Carol Off: At A Loss For Words

Stuart Murray  0:00  
This podcast was recorded on the ancestral lands, on treaty one territory, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe Cree, Oji Cree, Dakota and the Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Metis nation.

Amanda Logan (Voiceover)  0:19  
This is humans on rights, a podcast advocating for the education of human rights. Here's your host, Stuart Murray,

Stuart Murray  0:31  
as co host of CBC as it happens, Carol off spent a decade and a half talking to people in the news five nights a week, on top of her stellar writing and reporting career, those 25,000 interviews have given her a unique vantage point on the crucial subject at the heart of her new book, at a loss for words, conversation in an Age of Rage, in six wide ranging chapters off explores the mutating meanings and the changing political impact of her six chosen words, freedom, democracy, truth, woke, choice and taxes. Carol, off. Welcome to humans on rights.

Carol Off  1:13  
I'm so glad to be here. Stuart, thank you

Stuart Murray  1:15  
so Carol in your book, at a loss for words, you write that as host of CBC radios, as it happens, you became alarmed by the strident language of many of your political conversations, and you say that these conversations started to become more angry and bitter. Carol. Was there a moment in time when you were acting as co host that you said, wow, something is shifting here. And can you kind of put that down to any particular thing that was happening in the world?

Carol Off  1:46  
It was slowly shifting in the years of the government of Stephen Harper, where I just found all conversations were so antagonistic. And you know that I would, I would challenge people in interviews. That's my job. But it wasn't just a matter of pushing back in the interviews, but they would be so angry, and eventually they just said, we're not going to talk to you at all. And they did that with many other journalists, not just me. So I already had that adversarial, angry quality to our politics before the big event, which was the election of Donald Trump. And so once Trump hit the main stage with the most extreme form of what we'd had only a taste of in Canada, my sense that somehow the Furies got released and that people were feeling liberated to say almost anything and to say things that were so mean and so angry, because it was, was called refreshingly honest when somebody would when, especially Donald Trump, would say something a misogynist or racist or Islamophobic. It was just like that. He tells it like it is. And so it just, it just unleashed this freedom to say the worst things, the most angry things. And also in the interviews I had, it was not just that people disagreed with each other. They hated the people with whom they disagreed. The whole thing just got unbelievably ugly. Yeah,

Stuart Murray  3:18  
and I think that your book is so well written, so well researched, that I think it does capture a moment in time where I look at the Trump election also as a way that it seems to unleash people's anger, and they could sort of say anything. And you know, I want to talk a little bit obviously, about your book, Carol, and you talk about freedom in your book as one of the key words, and I'm just curious to see why you chose that word, and I want to just preempt a little bit by saying I think you're clairvoyant, because I think Kamala Harris, coming on to the scene, has really embraced freedom in terms of what she wants to run on. But why was that word important to you,

Carol Off  4:00  
I wish that my book had come out earlier so I could claim that she read it, and that's how she decided to turn her theme camp, her campaign theme, into the freedom. You know, two events that really galvanized all this in my mind. And the first, the book. And second, the word which leads the book, which is freedom. The first was in January of 2021 when those mobs stormed Congress in the United States, and did so in the names of liberating America from the woke menace, or from the deep state, or from the tyranny of the Marxist leftists. That was their war whoop. And so that was the first thing. And then the A year later, almost exactly a year later, Ottawa was taken over by the so called Freedom convoy, and they used to actually use the word freedom that they were going to liberate Canada from all of these oppressive measures, from the tyranny of the liberals, from woke agendas. I. And from mask mandates and being forced to be vaccinated if they wanted to go to McDonald's, all these things were told me that this word freedom had been hijacked by completely different agenda, and that it wasn't the freedom that I had known through all my history and all of my education, which was the desire part of people to be liberated from oppression and to also be liberated from want and from fear of want that were became sort of the mainstay of the four freedoms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and how we the whole welfare state, came out of that idea that we should be free from Want and free from fear, and suddenly that, that fear, that there that freedom word, was now hijacked and weaponized for a completely different cause. And I thought, well, if I'm going to do anything, I'm going to write a book about that word. And then the other words kind of flowed from that,

Stuart Murray  5:55  
with your background, Carol, the notion of calling the so called Freedom convoy, because that was self appointed. I think a lot of people wondered if it was more of a, almost a terrorist action on wheels. Because, you know, to use the word freedom allowed a lot of people to sort of gather and say, Well, what's this about? Maybe I should know more about it. I think that the weaponization of the Canadian flag has been something that I guess I would ask from your perspective, as you've written and read and thought about this, you know, how do we get our flag back from this so called Freedom chant?

