About

Join editor, Elamin Abdelmahmoud, and contributors Jesse Wente, Jessica Johnson and Carol Off as they discuss the new collection Elbows Up! Canadian Voices of Resilience and Resistance. This anthology is in response to the USA’s recent threats against Canada, and brings together a diversity of Canadian voices who question what it means to have treaties broken, resources stolen and to feel for the first time that a target is on Canada’s back. With the president of the United States looking to make Canada its “51st state,” where do we go from here as a country? Will Canadian citizens stand strong together and if so, what will that mean for the country’s future when the past can be so divisive?

ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD is a culture writer for BuzzFeed News and was the host of CBC’s pop culture show Pop Chat, and is the host of new CBC Radio show Commotion. He was a founding co-host of the CBC Politics podcast Party Lines, and he is a contributor to The National’s At Issue panel. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, the Globe and Mail, and others. When he gets a chance, he writes bad tweets.

JESSICA JOHNSON is a senior fellow at McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology, and Democracy, where she recently led “What Should the CBC Be?”, a national research project on the future of public media in Canada. She is the former editor-in-chief of The Walrus, a general interest magazine with the tag line “Canada’s Conversation.” From 2009 to 2016, she was the copy director, aka “Chief Adventurer of Writing,” at Hudson’s Bay. Her reviews, columns and features have appeared in the Globe & Mail, the Guardian, the Toronto Star, and a wide range of other publications. Jessica teaches journalism and media studies at the University of Toronto and is the proprietor of the Substack newsletter “Writing for People Who Hate Writing.”

CAROL OFF spent almost sixteen years co-hosting the multi-award-winning CBC radio program, As It Happens. Before that, she covered news and current affairs in Canada and around the world. As a radio correspondent, she reported on politics in Ottawa and Quebec. As a television journalist, she covered the break-up of Yugoslavia; the 9/11 attack on the United States; the election of Vladimir Putin; and politics, conflicts and culture throughout Europe, the United States, the Middle East and Africa. Her first bestselling book, The Lion, The Fox and the Eagle: A Story of Generals and Justice in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, was published in 2000. Since then, she’s written three more award-winning works of narrative non-fiction, including, most recently, All We Leave Behind: A Reporter’s Journey into the Lives of Others, winner of the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

JESSE WENTE is a husband and father, as well as a writer, broadcaster, speaker and arts administrator. Born and raised in Toronto, Jesse’s family comes from Chicago and Genaabaajing Anishinaabek, and he is a member of the Serpent River First Nation. His memoir, Unreconciled: Family, Truth and Indigenous Resistance, is a national bestseller and was picked as one of best books of 2021 by Chapters-Indigo, Apple Books and the Globe and Mail. Jesse also won the Rakuten-Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in Nonfiction.

Elbows Up! Canadian Voices of Resilience and Resistance

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