Joe Schlesinger is a veteran Canadian journalist who for four decades has reported for CBC Television News from every corner of the world. Born in Vienna in 1928, Schlesinger was raised in Czechoslovakia. In 1939, after Hitler dismembered the country, Joe's parents sent him for safety to England. When he returned to Czechoslovakia at the end of World War II in 1945, he found his parents had been killed in The Holocaust.

Joe started his journalistic career in 1948 in the Prague bureau of the Associated Press. When the communist rulers of Czechoslovakia started arresting AP staffers, he fled across the Iron Curtain and came to Canada.

He became a reporter at the Vancouver Province and the Toronto Star, then an editor at the UPI bureau in London and at the International Herald Tribune in Paris.

In 1966, he joined the CBC in Toronto. He served as executive producer of The National, the CBC's main TV news program and head of CBC TV News. In 1970, Schlesinger went overseas again, this time as the CBC's Far East correspondent based in Hong Kong. This was followed over the next 20 years by postings to Paris, Washington and Berlin. In 1991 he became the CBC's Chief Political Correspondent in Ottawa. Joe retired from the CBC news service in 1994, but has continued to contribute to CBC programs.

He reported on wars in Vietnam and in the rest of Indochina, the '71 war between India and Pakistan, the guerrilla wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador of the eighties, the Israeli-Arab conflict at various times, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in '80, earthquakes in Italy, Iran and Romania, haute couture and haute cuisine in Paris, revolutions in Portugal, Iran and Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution in China.

Finally, 50 years after he first left Czechoslovakia as a refugee, he was privileged to return to Prague to witness the Velvet Revolution that overthrew the communist regime in his homeland.

A book of Schlesinger's memoirs, "Time Zones," was published in 1990 and became a best-seller. He won four Gemini awards, the John Drainie award for distinguished contribution to Canadian broadcasting and a Hot Doc award for documentary writing. “The Power of Good,” a documentary he wrote and narrated, won an International Emmy award in 2002.

In 1994, he was named a member of the Order of Canada. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of British Columbia, The Royal Military College, Dalhousie and Queens Universities as well as the University of Alberta. He has also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Journalism Foundation.

Schlesinger has two daughters by his late wife Myra: Leah, a lawyer, and Ann, a molecular biologist. He and his partner, Judith Levene, a psychoanalyst, live in Toronto.