Carol Off  6:31  
I've heard this from so many people, and it's something I share. I can't even look at the flag without shattering now. And why should that be the case? Because we saw people that who were filled with anger, filled with rage, who stormed into Ottawa, but then continued from there, they roar around. I don't know it's like in Winnipeg, but in Ontario, they roar around in pickup trucks with F Trudeau signs on them, with Canadian flags flapping, sometimes upside down. They've turned this, what they say, this freedom movement, which was freedom from responsibility to others, freedom from obligations to society, freedom to do and say whatever you want. To turn that idea of freedom into their clarion call to wrap that in a flag and actually call it patriotism, which is what we witnessed here. And so that, how do we get that flag back? You know? I mean, maybe, maybe we don't, maybe we don't get it back. Maybe it's not important to have as much as I that flag meant something to me, and I traveled the world. I've been in wars everywhere. I've seen horrible things. I have been involved in refugee crises, wars, hate filled events, and when I would return home and see that flag, my heart was just gripped with joy. And there are times when I literally, literally got down on the ground and kissed it when I got back to this country, and I still feel that way. And they could take the flag, they can they can take the the words, they can take all that, but they can't take from me the feeling I have that this is my country, and I know what it's about, and I know what it stands for. And I think a lot of people share that idea with me. Yeah, no. Thank

Stuart Murray  8:10  
you so much, especially coming out of the Olympics and watching how well Canada did. And you know, one of the things that, of course, is for these athletes to drape that flag and run and people celebrate. And so I appreciate your thought on that Carol. Thanks. I mean, the other issue, of course, which you write about is the January 6 absolute insurrection that took place in Washington, DC,

Carol Off  8:29  
yes. And so, from the American point of view, this same idea that they were going to be liberated from tyranny, from the tyranny of the deep state, from the tyranny of Democrats, the tyranny of whatever it was all, it's all gobbledygook. I don't even know that. I don't think they know what they they they're talking about, but they who was motivating that, who was behind it? I found that a lot of the people with whom I spoke, because we covered it and articles I read, a lot of people who got sucked into that felt that they were part of something important and, and just, I think the same with many people that went to the freedom convoy. They believed that they were part of something important, and, and, and that's fine. I think that people should feel inspired to get involved and get engaged without violence and without interrupting the lives of others. But in that case, it was real violence that happened in Washington, and they, they claimed that they were doing it to liberate but the people behind it, that's when you have to that's what I really spend a lot of time in this book, is looking at who pays for this, who's financing it, who's sending out the busses, who's writing the talking points, who supports this, whose money is it, and would find that there's some really sinister kinds of things in the background, some of that, many of the people who were leading the charge in Washington were from very, very frightening white supremacist groups, from terrorist registered groups, registered as terrorist organizations, of. On the right, and they were the ones who were instigating it. They were the ones who were doing or leading the violence. And a lot of people got sucked into that. And I think there's some tremendous regrets on the parts of many people, first of all, because they're in jail and because they their families had to mortgage the house in order to pay the legal bills. And I think just really, just regretting that they got pulled into something without realizing that they were being manipulated.

Stuart Murray  10:25  
Yeah. And I, you know, one person might be Mike Pence, just for starters. You know, for what he did, you talk with the word freedom. And I know that we talked a little bit about the Harris walls campaign coming out, and using that as kind of a bit of their calling card, to some extent. And it's supported by Beyonce song freedom. So again, I think, Carol, what you've done is created a really, really nice platform for anybody who wants to read your section on freedom, to understand the importance of it, and the narration of what, what Harris and walls are doing is exactly, I think, what you are advocating people to sort of embrace that sense of freedom. In

