Finding our footing

Defining a Canadian identity has long been the preserve of this country’s chattering classes. Of late, the preoccupation’s gone more mainstream.

In her new book True Patriot Love: Reporting from the Frontlines of Canadian Sovereignty, Carol Off nicely frames the impetus for this change right off the hop. “When Trump was elected president for the second time in November 2024 and he began to think aloud maybe Canada should no longer exist as a country, something snapped in our otherwise go-along-to-get-along disposition and we found ourselves at a crossroads,” she writes. “We considered two options: either we could cease to exist as a country or we would become something we’ve never been before – a truly sovereign nation.”

Off is the author of five previous books, most recently 2024’s At a Loss for Words, but is best known as a long-running host (2006-2022) of CBC Radio One’s current-affairs program As It Happens.

Her latest book is part memoir, part political journalism and part historical survey. And it’s top notch.

Off was born in Winnipeg, but her family moved to Ottawa when she was 10 years old.

She even starts the book with a potted history of the tumultuous 1965 creation of Canada’s red-and-white Maple Leaf flag — which replaced the Canadian Red Ensign that prominently featured the British Union Jack in its upper left corner — that’s partly filtered through childhood reminiscences of her West Kildonan neighbourhood and Victory School, across the street from her home. In 1964, her elementary-school class even participated in an open national competition for design of a new flag.

She serially plots out sovereignty-themed episodes of recent Canadian history and culture, illuminating both with punch and finesse.

On tap are chapters on the flag debate, Montreal’s Expo 67, the rise of CanLit, the patriation of the Constitution and creation of the Charter of Rights, the original Canada-U.S. free trade agreement (which later spawned NAFTA and CUSMA), the Meech Lake Accord and its demise and Canada’s failed role as an international peacekeeper in Bosnia and Rwanda. And it all ends as it began — with our relationship with the regime of Mad King Donald.

Particularly excellent, and moving, is her account of her stints reporting on the ground in Afghanistan. She compellingly recounts how coalition forces, including Canada’s military, fatally aligned themselves with the corrupt and brutal warlords that replaced the Taliban, paving the way for the resurgence of that Islamic fundamentalist regime and its return to power in 2021.

The only weak part of the book is her London- and Toronto-centric accounts of 1970s avant-garde theatre and visual arts, whose major players and their works will be unknown to anyone outside southwestern Ontario.

Early in the book, and almost in passing, she also makes a regrettable gaffe. She does a gross injustice to the late former Globe and Mail and Toronto Star columnist Anthony Westell, glibly dismissing him as an “outspoken member of the Canadian political establishment.”

Westell was never an establishment insider or aristo. Nor was he born with a silver spoon in his mouth. A British immigrant with no post-secondary education (he left school in England at age 15 to become an apprentice reporter), he worked his way up in Canadian journalism, eventually becoming director of Carleton University’s journalism school.

Overall, however, this is a deeply researched and deliciously delivered mix of recent Canadian history and memoir, all wedded to an articulate call for a new patriotism in response to America’s continuing threat to our sovereignty.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.

Carol Off launches True Patriot Love in Winnipeg on Wednesday, Nov. 25 at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location.