How are Canada’s leaders diagnosing – and treating – today’s anger?

Open this photo in gallery:Prime Minister Mark Carney appears to be reading anger correctly, Dr. Alika Lafontaine writes.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian PressShareSave for laterPlease log in to bookmark this story.Log InCreate Free AccountDr. 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).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.After long reflection, I’ve realized the self-proclaimed freedom convoy was not why our friendship fractured. As the CMA’s 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 – where he felt rights and freedoms were under threat, and that people and systems had let him down – 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.Anger and outrage are two emotions that we treat the same, but are very different. And in today’s politics, that distinction is everything.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.Mark Carney appears to be reading anger correctly. His voters are angry, though they were outraged not long ago – 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 – a former central banker who sounds like he knows the drill – 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.Open this photo in gallery:Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre rises during Question Period in the House of Commons in Ottawa.Spencer Colby/The Canadian PressPierre Poilievre, meanwhile, built his brand on outrage. He was the reformer dismantling gatekeepers, elites, the Laurentian consensus – and he was very good at it. In February, he seemed to pivot when he told Canadians that “the most effective response to uncertainty is not outrage. It is results.” He laid out affordability and strategic-reserve plans in Toronto and elsewhere. But more recently, the reformer’s reflexes have reasserted themselves with attacks on Mr. Carney’s competence, charges that the Prime Minister “has been wrong about every major economic question of our time” and focusing on the betrayal by floor-crossing MPs. Whether Mr.…

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