elected, and there were these rallies that were paid for by the Liberal government in Ottawa. They sent in 100,000 people who showed up to try and influence that vote, and it was really taken badly by Quebecers, this spectre of these people showing up with a massive flag the size of a city block. If you’d seen it at the time, it should have been okay, just saying, “Hey, Quebec, we love you. We don’t want you to leave.” But it was really taken badly by Quebecers. Maybe you’d say, well, we were just trying to say we didn’t want them to leave. But it didn’t read like that. So I’m watching Prime Minister Carney approach these referendum questions, the situation in Quebec with separatism and Alberta separatism, very, very cautiously, and I think he’s doing that with the knowledge that this can be taken the wrong way. So how do you speak for Canada? How do you speak up without meddling in the affairs of these places? I think he’s cautiously speaking for Canada. It’s hard to do that and still respect the rights of these provinces, and the people in them, to make their own decisions. So I think this idea of being respectful of provinces trying to make their own decisions, trying to find their own way, is very important. But at the same time, not just to say we love you, we don’t want you to go, but to say we would like to talk to you about renewing federalism. We have not done a great job. We haven’t done it at all since the Constitution and Charter of Rights were patriated by Pierre Trudeau in 1982. We haven’t really been able to renew our federation, renew our constitution, bring the provinces into a better understanding of what everybody’s role is and what the relationships are. We haven’t done that in the decades since 1982. So a commitment to doing that on the part of Mark Carney would go a long way to address some of the concerns people have in both those provinces, among people who are leaning toward these movements only because they feel that Alberta or Quebec is not treated with respect by Ottawa. But underlying both of those movements there is a current of anti-immigrant, blood-and-soil nationalism that I find is something we have to keep an eye on, because it’s growing in those provinces. To say, yeah, well, we have to separate from Ottawa, because Ottawa wants this multicultural, immigrant country, diversity and inclusion, and we don’t want that. There’s a core, a fraction of those people who are like that. So how do you say: if you decide you want to stay, you’ve sent the message to us, we need to renew this federation, but please don’t succumb to the uglier sides of some of these nationalist movements?
Stuart Murray 30:40 On that basis, do you think it’s possible? One of the things I think Prime Minister Carney has done very well is he’s talked about re-engaging this economic engine that I think a lot of Canadians would say, for 10 years prior to Prime Minister Carney coming, was in abeyance, and we lost our way. And along comes this Bank of Canada, Bank of England governor, knowledgeable business guy, who becomes the leader of the Liberal Party and the prime minister of Canada, goes out and starts talking about major economic mega projects to get Canada moving again, getting all these things done. Is it possible, in your mind, to separate sitting in front of a group of people who say they want to leave and saying, “These economic opportunities will make your province richer, make you more a part of Canada,” versus saying, “Forget the economics. What does it mean to you to be a Canadian?” Can you recognize the difference between the economic benefit and the federalist benefit of being part of this nation? Do you think there’s a way to separate those two?
Carol Off 31:45 I covered the free trade negotiations in the 1980s with Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan, and that was the question then. How do we benefit from a North American trade zone and at the same time not lose our soul? And the feeling was, well, maybe we have to give up a bit of that soul. Maybe we have to put water in our wine in order to have this industry and these trade agreements. The key argument at that time was about culture, and about an ability to tell our own stories to each other. To do what you and I are doing here right now: to be able to speak to people from coast to coast and share ideas, to see our own movies, to see our own plays in our theatres, to read books written by Canadians, to have stories and film and television that were ours. What I worry about with Mark Carney, what I worry about in the moment we’re in, is that it becomes an idea that, well, we need to suffer, like we are going to suffer under these tariffs, because we have to hold on to our ability to have our own steel and our own oil and our own branch plants. And those things are all okay, fine. But unless we have our own culture, unless we have an ability to talk to each other through newspapers, which are disappearing at a rapid rate in this country, being owned by American hedge funds, unless we have our own radio stations, which are disappearing, if we don’t have our own film industry, which is always struggling, if we can’t see our plays and read our books because 98% of our publishing industry is owned by foreigners, maybe it’s more like 95, if we can’t talk to each other, what’s the point of this economic sovereignty? What’s the point of this defence industry that’s going to protect this entity if we can’t do what you and I are doing here right now? So people may feel, well, maybe we have to put some water in our wine again. Maybe we have to surrender some of this economic freedom in order to have jobs. At the same time, I think that on that fateful Friday in August, when Mark Carney walked away, he said, “Whoa, there’s something going on here.” He saw something that spooked him. We don’t know what it was. I’m dying to know what it was. But it seemed to be around culture, and not just the French language. He seemed to be looking at something and saying something is really not right here. And I think it was because in the week leading up to that moment, the Americans had begun to talk about harmonizing our digital footprint, our cloud, which sounds like, okay, whatever that is, but that was key. What that meant was that everything, our television, our radio, we wouldn’t have any Canadian content rules. We wouldn’t be able to fund the CBC. We wouldn’t be able to subsidize newspapers. We wouldn’t have our own independent sovereign cloud. All these things were under threat at that moment, including the ability to have the French language in our cinemas and in our movies. And I think he saw that, and to me that was the most exciting moment, when I think he embraced this idea. I think he understood that if we don’t have our own cultural sovereignty, then all the other sovereignty, why do we bother? Why would we sacrifice jobs for something that we can’t keep? Because we want to have health care? Yeah, we do, because we want to do things somewhat differently. Well, we do, but is that enough to give up everything to this trade agreement with the United States? I think he saw that there’s something absolutely integral to the Canadian experience that has been eroded like crazy over these years, and we’re about to see it completely erased. And I think that’s what stopped him.