Carol Off  11:03  
the past couple of years, while I've been writing the book, I didn't think that I would be in a moment of any kind of hope or joy. By the time you and I would be talking, it felt so dark. And I thought what I was going to try to do is to is that felt people were giving up, that they thought that the whole thing had been hijacked by another agenda, that the people the freedom convoy, or the people the maggot Republicans, all of that had they owned the story. And it was happening not just in Canada, the United States, but was happening in Europe. It was happening elsewhere, and that we had lost. And people were resigned to that, and I wrote the book, hoping I could maybe stir some desire to say, No, we just not give up on this. These are brilliant ideas, this idea of democracy and our idea of freedom, which is freedom to Freedom from what, freedom from fear, freedom to take care of each other. All of these freedoms, there are social freedoms like the social responsibility freedoms that let's not give up on them. Let's not let them own these words. And I honestly was not expecting what happened weeks ago, months, I guess, now, into months when Kamala Harris took the stage and owned that word. Said, this is we're going to say that you're going to you should be you're free to send your kids to school without fearing they're going to be shot, which you should be free to choose when and if you're going to have children. You'd be free to choose what gender you want to have. You should be free to live your life as you want to live it. You should be free from want. You should have health care. You should be free from the fear that if you change your job, you won't have Medicare anymore, all of these things that she which was that this social programs that were being eroded in the United States and being eroded in Canada because of the similar pressures, she is going to restore that. But what was so interesting about this freedom movement of the Harris walls campaign was when Tim walls jumped on and said, It's none of your damn business. And so when he did that, he took the other part of freedom, the very part the opposing view of freedom, which is your freedom from interference in the government. And he and he exposes what the Republicans were doing because they were they had their book banners in the libraries. They had their their agenda to remove the rights of women to choose to have the reproductive freedoms. Who are you going to marry? Where you're going to get married, what gender you're going to have? All the things that were were considered to be none of your damn business, freedoms, that think that the Republicans, the right, owned that idea that the government should get out of your life, should not be interfering in your lives. And now suddenly the Democrats not just took the old FDR part, the old part of saying this, take care of our people, but leave us alone to live our lives as we want to live them. It was an astonishing accomplishment.

Stuart Murray  14:03  
Yeah, for sure. And again, we don't know what the results are going to be in November, but you know, let's bring hope also back into the agenda, as they talked about at that Democratic National Convention. So So Carol, let's just move on a little bit on your book. One of the other words that you have is democracy, big word. Why did you choose that word? Well, because

Carol Off  14:20  
there were so many people everywhere in the United States but around the world, talking about how democracy had outlived its usefulness, that democracy was an old thing. We didn't need it anymore. It was an old idea whose time had passed, and what we really wanted was some kind of a strong man who would make decisions, take control of things and and be our strong man. And so the populist, the demagogue, the populist message of demagoguery, which is always us against them, always we that we are the people. I am the leader who's going to take care of the real people and the elite. Are out there, always conspiring against you, the gatekeepers, the globalists, and so this idea that we don't, we don't need democracy. We don't need and I say democracy, I'm talking about liberal democracy, which is the very elastic term democracy, but liberal democracy, which is that it's not just the majority of the people have voted for this party or this government, but that it doesn't, it doesn't matter, even if you didn't vote for that government, that the government sells responsibility to you, that it's that liberal democracy is not just that people have a free vote, but that you have a constitution. You have a constitution, you have a Bill of Rights, you have laws that protect minorities, protect the weak, protect those who didn't vote for you, and so that you have this pluralist, inclusive quality to that democracy. That's liberal democracy, and that's what I saw as being truly threatened, mostly in the United States and on this continent, but I was feeling that vibe in Canada, because there is not, you know, I wrote, I write about the history of democracy in this country, there's not a long and deep love affair with democracy. We have a tendency in this country to want people to make decisions for us and to and to have strong leaders take over things. So I thought we are so vulnerable to this very vile idea entering into our own political system.

Stuart Murray  16:26  
After reading your chapter on that, I was going to ask you, sort of, is Canada a country that you would deem a beacon of democracy? And you kind of answered that in tour, the history is not been that great.

