True Patriot Love

Reporting from the Frontlines of Canadian Sovereignty

De: Carol Off

From the #1 bestselling author of At a Loss for Words, an urgent, timely and powerful primer on who we are as Canadians, where we’re going and what role Canada is destined to play on the world stage.

We find ourselves in a moment of profound reckoning. We either cease to exist as a country, and Canadians seem determined not to allow that to happen, or we become something we’ve never been before—a truly independent nation, defined and shaped on our own terms, with a firm grip on our identity.

Since she stepped down from As It Happens, Carol Off has been on the road talking to Canadians and listening to their ever-pressing questions about the country's future. With True Patriot Love, she's ready to offer answers, drawing on lessons from the crises, over the past 50 years, where Canadians tried and often failed to define ourselves. She witnessed these defining moments firsthand as a journalist: the flag debate; the first wave of Canadian cultural nationalism in the 1970s; the Shamrock Summit and the original free trade deal with the U.S.; Meech Lake and the country's ongoing relationship with First Peoples; and our shifting identity as international peacekeepers.

In True Patriot Love, Off remembers this history as she calls us toward our unspoken values and shows us that there is a positive identity to be claimed from all our efforts—imperfect as they may be—to make an identity out of our compassionate, caring and accommodating impulses, our desire to include and not exclude, to welcome and encompass rather than reject and demonize. Canadians aren’t saintly, as Carol Off writes, but we have mostly tried to be decent. And, she argues, in this new world order rocked by the belligerent and autocratic president to the south, that is a rock worthy of building a national identity upon.