{"id":22878,"date":"2026-04-28T11:40:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T11:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/22878\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T11:40:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T11:40:10","slug":"how-are-canadas-leaders-diagnosing-and-treating-todays-anger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/22878\/","title":{"rendered":"How are Canada\u2019s leaders diagnosing \u2013 and treating \u2013 today\u2019s anger?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Prime Minister Mark Carney appears to be reading anger correctly, Dr. Alika Lafontaine writes.Sean Kilpatrick\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

Dr. Alika Lafontaine is the author of The Outrage Cure and formerly served as the first Indigenous and youngest president of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA).<\/p>\n

In early 2022, when I was president-elect of the CMA, I had a phone conversation with Tom, one of my oldest friends, about the trucker protests in Ottawa. At the time, I was focused on what patients and colleagues were living through. He was focused on the threat to rights and freedoms. The conversation became existential. Accusations were made. He hung up. We did not speak properly again for years.<\/p>\n

After long reflection, I\u2019ve realized the self-proclaimed freedom convoy was not why our friendship fractured. As the CMA\u2019s president-elect, I heard from physicians in Ottawa who were reaching out to me directly, describing the constant noise, the congested streets and aggressive behaviour from some protesters. Life, they told me, had become unlivable. Tom was living somewhere different \u2013 where he felt rights and freedoms were under threat, and that people and systems had let him down \u2013 but the underlying condition was the same. We were both filled with emotion about the problems we saw in front of us. I misread that he was angry. Tom was outraged.<\/p>\n

Anger and outrage are two emotions that we treat the same, but are very different. And in today\u2019s politics, that distinction is everything.<\/p>\n

Anger is a call for help. Outrage happens when help does not arrive, despite repeated calls. Anger wants problems solved. Outrage wants the people and systems that failed to show up exposed as incompetent and untrustworthy; outrage wants reform. Every problem starts with anger, then grows into outrage. What we are witnessing today is an electorate that was recently outraged but has settled back into anger.<\/p>\n

Mark Carney appears to be reading anger correctly. His voters are angry, though they were outraged not long ago \u2013 over unaffordability, aging infrastructure, overwhelmed social systems, a fraying sense of common purpose. A President to the south reframed reform as existential, snapping Canada out of outrage and back into anger. Since anger is a call for help, the apparent competence of Mr. Carney \u2013 a former central banker who sounds like he knows the drill \u2013 is a clinical fit between signal and response. His stable approval numbers are not a referendum on popular ideology; they are what happens when a country in anger finally finds someone who seems to have heard it.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre rises during Question Period in the House of Commons in Ottawa.Spencer Colby\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

Pierre Poilievre, meanwhile, built his brand on outrage. He was the reformer dismantling gatekeepers, elites, the Laurentian consensus \u2013 and he was very good at it. In February, he seemed to pivot when he told Canadians that \u201cthe most effective response to uncertainty is not outrage. It is results.\u201d He laid out affordability and strategic-reserve plans in Toronto and elsewhere. But more recently, the reformer\u2019s reflexes have reasserted themselves with attacks on Mr. Carney\u2019s competence, charges that the Prime Minister \u201chas been wrong about every major economic question of our time\u201d and focusing on the betrayal by floor-crossing MPs. Whether Mr. Poilievre chooses to respond to anger or outrage next is an open question.<\/p>\n

Avi Lewis is betting outrage will come roaring back. The new NDP Leader is making the case that outrage is still the honest response \u2013 to inequality, housing affordability, climate change. If problems do not get fixed in time, he may be right. He is not matching the sentiment of the broad electorate right now, however. Angry Canadians are asking to be helped, not to have someone lash out on their behalf.<\/p>\n

Bloc Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois Leader Yves-Fran\u00e7ois Blanchet is running on ideology \u2013 sovereignty, a reformed federal project. But Quebeckers share the same anxieties as the rest of the country: affordability, services, the question of who shows up when things go wrong. An ideological project does not answer a call for help.<\/p>\n

None of this is abstract for me. As CMA president, I learned that outrage demands sustained, demonstrated competence and credibility, offered long enough that the people who stopped believing can begin to believe again. It needs presence, relationship-building, and honesty about what is and isn\u2019t possible. That is what the country is asking of whoever seeks to lead it. Majority or not, the party that diagnoses and treats anger and outrage precisely will be the one Canadians trust to lead and choose to follow.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t hear what Tom was trying to tell me on that phone call: that there were people and systems that had let him down. Tom didn\u2019t hear me either. We spoke past each other until outrage broke our close friendship.<\/p>\n

The country is on that same call. We need a leader who knows how to stop us from hanging up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Prime Minister Mark Carney appears to be reading anger correctly, Dr. Alika Lafontaine…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22879,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[135,111],"class_list":{"0":"post-22878","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mark-carney","8":"tag-dei","9":"tag-mark-carney"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}