Carol Off  16:36  
It took so long before we got votes for universal votes. We still don't have them right for so many well, people say that young people should vote. I think so too. I think I know 16 year olds who would be a more informed voter than many people in my age group. I think the vote should be given to younger people, but look how long it took before indigenous people were allowed to vote without leaving their reserve where they had to give up their status in order to vote in Canadian elections. Look how long it been before in British Columbia they allowed the vote to Chinese immigrants or people of Asian background. The Japanese were just shut out of the vote for such a long time, it really you get into the 20th century before you see people getting the vote, and look how long we've took before women got the vote. And we were one. We were an outlier in this country, in this in this world, as far as giving women that franchise. And so we we had to pry democratic rights out of the fingers of of our society for every single one of them, we had to struggle and fight and squeeze out of our governments. And we've done it. And so to lose any of that is bad. I think we should be moving forward. I think we one of the things I write in the book is that when I want to recover these words of freedom and democracy or truth, I don't want to just return to what we had before. I don't think we want to go back to the status quo. I think we want these things to expand. We want that, yes, that we live in an inclusive society, a pluralist society here in Canada, but not enough. There are, there's, there's just not enough recognition given to how many barriers there are to so many vulnerable groups. We still haven't sorted out our relationship to the transgender community. Look at what's happening in Alberta. We still are have had, we still have the Indian Act for God's sakes. We still haven't moved that much forward on ensuring that people have access to education from all groups, we still have deep animosity toward immigrants, which shocks me. I was just in a in the green room this morning where I was about to do a television interview, and there was a man there who just casually mentioned to set we were all white people sitting in the room, so I guess he felt comfortable, but he said, You know, there's just too many immigrants in this country. I turned on him, and I said, No, what do you mean? He said, have you noticed that there are, how many people that all these people are from India? Everyone's coming from India. How do you know they're Indian? And he said, Well, just look at I think I lost my cool. I lost it on this guy. And I said, You are so wrong. He said, they're taking our jobs. They said, they're not taking your jobs. They're, they're they're building jobs. They build the society. Where did your family come from? I know where my family came from, and they came to a country where they had opportunities. We moved to Winnipeg and blossomed there because we were allowed to and so and I just was so angry, and I realized how deep this racism is in this country, and I think it's being stoked by so many of the elements in our political system. I think Alberta is an example of that. You see it in other provincial governments, and you certainly see it in elements of the Conservative Party in federally stoking these feelings. And I find it extremely alarming

Stuart Murray  19:56  
you talked a little bit about back to the freedom of. Of of where the Republicans have seemed to abandon something, that freedom should be their, their calling card, and they've abandoned it. And, you know, it occurred to me at some point, you know, how does the party of Lincoln get to a point where any election result will be challenged unless they win? You know, it's crazy. You know, it's just crazy stuff. Carol, let me just touch on a couple of other words that you've written in your your book at a loss for words. And I should remind any listener that's on this podcast, this coming Sunday, September 15, at 2pm there's an afternoon with our author, Carol off live streaming on YouTube, but it'll take place at McNally Robinson at Grant Park. So if you're around on September 15, two o'clock, go to Grant Park, meet the author. Have a wonderful, wonderful time. It'll be very, very interesting that, I can assure you, Carol talk a little bit about truth. And I just want to kind of preface it, if you don't mind, this is a human rights podcast, and language is very, very important around human rights. And so one of the elements of from a human rights lens, if I could say that, is speaking truth to power is a non violent political tactic, which template is used by those who regard government as authoritarian. But you mentioned truth is one of your six words. What do you think about the issue of truth with respect to human rights, and what happens when those people in power start to change the word from truth to fake news.