Stuart Murray 35:40 I’m listening and learning as you’re saying it, because I don’t know, but I suspect your sense is probably exactly right, and let’s hope it is. And I think the beautiful thing he did was to walk away. Everybody said, well, when is he coming back? When he’s ready. Which is an unusual position for a Canadian prime minister to take.
Carol Off 36:01 At some points, it’s a really deep and frightening conversation to have with ourselves. But as the United States becomes anti-democratic, as it moves into this autocratic sphere that Donald Trump seems to be taking it into, as it embraces this idea that Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance have, that they’re going to have a white Christian patriarchy in the United States, as it drifts into this really, really dangerous area, do we really want to tie ourselves so tightly to this entity? Do we really want to put all our eggs in the basket of a country whose idea and whose reason to be we don’t agree with? If that’s where the United States is going, how closely do we want to be aligned with a state that is against our values, and how can we actually be part of a state that is contrary to our values as a country? At some point, I think Mark Carney was confronting that very reality.
Stuart Murray 37:05 He stepped into a job with no political experience, so to speak. A lot of great experience, but no political experience. And I’ll be the first person to say he surprised me, and I’m delighted to be surprised. So we’ll see where it goes, Carol. Just a thought from you on Alberta for a second. Danielle Smith is really toeing a line on this referendum and what it means and where she stands. I’m a Western Canadian, and your roots are in Winnipeg too. I know a lot of people in Alberta, and the people I’m talking to have no interest in separating. Having said that, they’re saying, “How do we get Ottawa’s attention? We have an oil industry here that we think is being ignored, in the sense that we’re getting cleaner and we’re trying to be more aware of what we’re doing.” Now, they’re speaking from their own perch, and I appreciate that. But sometimes they say, we go down to Ottawa and talk to various people in the PMO and at the deputy minister level about what we’re doing in Alberta, and we ask them to help us in a certain way. And they’ll say privately, well, what you’re saying makes sense, but politically it’s just not something we can do. So they find themselves in this position, saying, “How do we get Ottawa’s attention?” I’m not trying to be naive. Pick a percentage, 8, 10, 12, I don’t know what it is, who are saying, “Yeah, we want to be out of Canada.” I think one of your colleagues said at some point, if you want out so much, why don’t you just leave? Nobody’s asking you to stay. But the notion of trying to get attention from a political standpoint: do you buy that argument, Carol? That that’s part of what this could be about?
Carol Off 38:54 Well, it’s a pretty dangerous thing to threaten to leave in order to get leverage, because it’s already economically damaging Alberta and Canada. Investors don’t like that insecure investment environment. It’s interesting, you mentioned you were within the Mulroney government years ago, and it’s a bit back to the future right now, isn’t it? Because Brian Mulroney had two files. One was a free trade agreement with the United States, and the other was a constitutional accord with the provinces for federal renewal, constitutional renewal. He was very busy trying to get that free trade agreement signed, and he ran an election on it, the free trade election, in 1988. And then he was going to turn his attention to the Meech Lake Accord and that effort to get Quebec’s signature on the constitution, but it was also going to bring all the provinces into what I thought was a pretty bad deal. I think Mark Carney is faced with exactly the same dilemma: these are two things that, oddly enough, have to be done at the same time. Those are the two files on his desk. One is to figure out Canada’s relationship with North America and where we fit with the United States, and the other is to figure out how we fit in with each other. I totally believe that if Brian Mulroney had done a free trade agreement with the provinces and a Meech Lake Accord with the United States, getting Washington to recognize Canada as a distinct society, if we had done it that way, where we might be today would be quite different. But I think Mark Carney is faced with that double whammy in exactly the same way Brian Mulroney was confronted with it in the 1980s.
