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.

Catch Carol in Winnipeg on November 25th to talk about her book with Niigaan Sinclair at McNally Robinson.

True Patriot Love: Reporting from the Frontlines of Canadian Sovereignty is out now.