Carol Off knows about talking to people. A five-decade career as a journalist, author and broadcaster has made her one of Canada’s foremost specialists in conversation. The problem is people seem to have lost the ability to talk to one another to overcome society’s mounting challenges.
A beloved voice on the CBC radio’s foundational program As It Happens between 2006 and 2022, Off connected listeners to the good, the bad, the quirky, the humourous and the profound between 6:30 pm and 8 pm every weeknight. More than 25,000 interviews in 15 years has provided Off a unique vantage point that she’ll share at a Mir Lecture event on February 12 at the Brilliant Cultural Centre in Castlegar.
Based on her outstanding new book—At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage—Off will discuss the importance of reclaiming the words that give life and meaning to our pursuit of a better world.
“I wrote the book because it seemed to me that the entire political landscape was changing,” says Off, who retired from the CBC in 2022.
“I was leaving As It Happens at a time when the entire structure of our conversations was changing. They were so much more adversarial, people were so angry, there was this rage-farming going on… it felt like a breakdown in our civil society was beginning. I felt there was a place to warn people about where some of this rhetoric and some of this politicking might take us.”
Released in September 2024, Off’s book concentrates on six words that she feels have been hijacked, weaponized and semantically bleached: freedom, democracy, truth, woke, choice and taxes. As she explains in the introduction, her latest work is not a linguistic critique or political thesis. Off is not an etymologist, a historian or a social scientist, she is a journalist who has dedicated her life to telling stories that are based on fact.
Her career as a journalist started at the University of Western Ontario’s student newspaper in the late-1970s. She spent the next eventful five decades as a radio correspondent and television journalist covering politics and current affairs in Canada, the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early-1990s, the 9/11 attack on the United States, the election of Vladimir Putin, and thousands-upon-thousands of minutes interviewing the most famous and the previously unknown on As It Happens. Off also managed to tuck-in four best-selling books to her incredible life’s work.
At a Loss for Words is a product of our current divisive times. Off explores the past and present of the six words in focus, mixing in personal stories from her life and career, sprinkling around plenty of historical context, introducing readers to a wide range of personalities, and ultimately connecting the dots on how we arrived to this dramatic point.
From Donald Trump to Charles Lindbergh, Victor Orban to Radovan Karadzic, Mark Zuckerberg to Charles Koch, Danielle Smith to Pierre Trudeau and lesser-knowns Leonard Leo to Barre Seid, the cast of characters is fascinating.
Off describes her book and what she will speak about at the Mir Lecture event as a cautionary tale about where adversarial, wedge-driving, in-fighting and angry politics will eventually lead us.
“As I have toured the country, people want to know what my prescription is, and how we recover the civil society and the conversations that we used to have,” Off says.
“I don’t have a lot of solutions for people, except to get off their social media more often, which I now call anti-social media. People are being swept away by a politics that is designed to get them worked up, designed to get them angry. That’s what populism does, that’s what demagoguery does.”
Bringing the narrative into the focus of our current times, Off writes plenty about the rise of US President Donald Trump, the 2022 Freedom Convoy in Canada and Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre. She says the chaos of the moment, the tools being used by the powerful to generate the distortion and the extremely difficult challenges ahead, have weakened the majority who are simply searching for better outcomes.
“I still think we still have a lot of people who are in the middle, who just don’t feel they have a political home anymore,” she says.
“To people on the extreme left and people on the extreme right, we are capable of just saying: ‘you duke it out with each other, but we in the middle want to start talking to each other and have civilized conversations so we can start to work out some of the big issues that we need to confront as a united society.’ Not all thinking the same thing, but definitely agreeing on what has to be done and how to do it.”
Ultimately, Off is a storyteller. It’s her gift to help tell stories of others by asking questions as a journalist, narrate personal stories from her youth and career, and enliven others to seek connections themselves.
“Every meaningful thing that we do will contribute to something larger,” Off says of a better way forward.
“Whether it’s just voting or taking care of neighbours or listening to your kids or joining a book club or becoming involved in volunteer work. Anything meaningful that you do is extremely powerful at this point because the cumulative effect of all these gestures is really significant. That is the antidote. Hopefulness is not something that I am turning to, meaningfulness is my buzz word for 2025.”
Tickets are now on sale for the Mir Lecture event that starts at 7 pm on February 12 (adults $35, students/youth/low barrier $22, recording of event $25). You can find out more information and purchase tickets at: https://selkirk.ca/events/mir-lecture-carol.
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