Death is certain. Taxes, too, people say, are certain. Everything else is not. This has been the case since ancestral human beings looked at the horizon and wondered what lay beyond it, which, in human terms, is to say, forever. The lack of certainty is not a crisis. It is the permanent condition of conscious life, the price of admission to a world where the future remains unwritten and human beings retain the freedom to shape it. Every generation has confronted it. Every civilization has been built within it. Uncertainty is the medium in which courage, enterprise, and discovery operate. Remove it, and you remove the possibility of meaningful action altogether.
You would not know this from listening to Canada’s progressive leaders. In their telling, uncertainty is not a fact of life to be navigated with prudence and met with resolve. It is an emergency, a wound, a condition so alarming that it demands immediate intervention by the only people qualified to provide it: themselves. The purpose of progressive government has become to relieve you; nay, to appear to relieve you, from whatever discomfort you may experience from the lack of certainty in your existence.
The rhetorical pattern is remarkably consistent across the progressive spectrum. Justin Trudeau was its most prolific practitioner, and the pattern pervaded every register of his political life: campaign rallies, budget speeches, ribbon-cuttings, school visits, senior citizens’ associations, and international podiums alike. For a decade, the man was indefatigable. He named anxiety in supermarkets and international summit halls with equal conviction.
The irony at the heart of his tenure is that he built an entire political identity around accusing his opponents of trafficking in fear, while simultaneously trafficking in it himself. At the Liberal Party’s biennial convention in Montreal in 2014, he told the faithful a story about a woman named Nathalie who was anxious about her future and more anxious still about her children’s. He announced that he would not practice politics in a way that turned her anxiety into resentment. His competitors, he explained, believed the angrier Canadians got, the better they would do. He was the alternative. He would not stoke. He would soothe. The audience applauded. The programme had been announced. At the CARP conference that same year, he spoke of the anxiety many Canadians felt about retirement, framing the state as the reliable antidote to that particular worry. He had not yet formed government, but the formula was already hatched: name the anxiety, claim the cure.
Once in power, he never stopped. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2018, he opened by turning to the assembled billionaires and telling them, with a straight face: ‘Still, if you’re anxious, imagine how the folks who aren’t in this room are feeling.’ Having established that the world’s wealthiest people should feel anxious, he widened the aperture. ‘The unrest we’ve witnessed is driven by anxiety and fear. Fear of what a rapidly changing world means for workers and their families.’ He then diagnosed the condition: ‘And that fear, that anxiety, is valid.’ A Canadian prime minister had flown to Switzerland to tell the masters of the global economy that their anxiety was valid and that ordinary workers’ anxiety was even more valid. He then flew home to manage both. At a joint press conference with President Biden in March 2023, Trudeau reached again for the phrase, this time with a kind of theatrical effortlessness: ‘In a time of global uncertainty,’ he told the reporters, Canada was ‘extremely certain’ that it was well placed. He had become so accustomed to invoking uncertainty that he could deploy it and dismiss it in the same sentence.
During the COVID crisis, he told Canadians from the steps of Rideau Cottage: ‘We will go through more moments of uncertainty. Fear and anxiety will continue to be part of daily life for most of us.’ His daily televised briefings through the spring of 2020 established ‘I know Canadians are anxious right now’ as a governing refrain, repeated so often it ceased to be a description of public sentiment and became a prescription for it. In December 2023, asked by a CBC interviewer to reflect on a difficult year, he said: ‘Yes, it’s really tough right now and people are frustrated and people are uncertain. But the building blocks are there.’ The formulation is structurally identical to everything before it: the anxiety is named, the state is the building block. In his first speech after the 2021 election, he warned Canadians they faced ‘a global pandemic, a global recession, a global climate crisis.’ The throne speech that followed was designed, as Global News accurately observed, to speak to ‘Canadians’ anxieties in turbulent times.’ At the Council on Foreign Relations in April 2023, he stacked the anxieties like cordwood: pandemic, rising costs, economic anxiety, climate change, authoritarianism. ‘This is a moment of uncertainty like we haven’t seen in our lifetimes,’ he declared. By then, he had been saying roughly that for nine years. The formula was the same from 2014 to 2024. Name the fear. Validate it. Present yourself as the remedy. The decade in office was one long loop.