Carol Off  21:22  
From the human rights perspective, it's just absolutely key. One of the things that Hannah Arendt said was that the purpose of the lying, purpose of lying and deception in politics isn't to convince people of the lies, it's to break down our ability to tell the difference between what's true and what's false. And so once you've done that, once you've broken our understanding of that, once we can't discern the difference between what's true and what's a lie, then you can't tell the difference between right and wrong. And then what breaks down after that is trust, trust in each other, trust in our communities, trust in our government. And that's the objective of those who are doing that. They know what they're doing. These the sort of demagogues and of the world know exactly what they're doing when they break down our understanding of trust, of truth, because what we can't we don't agree on what the truth is. We can't trust each other. We can't if, in a relationship, in a marriage, we have to trust our partner. We have to say we know this to be true. We have a foundation of truth. We have to tell the truth to people. We insist that our children tell us the truth. They're punished when they lie. Truth is so important to us as a species, we build our societies on these collective understandings of what's true, they say. Get tested from time to time. You find things to be not not true, and then you expand the truth, and you you work that out between each other and communities. Now, when we don't have truth, when we don't have facts, when we can't agree on what they are, that is a deliberate campaign to stop us from having democratic societies, and then you're open to all kinds of Hannah Arendt said totalitarianism, because people are easily manipulated in those states. And that's from from the Human Rights Museum point of view, your exhibits speak so much to that idea that people are when they get manipulated, whether it's in in Europe, when the the Nazis could manipulate people, or when it's in Russia, when, when the communists could manipulate people, because they didn't know what was true anymore. And you see, in in Putin's Russia, people don't know what that's so important to Vladimir Putin's power is that people don't know what's true and what's false. They don't know what's and so now we're in the same environment where they're creating this. They, when I say they I'm not always sure exactly who I'm talking about. But with what you're seeing is this, this effort to break down our knowledge of what's true and it's false. There's an interesting Canadian government study that I found online that was speaking to, what are the threats to our security? What are the greatest threats that we have to consider in Canada as as as we go forward? And there were 10 on top of the lists, and they had things like climate change and all the ravages that climate change could could bring to us. It war, pandemic, number one on the list. Number one is if Canadians cannot tell the difference between what's true and false, that if we can't, we don't know it's true and false. We can't trust our government to tell us what we have to do for climate change. We we can't trust them when they say you need to get vaccinated. We can't trust them when they tell us we should shelter against a fire. We can't You can't trust them. Even they say, go this way. We think maybe we'll go that way when you can't trust your government anymore, when you can't trust your society, you that you are so open to manipulation, and that's something I terrifically fear might happen as we lose our ability to tell a difference and do. It's true and false.

Stuart Murray  25:01  
You know, I look at to somebody who's had such an iconic career as you've had the amount of research that you would go into when you're having a conversation with somebody to to probe for for information. And if somebody was to challenge and sort of say, well, you know, at the end of it, once you shut down off the air, somebody said, Well, that, you know, that was fake news. Unfortunately, as you say, it's way that people get manipulated. I mean, the fact I read something again, I'm Hope it's not true that people believe that somehow, that God has chosen Donald Trump to come and save United States of America. But you know what, Carol, I believe, there's probably people that believe that.

Carol Off  25:36  
And you know what, they're perfectly free to believe that. I wish they would have other sources of information, but there, I think it's perfectly fair for people to believe what they want to believe and to say what they want to say, and I will listen to them, and I will try and straighten them out. And so what concerns me is that our reaction, first of all is to dismiss them, to dismiss those people to say, but they're, they're fools. They're they don't know what they're talking about, and just just to push them out. Instead, it's like, no, I'm going to listen to you. I'm going to get my facts straight so I can tell you what I know to be true. And you can't really dispute when people say that God has chosen Donald Trump. Well, I can't give you facts dispute that you but, but I will listen to what you have to say and tell you what I think. So it's not just a matter of just we have to push these ideas out of the public space. We have to accept that other people have ideas and then try to counter that with information and facts and and start to build that trust. And we can't build that trust by simply pushing them out of the of the arena and saying, We can't listen to you. This is one of the biggest problems we now face, is that we we tend to think that if we listen to someone with whom we disagree, we're giving them a platform. This idea that if it's a platform, if you listen to somebody, and that comes from the left, a lot from the real kind of extreme left, to say, no, there is no place to have it. There's no conversation to be had. We're not having any conversations. We're not going to listen to the other side, because they're just full of beans. And the extremists, I'm not going to listen to them. I'm not going to listen to Hamas, for instance. I'm not going to listen to extremists in Netanyahu is cabinet, but I but there are people in between. I'm going to listen to the Palestinians. I'm going to listen to Jews and Israelis, because I want to have a conversation. I want to hear them. I want to I want to deep listen to what they're saying. But I'm going to, I'm definitely going to reject people on the extreme fringes who are not interested in the conversation, but the people in between, I think we should listen to them, try to understand where they're coming from, and hopefully they will listen to us as we explain our perspective. It's the only hope we have at this point.

