Are You There, Canada? It’s Me, Canada

True Patriot Love: Reporting from the Frontlines of Canadian Sovereignty
By Carol Off
Random House Canada (2026)

When I was growing up on my grandparent’s farm on Kootenay Lake, I developed a near-obliterating hatred of trespassers.

I’m not exactly sure where this lava-hot source of antipathy originated. But it reached an epic boil when the “beach kids,” as we called them, arrived. Over the course of the summer, the sons and daughters of the doctors and dentists from town staged raiding parties on our cherry orchard.

If I could have murdered them outright, I probably would have done it. But chasing them with our dogs was about all we could manage as small children.

Echoes of this white-hot fury resurfaced when the current U.S. president began calling Canada the 51st state.

On the phone with author Carol Off the other week to interview her about her new book, that towering incandescent rage erupted again. It is still erupting as I consider Off’s latest, True Patriot Love: Reporting from the Frontlines of Canadian Sovereignty.

Her previous book, 2024’s At A Loss For Words: Conversation in the Age of Rage took aim at the things that divide us. True Patriot Love examines the stuff that brings us together. It’s a deep dive into what makes Canada the place that it is.

Off takes a decidedly personal approach by opening the book with a story about her Grade 4 teacher Mrs. Barchuk and a class project to redesign the Canadian flag. Fittingly enough, the chapter is entitled “The Great Canadian Flag Flap.”

The year was 1964, and the original flag still bore all the hallmarks of the country’s colonialist past, including a Union Jack. Under the auspices of then-Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, the project to create a new national symbol ignited the country. Off’s elementary school class of Winnipeg kids did not realize at the time that they were participating in the future of the nation.

Before Canada could decide on a symbol for the future, the lingering stuff of the past needed to be addressed. As Off explains, the pushback against the idea of a new flag came from a few directions. It wasn’t simply veterans who had fought for Old Blighty in the First and Second World Wars, but also from disgruntled populations across the country.

Some of the fiercest resistance came in the House of Commons, with then-Progressive Conservative Party leader John Diefenbaker’s jowl-shaking anger at the prospect of a new flag.

Many of the issues that were present then haven’t changed much.

“By the time Pearson became prime minister, it was obvious that Canada could only resist U.S. assimilation if it was united, French and English, East and West. The country’s sovereignty was precarious, its economy and defense heavily reliant on the Americans,” Off writes.

“Canada needed policies, principles and ideas that Canadians in all its provinces could rally around and ones that the world would respect.”

When the proposed design for the flag was presented in parliament, things went nuts. Various MPs challenged each other to duels, and a near-donnybrook brawl ensued. The term used to denote the level of chaos was “loony bin.”

But by the winter of 1965, Pearson’s perseverance paid off. The old flag came down and the new one bearing a red maple leaf was raised. It proved to be something of a hinge between old and new Canada.

Off writes of returning to her elementary school as an adult to better understand this inflection point.

“I suspect no one has ever sat on that bench and contemplated, as I did that day, what the flag has come to represent over the decades, and tried to imagine a time when it didn’t exist at all — an era when kids like me were conjuring up symbols of nationhood, imagining what their futures might be, pinning their ideas on the walls of Mrs. Barchuk’s classroom,” she writes.

“After more than 60 years of living with the distinctive red maple leaf, I confess to feeling deep emotions when I confront it. In true Canadian fashion, I’m of two minds.”

Facing dark chapters with frankness and clarity

Ah, yes, the good old divided-mind scenario. It’s as Canadian as the Great White North, toques, beavers and any number of national symbols one might throw in the hopper.

This twinning of personal experience with the state of the nation provides True Patriot Love with a solid structure. Off’s own life runs parallel to the evolution of the country.

The book recalls Off’s childhood delight in Expo ’67. There are also memorable scenes of Off hitchhiking with her sister, along with legions of other hippy kids, across the country. She also traces her early days as a journalist at the CBC.

The trajectory of Off’s life mirrors many of the most sizable, occasionally seismic events in Canadian history. As a journalist, she had a front-row seat to the 1987 Meech Lake Accord, the 1995 Quebec Referendum, the 1988 Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement and Canada’s role as UN peacekeepers in Rwanda, Somalia and the Balkans. In many of these situations, Canadian politicians and powerbrokers don’t come across at shiny and heroic. It’s often the exact opposite.