Stuart Murray 40:50 Carol, one of the things on who speaks for Canada: you talked a lot about our relationship with Indigenous peoples and the struggles we’ve had. My wife and I were just recently in Belfast, in Ireland, talking about the Troubles, that issue that continually goes on in Belfast, trying to decide whether you’re a unionist or a nationalist. When you come to Canada, you talk about Indigenous peoples. You’ve been a viewer of Canada through the lens of a journalist. Before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission took place, through Murray Sinclair and the other commissioners, did you have a sense of why that was necessary? Why we were doing it? What I’m getting at, Carol, is that I grew up in Saskatchewan amongst four reserves. Some of the stuff that came out of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I saw, but I just didn’t see it. I wasn’t aware of it. So from your perspective as a professional journalist, and you write about it in the book, did you see things that needed to be done prior to Truth and Reconciliation? And my follow-up would be, what do you think we can do better moving forward?
Carol Off 42:04 No, I didn’t know it at all. And you know what? I don’t think even a lot of Indigenous peoples knew the story. They knew their own individual experience. They knew the trauma their family knew, or they might even know the trauma their community had. But I don’t think they knew the scope, because it hadn’t been written about. It hadn’t been examined. Very much in the same way that it was probably more than a decade after the Second World War before Jews began to compare stories, before we really knew what had happened during the Holocaust, because Jews who came out of that trauma said, “I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to know anything. I don’t want to talk about it.” And they withdrew without realizing how huge it was. Until we saw some of the big trials that went on later, and people started to say, my God, I didn’t realize how broad this was. I didn’t realize how much other Jews had suffered. And I think the same of Canadian Indigenous peoples. I know this because I interviewed so many people on As It Happens about Indigenous people during that truth and reconciliation process. They had their own story to tell, which was horrible and painful and ugly, and they knew something of their other relatives, or their family, and maybe their community, but they did not know the scope of what had happened. They did not know the scope of the trauma from every part of the country. We all learned it at the same time. And I think the same thing happened in South Africa during those explorations of apartheid. I don’t think Black people knew the degree, and white people didn’t know. Then slowly they started to talk and realize, oh my God, is that really what’s been going on? That commission was vital, vital to understanding, not just for us, but I think for Indigenous peoples as well, to realize the scope of the injustice it represented.
Stuart Murray 44:05 Is there anything you think we can be doing better? We have Orange Shirt Day. We’ve got the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action, all of that now. The commission’s behind us. We now have to look forward. From your perspective, and going back to this incredible view you’ve put together in a book called True Patriot Love, are there some things we can do to embrace that, from an Indigenous perspective and from learning, as part of who we are as a nation?
Carol Off 44:39 Reconciliation and the Calls to Action are absolutely vital, but we can’t even do that until we’ve dealt with the truth part of it. It’s the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and we haven’t collectively agreed on and come to embrace the truth. I think that’s still a struggle. I have granddaughters who are 12 and 14, and ever since they were younger kids, and they’re still kids, Orange Shirt Day has been so important to them. I don’t know what it’s like in Winnipeg, but in Toronto…
Stuart Murray 45:17 Huge.
Carol Off 45:18 I look, and everyone in the street is wearing an orange shirt.
Stuart Murray 45:22 Right.
Carol Off 45:23 But the kids, that orange shirt movement. Kids get things that are unfair. They may not understand injustice and reconciliation, but they know that was not fair. Kids have an intuitive understanding of fairness. And when my granddaughters talk about Orange Shirt Day, they say, “Grandma, how could they have done that? How could they have taken all those children from their homes?” They have such a profound understanding of that. That whole generation is developing that, and you can’t remove it anymore. It’s never going to go away. I know older people say, “Well, they should just pull themselves together.” Like Stephen Harper would say, “Pull up their boots and get on with it. Stop whining.” There was all that talk before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and even during it. And there are still people to this day who say, “Well, they’re always wanting something,” and you’re hearing it in this Alberta campaign: well, Indigenous people are just going to have to go along with our project if we separate. Are we really going to just ram that through without any recognition? You cannot take Alberta out of the country. You don’t own it. You can’t take it. We don’t own it. So I think what’s so important is that there’s a generation now, my granddaughters are into their teens, a whole sphere of Canadians growing up with this knowledge of the truth, of knowing that something really bad happened. And that’s the bedrock on which reconciliation will be built.
