A veteran CBC broadcaster issued an appeal to rethink the use of incendiary and misleading language during the Rockwood Lecture in Sechelt last weekend.
The annual lecture is the centrepiece of the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts. Carol Off — a career journalist who hosted CBC Radio's As It Happens current affairs show for 16 years — spoke to a capacity audience at the Rockwood Pavilion on Saturday night.
Off recalled that as recently as her final season on As It Happens, in 2022, she witnessed a shift in public discourse.
"Language was beginning to take a turn, and it was really alarming to see that it wasn't just that it was morphing into something else," she said. "It was, I felt, being hijacked by another agenda — and I've seen this before in other countries where I"ve covered really horrible things that happened. But I'd also read about this in books about the Nazis, and how they were able to brainwash people. How they were able to manipulate people with language and get them to see things differently simply by implanting other words in the vocabulary with other meanings."
Off was one of more than 25 authors and poets who presented their work at the festival. Her latest book, At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage, focuses on six words whose convolutions may be reshaping civil society. The word "freedom," she explained, formerly signified a release from want and need, or an escape from injustice. More recently, it has become shorthand for an absence of obligation to others: "the freedom not to wear a mask, the freedom not to be vaccinated, the freedom to not care what happens to your neighbours, the freedom to do whatever you want."
The weaponization of other words — democracy, truth, choice — similarly reflect a societal shift away from mutual care and responsibility, Off said. "Truth is so important to us as journalists because truth is the foundation of our trust," she stressed. "Without agreed-upon facts we can't trust each other, then liberal society starts to break down."
Even the word woke ("a beautiful word, actually") was placed under the microscope. The word's original definition suggested a sensitivity to injustice. It has become an accusation, Off said, that adherents of wokeness are themselves attacking the rights and freedoms of others.
Off spent the bulk of her address on the sixth word: taxes.
Taxation is the foundation of an equitable civilization, she said. "Taxation is a power that governments have in order to transfer wealth from the very rich to everybody else. It's the way to be able to allow people to be equal to give them opportunities to help them to realize who they are and what they what they what they can contribute. It's absolutely essential to the creation of the society like we have here."
She described a provocative question she recently put to well-heeled diners at a Toronto-area philanthropic fundraiser, suggesting that their eagerness to squirrel money into tax havens can impair the development of essential infrastructure like sewage systems.
During her radio career, Off conducted more than 25,000 interviews. Audience members in the Rockwood Pavilion turned the tables by pressing her for antidotes for anger-stoking populism.
"Buy subscriptions," she urged. "News gathering is the most endangered beast in media right now: the people who actually go out every single day and get the information and distill it and test it and make sure it's right. Your communities absolutely rely on those local news producers, but the newspapers you have are disappearing, the radio stations are disappearing. And when that's gone you can't get that back."
