We all know and love Carol Off as an award-winning journalist, author and host of CBC Radio’s As it Happens, for which she conducted 25,000 interviews over 16 years. She is an icon of Canadian journalism and a beacon of humour, compassion and insight.

 Carol Off’s latest book: At A Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage (Random House 2024) has been called “…an elegy and a call to arms”.

 In the book, Carol Off studies six words whose meaning and use, she feels, have been hijacked and twisted to mean something completely different. As a result, we are losing our political vocabulary—and with it, the ability to speak with and hear each other in meaningful ways.

 We are left unable to reckon with the complexities of the crises we face, and become easy prey to conspiracy theories, tech billionaires, and autocrats.

It is true that dictionaries add and remove words each year. Are language and society simply evolving?

 Or is the “dumbing down” of language and society, along with a democracy now dictated by capitalism, leading to less nuanced, balanced and important discussions, and, by extension, to people’s inability to accurately articulate their own thoughts and needs?

 Carol Off wonders if we can reclaim the value of words like: Democracy, Freedom and Truth.

 Please join us for this special discussion with a very special guest.

Tickets availabe HERE