Carol Off is a journalist in the current affairs and documentary department of CBC Television's The National. She is also the author of the Canadian best-selling book, The Lion the Fox and the Eagle: A Story of Generals and Justice in Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
After graduating from the University of Western Ontario in 1981, Carol Off freelanced for a number of years, principally for CBC radio. During a working trip to Pakistan in 1986 she provided exclusive coverage to the CBC and to American networks of the Panam hijacking in Karachi. She also covered Benazir Bhutto's return to politics and the American-financed military build-up at the Afghanistan border.
Back in Canada, Off was subsequently appointed the Ottawa correspondent for CBC Radio's flagship current affairs programme, Sunday Morning. In that capacity, she covered some of the major political events of the Mulroney years including the Meech Lake Constitutional Accord and the Canada/US free Trade Agreement.
Her next post was to Montreal as CBC Radio National News correspondent for the Province of Quebec. In the four years of this appointment, Off covered such events as the Montreal massacre; the death of the Meech lake Accord; the referendum on the constitution and the Oka Crisis. She was also assigned to Israel and Jordan during the Gulf War and to Haiti for the election of Jean-Bertrande Aristide.
Off returned to Toronto in 1993 and shifted to CBC Television's Prime Time News where she covered arts and culture for two years before she returned to politics and current affairs for The National Magazine. Throughout the 1990's, she produced many award-winning documentaries on national and international affairs including "The Children of Chernobyl"- the illness and death that followed the Chernobyl disaster; "A Horrible Place to Die"- the quet for the northwest passage and" Playing with Fire" - on racism in Canadian politics.
Her extensive coverage of the wars in Yugoslavia and Canada’s role in it won a number of awards and accolades including a gold medal for investigative journalism at the New York Festival of Film and Television for the programme "Flight From Bosnia", the story of war crimes suspects who came to Canada as refugees. Her experience in the Balkans and at the United Nations tribunals for war crimes inspired her to write the book, The Lion The Fox and The Eagle. It explores Canada's involvement in war and justice during the 1990s through portraits of General Lewis MacKenzie, General Romeo Dallaire and Justice Louise Arbour.
More recently, Carol Off covered Canada's involvement in the war in Sudan; the struggle for peace in Macedonia and the international fall-out from the September 11 attack for which she travelled to Washington, New York, Tampa, London, the Middle East and Afghanistan in order to tell the story. She lives in Toronto with her husband, Linden MacIntyre of CBC's the fifth estate.