Stuart Murray  27:50  
Yeah, for sure, and I appreciate that. And I'm just kind of kind of work through your book with this Carol, one of the big words that I thought was very interesting is wokeism, and I'm glad you put that in the book Carol, because I had never heard of that word, probably until the George Floyd incident. And you know, the way was explained to me quite simply by somebody who was a member here for Black History, Manitoba just said, Well, no, the idea of being woke is something that a lot of racialized people. Black people used to say to each other, just to be mindful of what was going in behind them, around them, stay woke. But has that word ever become politicized and marginalized so

Carol Off  28:31  
much so? And what's happened is that woke, as you point out, originally, it comes from the last century, and it was when black people who had so few rights and so few freedoms freedom of movement, were constantly having to look over their shoulder to see who was coming for them. And so the idea is to stay woke, stay aware. Just be aware of the around. Don't relax. Don't let your guard down. Then, as you point out, Black Lives Matter, brought this idea of woke as more of a word of activism, and that was to evoke this idea that racism isn't just around you. Racism is systemic. Racism is deeply into the grain of the society we live in, and we need to eradicate that. And so that was the message that about woke, that that that emerged in black lives matter, but that got turned around so quickly by the the anti woke movement and turned into wokeism and woke ism. Is this, this belief that there, or this claim that there are these agendas, these Marxist, Leninist agendas, of these, these radicals who are trying to take away your rights, make you feel bad. This is literally what they're saying in the United States. Make you feel bad for being a white man in the United States. And so they actually not only just said that all this wokeism has to end, but they started passing laws and making policies in many states and the US to stamp out wokeism. The anti woke laws, they. Actually have laws anti woke laws, which means that there'll be no more diversity, equity and inclusion programs in their schools, that you're not allowed to teach kids about racism, and you can't teach them about the slave trade in the United States because it makes white kids feel bad about being white kids, which is simply not true. I mean, kids need to know this. They want to know this. What's happened to their to their neighbors, the people around them. So this is this wokeism thing, and it's not just in in the United States, obviously, I we've heard it in Canada. They're talking about the woke movement. Even the liberals say, Well, I'm not woke. I've heard liberal cabinet ministers defend themselves against charges that they're woke. Was it? Why? Why this is this is a good concept. So what I started to understand was that woke and woke ism woke was something, a word that the right could now use as a weapon against people and the racialized communities and in LGBTQ communities and any sort of minorities that you could use that as a as a weapon against a cudgel again to and they literally talked about it being a cudgel that you could hit them with so you can, you can smuggle racist, homophobic and misogynistic ideas into the public space under the guise of it being that you're I'm not against women's rights. I'm not against the gender rights. I'm not against black people, I'm not a racist, I'm not a bigot, I'm just against woke. And so it became this way for people to actually say racist, homophobic, Islamophobic things without being accused of that, and they could get away with it so and it's now being used so widely. It's even in Europe, there's it's been translated woke. Wokeism is a word that they use in France. They woke is a word that's in Hungarian. Woke is a word in India. They use the word woke universally to denote this the the other people who are saying, we want to have an inclusive world recognizes that racism and prejudice is deeply in our societies, and we need to find ways to get getting rid of it. So that's why I chose woke, because I don't know if you can reclaim the word woke, or even if anyone wants to reclaim it at this point, it's been so besmirched, but I wanted to at least get people to listen when someone acute says that that's just you're being woke. I'm not going to accept your woke ideas. They mean I'm not going to accept your ideas and inclusion. They mean you're not I'm not going to accept your view that people should be accepted or should be given the same opportunities as everyone else. Just listen to what people actually mean when they use that word. That's all I can ask of people at this point. Yeah, for sure.