Mark Carney inherited the technique from Trudeau’s team and refined it with a central banker’s vocabulary. Where Trudeau catalogued fears, Carney quantifies them and presents himself as the uniquely credentialed risk manager. The structure is identical. The varnish is different. And a systematic review of Carney’s speeches on the public record at pm.gc.ca, from his start through April 2026, reveals something more damning than a rhetorical habit. It reveals a communications architecture, assembled in advance and deployed by template across every policy occasion, regardless of subject matter. Carney won’t let go of what worked so well for Justin.
The archive begins with the announcement of the strategic industries in Toronto on September 5, 2025. Speaking at a Mitsubishi plant, Carney opened with ‘unprecedented change’ and then introduced one of his signature constructions: ‘This is not a transition, it’s a rupture.’ Workers, he said, would be displaced; supply chains disrupted; the combination was causing ‘extreme uncertainty that is holding back massive amounts of investment.’ The solution to this uncertainty was, naturally, government action. In the same speech he deployed a phrase that, read carefully, discloses the entire political logic: the government’s role, he said, was to give builders ‘greater certainty of the scale of opportunity’ so that they ‘face calculated risks rather than unknowable uncertainty.’ Uncertainty, in other words, is for the state to resolve and the citizen to be relieved of. The speech closed with a five-word policy summary that reads as a campaign slogan: ‘from uncertainty to prosperity.’ Uncertainty is the disease. A never-arriving prosperity is the state’s gift.
On November 26, 2025, at a steel industry announcement in Ottawa, Carney reached again for the same construction: ‘It’s a rupture.’ This was the second documented use of that phrase in eleven weeks. He also introduced a recurring companion piece: ‘many of our strengths have become our vulnerabilities.’ Trade uncertainty, he said, would ‘cost Canadians around 1.8% of GDP,’ naming the damage in dollars, as a central banker would, to give the alarm the texture of precision. Numbers often give an aura of certainty to things. Three weeks earlier, speaking at the Chamber of Commerce in Montreal on November 14, the same framing governed the opening: the world is changing, Canada’s former strengths have become vulnerabilities, and his government’s plan is the only path to resilience.
On January 20, 2026, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, ‘rupture’ appeared for the third time: ‘This is not a transition, it’s a rupture.’ The assembled world leaders were told that allies were diversifying to ‘hedge against uncertainty’ and buying insurance against a world in which great powers operated without constraint. Two days later, on January 22, at the Citadelle in Quebec City, the same alarm opened the national unity address: ‘We are under no illusions. The world is more dangerous and divided. Old alliances are being recast and, in some cases, abandoned.’ Four days after that, on January 26, back in Ottawa at a grocery store announcement, the formula opened a speech about food prices: ‘The rapidly changing world is leaving Canadian families and businesses under a cloud of uncertainty and worry.’ The policy subject changed. The opening did not.
The scripting is most visible in the phrase ‘we cannot control what other countries do, we can control what we choose to do,’ or close variations thereof. It appears verbatim in the January 26 groceries speech and again verbatim in the April 14 fuel excise tax speech. The occasion on January 26 was a supermarket. The occasion on April 14 was the announcement of gasoline prices. Neither demanded geopolitical framing. Both received it as a matter of template. In the same April 14 speech, two other scripted constructions recurred: ‘the world is more divided and dangerous’ as the opening line, and ‘during this time of global turmoil’ as a mid-speech pivot, both of which had appeared in the January 26 groceries speech. The fear frame is not being generated by events. It is being applied to them, regardless of what they are.
Consider the range of occasions. On March 26, 2026, at CFB Halifax for a defence announcement, Carney offered: ‘In a more fractured and darker world, Canadian leadership will be defined not just by the strength of our values, but also by the value of our strength.’ On Commonwealth Day, March 9, a ceremonial occasion observed since 1977, he opened with: ‘In a more uncertain and divided world, the Commonwealth remains a constant.’ No one attending Commonwealth Day had expected a geopolitical emergency briefing. They got one anyway. On April 27, 2026, announcing the Canada Strong Fund in Ottawa, the substantive section opened: the world is ‘changing, not gradually, but suddenly,’ ‘the foundations of the international order are crumbling,’ and ‘many of our former strengths have become our weaknesses.’ That last phrase had appeared in Toronto in September 2025 and in Ottawa in November 2025. Three speeches. Three different policy subjects. The same five words.