But as Off makes clear, part of becoming a mature country means facing up to the darkest chapters of our collective history. The usual dung-heap stuff of racism and sexism is familiar enough, but it’s joined by particularly Canadian issues like Western alienation and Quebec’s ongoing quest for independence.

Easily one of the most startling sections in Off’s book details the complexities and horrific actions of Canadian peacekeepers on the world stage. Rwanda is well-known story, but reading about General Roméo Dallaire’s decision to remain at his post, trying to save as many people as he could as the country descended into genocide, is still shocking.

Another event detailed in Off’s book is even harder to contend with.

The Battle of Medak Pocket remains a subject that soldiers talk about quietly with each other. It is still considered to be one of the darkest chapters in Canadian military history.

In September 1993, soldiers from the 2nd Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry were sent to Medak, Croatia to support the United Nations Protection Force mission. The Canadian soldiers were tasked with supporting the soldiers already on the ground in what was thought to be neutral area.

But after being bombarded by Croatian forces, the Canadian troops discovered the Croatians had been engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Serbian civilians.

The firefight with the Canadian forces was meant to be a distraction so that the mass killings could occur. The Canadian soldiers were not allowed to talk about what they had witnessed, in part because of the sensitivity around previous engagements (i.e., Somalia), but also because the image of Canadian peacekeepers as the good guys and non-combatants was more important than the truth.

Off describes the work of getting the facts: “Whenever I was travelling with Canadian soldiers or visiting their base camps, I would hear stories of Medak Pocket, passed on like secret handshakes. Why did no one know about this? Why was it covered up? I would learn that the Somalia affair and the murder of Shidane Arone had so profoundly spooked the DND [Department of National Defense] brass that they didn’t want any more tales of violence involving our peacekeepers, even righteous ones.”

Like other horrific chapters in Canadian history, facing the truth requires courage and honesty. It’s an ongoing effort. And hard enough to manage without the looming spectre of being swallowed whole by the Americans.

‘I’m astonished we even have a country’

The existential threat posed by the current U.S. administration isn’t new. But in Off’s thoughtful opinion, Canada is better positioned now to stand off the U.S. than it was in the 1980s, when Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan found a meeting of the minds over the Free Trade Agreement and a shared love of crooning Irish folk songs.

“I’m astonished we even have a country,” she states matter-of-factly. Resisting the cultural onslaught of the Americans has proven far more insidious and pervasive than any outright military campaign.

Standing off what she describes as the “most powerful media technology in the world, especially when we share the same language,” has proven the more difficult task. The continuing erosion of media outlets in Canada is another factor. It means “we’re losing the ability to speak to one another,” Off said.

She cites the need for a robust local media to not only inform people, but also to provide a common ground of shared experience and solidarity.

“Selling out our culture for cheap veggies and a condo in Florida,” as she puts it, may been more incentivizing in the 1980s and ’90s, but with the election of President Trump, the long sleep of peaceful co-existence was shattered.

Off credits Trump with the dropping of the mask of perceived friendship between the U.S. and Canada. As our American neighbours indulge in white Christian nationalism alongside the usual slop of aggression, greed and expansionism, the threat to Canadian sovereignty becomes more than theoretical.

It is not a fair fight. Then again, Canadians are good at persisting in the face of challenge. Off herself is emblematic of this very quality, from facing down the wrath of Pierre Trudeau to covering some of the most dangerous places on earth (the chapter in her book about Afghanistan is particularly harrowing). The woman has grit.

Out of darkness can come true northern light. One thing that unites Canadians in joy and laughter is culture. It’s fitting, then, that Off ends her book with a full-throated appreciation of Canadian creativity, citing films like Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language and Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron.

Both Rankin and Romvari’s films embody what is best about Canada: they are complex, emotionally nuanced and filled with profound compassion and curiosity for the human spirit.

It is cultural sovereignty that Off returns to often, like a clarion bell of Canadiana. This reminded me of the apocryphal quote attributed to former U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill. When asked about cutting arts funding to support the war effort in the Second World War, he remarked, “Then what would we be fighting for?”

True Patriot Love is a reminder that Canada is still a work in progress. Yes, we mess up, we make terrible decisions.

But Canadians seem bound and determined to try and do better. To create a place that we can all call home.

Join Carol Off at the closing night of the Vancouver Writers Fest on Oct. 25, where she will be in conversation with writer and editor David Moscrop about ‘True Patriot Love.’ Tickets are available online.