’In love with the idea of Canada’: Veteran broadcast journalist urges us not to fear the future

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There’s a dramatic moment in Carol Off’s new book, True Patriot Love, when she brings the reader to a pair of our nation’s most hallowed landmarks.

One is the National War Memorial in Ottawa’s Confederation Square, dedicated by King George Vl in 1939 just months before the country would be plunged again into battle.

The other monument, The Reconciliation, honours the nation’s role in United Nations Peacekeeping; it led to a Nobel Peace Prize for the man who conceived it — Canada’s Lester Pearson.

But then, she writes, there’s another kind of monument nearby — “this one representing an impulse to dominate … The United States embassy looms over The Reconciliation, the building’s steel, concrete and opaque glass facade impenetrable and inscrutable.”

Located on Sussex Drive, it’s a structure that Canada’s prime ministers must pass on their way to work. “It’s intimidating,” Off tells Postmedia now. “It’s intended to be intimidating. Their old embassy, across from the Parliament buildings, was quite graceful and beautiful and the building they constructed in its place is designed to strike fear.”

This is the fifth book from Off, a veteran broadcast journalist and former host of CBC Radio’s As It Happens, and it’s telling Canadians not to be afraid. Part history, part memoir, part meditation — it’s a thoughtful and sometimes provocative summation of six decades of living and working through nation-defining events. And it’s not only the seasoned journalist we’re meeting here. Yes, we get an inside look at key events she has covered — among them the Quebec sovereignty movement, the initial Canada-U.S. free trade negotiations where “it often felt as though a cat was toying with a mouse,” the trauma of Canada’s peacekeeping involvements in the Balkans and Afghanistan, the artistic renaissance that gave strength to an often beleaguered cultural life. But there are also the emotions of a nine-year-old Winnipeg kid experiencing her first glimpse of Canada’s new flag.

True Patriot Love: Reporting From The Frontlines Of Canadian Sovereignty
Carol Off
Random House

“The book is really a journey, a voyage of my life from the child who saw the flag for the first time to my adventures abroad covering the Canadian military in various operations, and I realized that the arc of the story, the journey, would be watching Canada mature as a country,” Off says. What she didn’t know at the start was “that in the process of writing I would recall so many things and have so many feelings and recollections of moments in time, especially thinking of my own family, my son growing up against this backdrop of Canada maturing as a nation and then seeing my children growing up.”

She came to appreciate what her book was really about — “how I truly, patriotically, came to love this country.” And she hopes readers will ponder the same questions she had been asking herself. What does it mean to be a Canadian? What kind of Canada do we want to build?

The shadow of Canada’s neighbour to the south hangs heavily over the pages. Consider Off’s opening sentences. “Canada has long defined itself by what it is not, meaning it is not the United States. While we’re often content to not be Americans, we haven’t always had an idea of who we are. That’s now changing.” She argues that U.S President Donald Trump has triggered a new-found self assurance among Canadians.

“I didn’t recognize it until that extraordinary moment when Donald Trump awakened us from our slumber and I started to understand what we had as a country,” Off tells Postmedia. “I’d been travelling, I’d been working abroad, I’d been covering stories in Canada and everywhere in the world — I’d been taking things for granted and thinking that everything is cool. Then Trump began to muse about the 51st state and how he could just erase the border.

“Something just snapped and I realized the stakes. That’s when those thoughts and memories and stories from my life all sort of came together and I thought — there’s a narrative here I want to tell.”

Those thoughts and memories are not always reassuring, but they heighten the book’s value. The Battle of Medak Pocket plunged Canadian peacekeepers into full-fledged war with Croatian forces, but the Canadian government attempted to cover up that bloody event. It deserves to be remembered as does another unsettling moment — the attempt by Flora MacDonald, a Mulroney government minister to create the foundation for a viable Canadian film industry and its destruction by Washington-backed Hollywood power brokers.

The book suggests that Trump has confronted Canadians with two options — “either to cease to exist as a country or become something we’ve never been before, a truly sovereign nation, defined and shaped on our own terms, with a firm grip on who we are and where we’re going. We decided to go with option number two.”

There have been demeaning moments — the residential schools horror is but one reason for soul-searching. “I have been thinking a lot about what patriotism really means,” Off says. “We are not perfect by any means and what I tried to do in this book was to show that to love Canada is not to be blind to its flaws, to its problems, to its many failures.”

Canadian patriotism isn’t about blowing your own horn and thinking that we’re superior. Patriotism is about an idea. It’s about being in love with the idea of Canada — an idea that doesn’t exist anywhere else any more …

Yet many Canadians are wary of the idea of “patriotism” — looking southwards and seeing it as jingoistic, based on feelings of superiority and exceptionalism and further inflated by slogans of greatness.

“I don’t think Canadians feel that way. Canadian patriotism isn’t about blowing your own horn and thinking that we’re superior. Patriotism is about an idea. It’s about being in love with the idea of Canada — an idea that doesn’t exist anywhere else any more …

“I don’t think Canadians see themselves as exceptional. They want to build on what works in the country and try to fix what doesn’t. We would just like to live in this country with security and also with pride. In the United States it’s about destiny, that the United States was a gift by God to the world, and that they have some special role in the world. I don’t think Canadians would ever see themselves that way.”