Stuart Murray 47:00 Yeah. And Carol, I’m mindful of our time here. I appreciate the fact you’ve been able to find time for this conversation. I want to ask you a quick question, and then kind of a wrap question. My question comes around this issue of our relationship with Indigenous peoples. I was fortunate enough to be asked to be the co-chair for the Manitoba 150 activities, and one of the things I did was reach out to a number of Indigenous Elders I’m aware of and ask them for advice. And they said, “Look, one thing you should be mindful of is that when Canada celebrated its 150th, they talked about the 150th birthday, and for Indigenous peoples it’s not necessarily looked on that way. It’s an anniversary. It’s a way to mark a date.” So that’s one way they allowed me to learn to use that language. But when July 1 rolls around, Carol, there’s a notion that it’s great. It’s this celebration of Canada, almost an elbows-up celebration, fireworks and all this sort of stuff. And I’ve had conversations with some Indigenous Elders who say they don’t necessarily see that day that way. And then you look at Orange Shirt Day, and it’s my hope that Indigenous communities and Indigenous leadership decide what they want that day to look like for Canada, not others. They’re the ones. But to your point, in Winnipeg I can tell you the streets are jammed with people wearing orange T-shirts. Jammed. So let’s find out where that can go. But Carol, I want to just tell you again: True Patriot Love: Reporting from the Frontlines of Canadian Sovereignty. I’m a member of a bunch of guys who get together and try to talk about books, try to talk about issues. The issues in your book are all we talk about. We try to figure out what they mean. So trust me, I’m going to be promoting your book, because it’s important that people read it. I’ll leave it at that. But in your ending, your last chapter, “Belonging,” there were some powerful words. And at the beginning, and I want this in your words, Carol, I think it would be remiss if I didn’t ask you. People can read it, and they should, in the book. But in the beginning you talk about what home is, and you learned where you’re from. And I’m going to quote you in the introduction, because these are your words: you wanted to reveal how you learned to truly, patriotically love this country. You say that in the introduction, you talk about it through the entire book, and you wrap it up beautifully in the “Belonging” chapter. Close our conversation, if you will, on why that was so important for you to write, and what it meant to you.
Carol Off 50:00 It was really hard to write that, and even to say it. People have said to me that they felt uncomfortable when they read that I had come to truly, patriotically love this country. But I think that if I don’t do that, then someone else will. We’re just up for grabs, right? All these symbols, like the flag, the orange shirt. Other countries find these symbols really simple. Other countries have a single national narrative. I was recently reading an essay by someone in the Globe and Mail, and he was writing about having just been to the Canadian Human Rights Museum, and he was disappointed that he didn’t come away with an understanding of what the Canadian narrative was. He said his family had come from Asia, and so he wanted to know what our narrative is, what our story is. Every country has a central story that says who they are. And he said he went in and was so disappointed that he couldn’t find out what it was. And I thought, because that’s the story.
Stuart Murray 51:05 Totally, totally.
Carol Off 51:06 The story is that we have no single national narrative. But there is one thing, and I have a last thing to ask of you. The last time I was in Winnipeg, I went to the museum. I had read online, and I wanted to see Elijah Harper’s eagle feather, the one he held up in the Manitoba Legislature every day for 30 days [sic] when he refused to accept the Meech Lake Accord, because it was not inclusive of Indigenous peoples and had not consulted anyone outside that small group of men in the back rooms who had cooked up that deal. And I went into the museum, and not only did they not have it there, they’d never even heard of this thing. And if there’s one mission I’m going to have, it’s that we have to find it, if it exists to this day.
Stuart Murray 51:59 I’m sure it will. I’m sure it does. It must.
Carol Off 52:01 And put it up as one of the great symbols of this country and all its diversity.
Stuart Murray 52:06 Yeah. What a great suggestion, Carol. I know that at the time, one of the biggest elements was the apology, the apology Harper made around the residential schools. You talk about a symbol that says nothing in terms of words, but the symbol itself is all-powerful. I appreciate you sharing that. Make it a mission.
Carol Off 52:34 Thank you, Stuart.
Stuart Murray 52:35 Congratulations again. True Patriot Love is a fabulous read. I loved it so much. And of course I disagree with some things you say, but that makes us Canadians. And you know what? I love the fact that some people are uncomfortable with you saying you have true patriot love. Be Canadian. Be strong. Say it. We’re so afraid to say, oh no, we shouldn’t really pat ourselves on the back. Start now. Start today. Start tomorrow. Start the next day. There was a premier in Ontario or Manitoba who always ended his speeches by saying, and we can view this as Canada, “The only thing better than Canada today is Canada tomorrow.” Your book does that.
Carol Off 53:16 Well, that’s as Canadian as possible under the circumstances.
Stuart Murray 53:19 Yeah, I love that, Carol. Thank you so much. Good luck on the book tour. If you’re in Winnipeg, I hope we might get a chance to see each other in person. But thank you for taking the time. Thank you for writing this book, and thank you for this conversation.
Carol Off 53:33 Thank you, Stuart. I enjoyed it immensely.
Matt Cundill 53:36 Thanks for listening to Humans, On Rights. A transcript of this episode is available by clicking the link in the show notes of this episode. Humans, On Rights is recorded and hosted by Stuart Murray. Social media marketing by Buffy Davey. Music by Doug Edmond. For more, go to humanrightshub.ca.
Matt Cundill 53:56 Produced and distributed by the Sound Off Media Company.
