Hello, you.
Hello you.
Is this feeling that you're leaving starting to get real?
I think I, you know, I'm trying to be really zen, but
I am on the verge of being transformed into a pile of wet Kleenex at this point.
So just don't touch me off and anything that makes me cry.
Well, I mean, what is it that makes you feel maybe sad?
Oh, the people that I've worked with.
Extraordinary people.
[Reporter] Don't worry, Carol Off is not going to cry.
Or at least not right now, but it's probably coming.
Hello again and welcome back.
I'm Carol Off.
[Reporter] How could it not?
25,000 interviews can change a person.
And yes, she says she's counted.
And at a program like the 54-year-old radio show.
As It Happens
there are the intimate, wrenching moments paired with the beautifully ridiculous.
If you haven't laughed and cried, got angry
learned something
we're surprised, all on the same show.
If you haven't done that in 90 minutes, we failed you.
[Reporter] Laughter has always been and As It Happens, hallmark.
From Barbara Frum talking to the possibly tipsy owner of the world's largest cabbage.
What did you feed the goddamn cabbage?
[Reporter] To Carol Off interviewing the man behind the infamous Bigfoot footage.
[Man] The moment where I saw her, I just said, Oh my God, they really do exist
because to see is to believe with me, you know?
[Off] And why do you think it was female?
[Man] Well, the mammary glands.
[Off] Oh, she had breasts, OK.
[Reporter] The whimsy, the studio have grown on her.
She calls herself an indoor cat now, who started as an outdoor cat.
I would argue that you're more than an outdoor cat.
I think you're borderline feral.
And and that's how I sort of think of you as his kind of desire to
to be out there completely covered in dust somewhere.
And I'm wondering, like, where does where does that start?
What was that bug that got in you?
I think I got hooked when traveling abroad.
This is like the 80s, early 80s
And I said, OK, I'm going to go on my own.
I'm going to sell whatever I have and and get whatever money I can.
I'm going to fly to Pakistan
and I'm going to meet Benazir Bhutto and I'm going to interview her.
Do you have any reason to believe any of that would actually happen?
She was in jail at the time.
Anyway, I arrived
and realized right away that it made a serious mistake that I was.
I was way in over my head.
The plane I came in on was hijacked.
And I was the only reporter, one of the very --
three reporters, we were in the airport at the time and we began to cover this
live not knowing what was going to happen next.
Police were pushing us back with their guns and screaming a few times.
I was grabbed by the arm and thrown back and we still persevered.
And eventually, I mean, it ended badly.
The hijackers set off an explosion and people were killed,
but I was
the immediacy of that there being able to cover that to be there.
And I thought it was it was transformative.
So the good thing about being in broadcast is that, you know,
on your life, we have receipts
for a life like yours.
How quickly did you see the evacuation of the wounded?
There was a cavalcade of ambulances running out of the area.
one could see people were lying on the tarmac face down.
Carol, this is so useful.
We thank you so much.
You're welcome. Bye bye.
And you talked about getting up close to one of the police vehicles
and talking to the to one of the hijackers
who was face down on the ground.
Well, I climbed into the vehicle actually and
wanted to know who he was and what he was doing.
I had to find out what happened, who was who are these people?
When I look at your career and I look at sort of Bosnia
and the Gulf War and these enormous moments, it occurs to me
that to me , looking at it from my vantage point, of course, Carol off was there.
Of course you were there, of course.
Of course a woman was there, but it wasn't always the way.
And I'm wondering what generations now who who see it as a given are missing?
At the time in the 80s to demand
that women should play these roles was called a radical feminist agenda.
It's hard to believe now.
There were very few women in the field.
The CBC had a policy.
Every news agency had a policy that women did not go into conflict
zones or war zones. - Why?
Because for two reasons, one would be dangerous
for them as being women, just because they're women.
See why you look surprised by the time this was made sense to them.
The other thing was is that I was told this explicitly
that we would endanger the people we were with.
Who would be men.
And that was the rationale.
And so, no, we weren't going to be allowed to go.
The warlords controlled
every aspect of daily life here before the Taliban.
[Reporter] That, of course, change.
Carol off at the pointy end
of creating that change.
To see war, cover it, haunts.
Her experiences in places like Afghanistan, forged part of her identity.
So two skirmishes at the microphone.
[Fantino] There's no Harper war on drugs.
[Off] I'm asking you a question, did you support the mandatory minimum
sentences for people for as few as six plants going to prison?
[Fantino] I'm afraid I can't answer that question.
[Reporter] Demanding accountability, a Carol off trademark.
[Off] You had three days to find out if it was true or not, and you didn't.
[Black] No, I don't do that.
I do the interview.
I don't do the rest of it.
[Off] You do a lot of research.
[Black] Will you stop harping on that.
Yes, I do a lot of research.
[Reporter] What worries her is a Canada
where getting a straight answer is no sure thing.
Access to information systems in Canada are notoriously slow and secretive.
The numbers of times we were told by by politicians
that we would never get another interview because we had challenged them.
Everybody wants to get straight goods here.
There is a feeling all of us journalists public that we're not getting it.
[Reporter] What Canada has experienced is connection.
October 2014 The murder of Corporal Nathan Cirillo,
who was standing guard at the National War Memorial.
In the awful wake
Carol Off reached out to the woman who reached out to Cirillo in his dying moments.
[Off] You spoke to him too, didn't you?
[Woman] I did, I actually tried to speak to him the entire time.
[Off] What did you say to him?
[Woman] I told him he was...
I told him he was loved.
What instinct is that for somebody, you know, saying, "Are you OK?"
You know, "What's going on?"
"Do you wan't me to call somebody?"
No, no, he's dying.
She knows he's dying, and she wants him
to to know that he's loved, a complete stranger.
I said, Well, why? What?
Why did you want him to know he was loved?
She says, because I knew that's what his family would want him to hear
as he died.
In recent weeks, when we saw what happened at the Cenotaph
with the protesters in Ottawa and to see that desecration.
The numbers of people who contacted me to say all they could think about
was Barbara Winters holding this man's hand in those very steps,
just the embodiment of love and care for others.
The recognition of that you are a citizen and everybody is
is somebody that is part of you.
[Reporter] That observation is so very Carol Off.
A voice, part of the fabric of Canadian conversations.
Easy to just expect it to go on.
If there is hesitation in you about leaving this
jewel of a program, what is that hesitation?
That hesitation would
that I have a family here in As It Happens
and they have been extraordinary and I think
I don't know how to leave them, but I have to.
Moving on.