Stuart Murray  32:43  
And if there's one word of the six that you referred to that was hijacked, that is classic wokeism. I mean, the way that people have talked about a woke agenda, it's like, I mean, in your book, as you say, and you talk about somebody who tried to explain it, they couldn't. They had no idea they were lost. So Carol, thanks for that. I know we just got a bit of time left. So I just want to touch on a couple of other things, choice, and I want to just drive to one point that I read in your book about the 1970 abortion caravan that went across Canada to meet Prime Minister Trudeau. I'm raising it simply Carol, because thank you for sharing that. Not aware of that at all as a Canadian, and I'm embarrassed. Isn't

Carol Off  33:21  
it an amazing story. Karen wells CBC journalist did a documentary about it on the anniversary of the convoy. I forget which one and so 1970 these a bunch of women, half dozen women in Vancouver. They they said, Well, this is just after the Trudeau the the Pierre Trudeau Government had rewritten the laws on abortion rights that everyone thought he was because he had made this declaration that the state did not belong in the bedrooms of the nation. What we learned is that state does belong in the wombs of the nation. And so they decided that they that that government, which was which was not just him. John Turner was part of that, that they would not change the law. They rewrote the law and left it largely the same as it had been for 100 years, which did not give women reproductive rights, which were changing around the world. This is 1970 we're talking about. So these women got, there's a kind of old hippie, kind of wood stocky van that one of them had someone had a Pontiac Parisienne, someone else that they got from their marriage settlements. But they had these cars, and they started driving to Ottawa to have this discussion with the Trudeau Government. And along the way, they would stop and they would tell they would just have meetings and and conversations with people. Across the country with women, there are a lot of church groups that let them use their space to have meetings about reproductive rights and and choice, and they sleep on the floor the basement of the church and carry on. By time they got to Winnipeg, I think I don't know, there might have been some dozens of them. They got in their cars, they started by time they hit Toronto, there was 200 women in vehicles. And then busses started coming in from, from from Montreal, where there's some really radical women at McGill, and they all showed up. And I was 500 women by the time they in May of 1970 they hit Ottawa to and they had, the plan is that if they're if the if the prime minister doesn't meet with us, that whatever Minister does, they better do this. And if it's just a junior minister will be outraged. Nobody met with them. The whole entire government would not have a conversation with them. So the women that on the next Monday, they went into parliament and and they disguised themselves as little ladies with handbags. In fact, the handbags had giant chains and padlocks, and they went into the gallery, gallery and chained themselves to chairs and started demanding that the Trudeau Government listen to them. And on the floor, they erupt as all men, and they're calling them whores and sluts and and headlines the next day were all about about crazy feminists and their and their and their agendas and but the women actually one point, they had this coffin, this makeshift coffin they've made to represent the numbers of women. At that point, they figured estimated, there were 1000s of women a year who were dying in botched abortions and in backroom shops, and they brought this black, painted coffin, and they took it to 24 Sussex, and they put it on the doorstep of the prime minister. And yet, even with all of that, that extraordinary story of those women, it took another 18 years before the law changed, and it was only because of a man, and that was Henry Morgentaler, yeah,

Stuart Murray  36:40  
no. Thanks for sharing that. The reason I brought it forward, Carol is because, you know, when I was the inaugural presidency at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, again, embarrassed to say I'd never heard of Viola Desmond. Why do I know about Rosa Parks and not Viola Desmond? So you know some of the things that you brought forward in the book. I just want to just emphasize again and say, Thank you for sharing, because that's a part of our history, our Canadian history, and we need to know that. So when you talk about choice, that fits right into the into the definition. So thank you for sharing that. So the last thing is, I just wanted to say because I heard an interview that you did. So again, I'm paraphrasing your response to when the person your host asked you about the inclusion of the word taxes. And I think you said that taxes was the most important word in the book. Why is that?

