The “dog days of summer” offer Canadians time to disconnect from a harried life and an opportunity to reflect before reacting. Parliament is quiet, our attachment to the frenetic news cycle is unshackled and, for a few precious weeks, the yoyoing of outrage and frustration becomes a distant call of the lake loon.
It is precisely in these quieter moments that we ought to ask ourselves whether we are becoming the country we imagine ourselves to be, or whether we are drifting toward a style of public discourse that elevates opinion over understanding and indignation over judgment.
The temptation is understandable. The world overwhelms us with events that demand moral clarity. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine violated the sovereignty of a democratic state. Hamas committed unspeakable atrocities against Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023. The suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza has shocked the conscience of the world. Bombs destroy lives in the Middle East based on tit-for-tat provocations. Antisemitism has risen. So has Islamophobia.
None of these realities should be minimized.
Yet the insistence that acknowledging one truth necessarily diminishes another has become the modus operandi of our political discourse. We have come to confuse complexity with equivocation, as though refusing to flatten difficult questions into catchy slogans were itself a failure of conviction. The polemics are the heroes.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s 2021 book, Value(s), argues that societies endure because they cultivate shared values capable of sustaining trust. His remarks in Davos on Jan. 20 extended that idea, suggesting that a world with amorphous rules depends less on defeating adversaries and more on finding allies. It is a deceptively simple proposition, but one with profound implications for a democracy increasingly inclined to treat disagreement as evidence of moral failure.
Former Canadian Medical Association president Dr. Alika Lafontaine reaches a similar conclusion in his book, The Outrage Cure. His concern is not that outrage lacks legitimacy –history is replete with injustices that demanded precisely that response – but that sustained outrage eventually narrows our moral imagination. When indignation becomes our default posture, curiosity disappears. Opponents become caricatures, motives are presumed rather than examined and dialogue is dismissed as compromise with the unacceptable. The consequence is not merely sharper polarization but a complete failure to solve the problems that generated our anger in the first place. Anger perpetuates more anger.
That lesson has particular relevance within our own federation. Alberta’s sense of alienation did not emerge overnight, nor will it disappear because the rest of the country dismisses it as hyperbolic or politically inconvenient. Canadians are free to disagree about the merits of western grievances or the wisdom of proposals such as a referendum on Alberta’s constitutional future. But a mature federation, and a mature society, should possess sufficient confidence to hear those arguments without immediately questioning the loyalty or good faith of those advancing them. Either you are with us or against us cannot be the dividing line. The appropriate response to alienation has never been derision. It has always been persuasion.
If Canada is to remain a country defined by pluralism rather than polarization, the burden rests with all of us to make the case that the federation is not simply a constitutional arrangement but a shared enterprise worth renewing.
I believe that with all my heart. I ask you to listen before lecturing, understand before condemning and recognize that alliances are rarely built by demanding unanimity. They are built by convincing people that they belong. They are built on citizens capable of listening long enough to discover where common ground begins.
Canada has long prided itself on being a country that could hold differences together rather than drive them apart. That reputation will not survive if we continue importing a politics that demands absolute allegiance and punishes independent thought.
Perhaps that is the real lesson of these quiet weeks of August. Before the next referendum, the next protest or the next international crisis, we should ask ourselves a simple question: are we interested in winning arguments or in preserving the conditions that allow us to live together?
The answer will depend less on the volume of our outrage and more on the strength of our values.
And values, unlike outrage, have always been better at building allies than enemies.