Carol Off  37:26  
Because taxes represents our obligation to society in financial terms. It's the price we pay to live in a civil society. And so when I talk about who's behind the efforts to break our connection with our governments, our trust in government. These are people who would would gain from a breakdown in government, because then they get rid of regulations, they get rid of of tax responsibilities. This is the goal, especially in the United States. There the idea that that there would be, we could live in a society that was, we're not even have the society. We would just be an organization of consumers and laborers with no coherent middle so with taxes. Taxes are the price we pay to live in a civil society, and the tax to me, the equation is that it that you're a citizen and that makes you and then you're a voter, and then you're a taxpayer. Those three things are joined together and and so when they try to break that down, when that, when people have said that, that that you're not the citizenry doesn't matter, the government is, is is full of special interests and don't represent you, which is a way to break down your trust as being a citizen. When they say your vote doesn't matter because it's being stolen. Is this thing United States, or when we decide that we're not going to pay taxes because we don't want to feel with this being robbed, this is a form of robbery. And even though you're driving on safe roads and your schools are clean and your kids are vaccinated and the stoplights work and things. If you go to other countries where it's corrupted and the taxes never get to pay for anything that citizens use, we don't live in that society. We live in a place where for the vast majority of our tax money is going directly to helping to address the differences in classes. And that's key to Canada. One of the things I say I met Steven polos at an event, who is the former Bank of Canada governor. And I said, How do you what's your feeling about the state of affairs? And he says, We're toast. I was shocked. What do you mean? He said, because the separation between the classes in Canada is growing at the fastest rate that it has in memory, and we are becoming a society of rich and poor, like they have the United States. And that is just an awful thing. The best thing that Canada has is that we we have a level playing we try to level things out. We have a transfer of wealth so that everybody gets a chance to become who they are, to realize their potential. And so that's all of that. Is why taxes. Matter to me, plus, because my father was a tax man, but it's not just that we pay taxes, but that we have an obligation to the society in which we and we're willing to pay for that obligation.

Stuart Murray  40:11  
You know, in the Human Rights world, the three words that are often used are, educate, mobilize an action. What action would you like to take people who are going to read your book?

Carol Off  40:23  
Those are interesting three words. We talk also a lot about equality, which I'm sure you do at the museum. And I think that equality doesn't quite capture it. I think it's it's two words that are most important for me in that regard. One of them is equity, and not equality. And equity is not just that. We're all made equal because we're not we're not equal. We're born into inequality. And some of us have tremendous opportunities. Others don't. But equity means that you have an equal opportunity to have access to things, not that you were all made equal, but that we, that we have an equitable opportunity in the society in which we live. But the other word is security, and because I think insecurity is a monster, and the feelings of insecurity are what people with these the demagogues and the and the wannabe dictators are playing on right now. Our sense of insecurity that comes from so many things, that's really where it came out of covid, isn't it? I mean, we just felt so insecure during that time, and we feel insecure because of climate change, we feel insecure because of war. And so when we feel insecure, we are so easily manipulated. And so I feel that the security is something that we can rebuild, and I think we rebuild it by patching and repairing the social safety net, by connecting our programs together in order to make it, make it possible for people to have sick leave. For instance, think how different would things would have been if there had been been if people who got covid could have stayed home, the ones who couldn't were the ones who had no money. They they brought covid into the workplace, or they brought covid into their into their homes, and gave it to their families, their their loved ones who died because of that. Think of of all the things we could have made better if we, if we would make people's lives more secure. So for me, I think insecurity, this monster of insecurity, can only be wrestled away from the demagogues and their power over us, if we feel we live in this in a secure environment, and I think we can return to that, again with the trust in each other, and again with trust in our government.

Stuart Murray  42:32  
And lastly, any fond memories of Winnipeg? Oh,

Carol Off  42:35  
so many. Yeah, I left when I was 11, but we went back for in the summers, because my family was all there. And yeah, mosquitoes, I definitely remember the mosquitoes, but it was a really special place. It still is a very special place to grow up. There's a spirit that you just I think Winnipeg and Montreal, for me, are almost Twin Cities, for a sense of diversity, of pluralism, of different voices, different cultures coming together, and it's just rich, rich. And I think really reason why both the cities are so much like that. I think that so much is because of the Jewish populations and the Jewish influence in both Winnipeg and Montreal, which I think just brings a quality and a culture and a human rights spirit that may be lacking in other places.

Stuart Murray  43:28  
Yeah, no. Thanks for that again. Reminder to all listeners that on the afternoon of September Sunday, September 15, at 2pm at McNally Robinson, you get a chance to meet and hear our guest today, Carol off and listen to her talk about her book at a loss for words. Carol off has advertised articulate, intelligent and incredibly entertaining. Thank you very much for your time on humans on rights.

Carol Off  43:54  
Thank you, Stuart,

Matt Cundill  43:55  
thanks for listening to humans on rights. A transcript of this episode is available by clicking the link in the show notes of this episode, humans on rights is recorded and hosted by Stuart Murray, social media marketing by Buffy Davey, music by Doug Edmund. For more, go to Human Rights hub.ca produced and distributed by the sound off media company.