The repeat phrases tell the story plainly. ‘Rupture, not transition’ appeared in Toronto in September, Ottawa in November, and Davos in January. ‘Dangerous and divided’ appeared in Quebec City in January, ‘divided and dangerous’ in Ottawa in April, and ‘fractured and darker’ in Halifax in March. The adjectives rotate. The alarm is constant. ‘During this time of global turmoil’ appeared verbatim in the January 26 groceries speech and the April 14 fuel excise speech. ‘We cannot control what other countries do’ appeared verbatim in both. What this survey reveals is not a politician choosing words appropriate to the occasion. It reveals a communications operation with a standing script inserted into every policy address, from groceries to sovereign wealth funds, from NATO defence targets to steel tariffs, from Commonwealth Day to a Davos auditorium.
The repeat phrases function as liturgical responses. The congregation knows its lines. Each recitation reinforces the emotional premise that the world is beyond the citizen’s grasp and that the state’s steady hand, which is his, is the only available anchor. The repetition is not careless. It is the mechanism by which an emotional reality is constructed and maintained across a population that is not in the room for any individual speech but is bathed in the cumulative effect of all of them.
Naheed Nenshi, leading Alberta’s NDP, has been a good pupil of the Laurentian Liberal strategy: he applies the same architecture at the provincial level. Since his selection as party leader in 2024, he has deployed the language of uncertainty and anxiety at every available platform. At the party’s May 2025 convention in Edmonton, he bridged his well-worn Calgary flood reminiscence into a metaphor about the Smith government: ‘It’s a flood of economic uncertainty. It’s a flood of attacks on our public services.’ At a Better Together town hall in Lethbridge in August 2025, he warned Albertans they must get ‘off this path of divisiveness,’ casting political disagreement itself as a form of social damage. Launching his For Alberta For Canada campaign in April 2026, ahead of an expected referendum on Alberta’s separation, he declared: ‘Even the threat of a referendum is already damaging our economy and creating chaos and uncertainty.’ The political process itself, Albertans exercising their democratic voice on a constitutional question, is framed as a source of economic damage. Uncertainty, in Nenshi’s telling, is not an inevitable feature of democratic deliberation. It is something being done to Albertans by people who disagree with him. The free exercise of political speech becomes the disease. Disagreement with progressive policy is recast as a natural disaster requiring rescue.
There are more examples, but that will suffice to make the point: the word uncertainty appears in these speeches not as description but as incantation. It is a bell rung to produce a Pavlovian response: anxiety, helplessness, and the instinctive search for a protector. The question worth pressing is why politicians who claim to lead confident jurisdictions spend so much time telling their citizens to be afraid. The answer, once you see it, is not complicated.
Several assumptions are embedded in this rhetoric, none of them innocent, and each carries implications that run well past the speech-writing room.
The first assumption is that the present moment is uniquely perilous. It is not. Canadians who lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, the Korean War, the October Crisis, and the stagflation of the 1970s would find the suggestion quaint. The world has always presented dangers. What has changed is not the level of risk but the eagerness of political leaders to amplify it for strategic advantage, and to exploit people’s lack of courage. Instead of fomenting calmness, they activate anxiety and push uncertainty. The irresponsibility is compounded by its deliberateness. The implication of the unique-peril claim is that ordinary politics and ordinary scrutiny are insufficient for the moment. Emergency governance follows emergency framing. Budgets expand. Questions are deferred. Accountability is postponed. The crisis that justifies all this need never end, because the politicians defining the crisis also define when it is over.
The second assumption is that uncertainty is a problem the state can solve. This is the prideful centre of what Hayek called the fatal conceit: the belief that centralized authority possesses the knowledge necessary to plan outcomes for millions of individuals making billions of decisions amid irreducible complexity. Uncertainty arises precisely because no single mind or institution can encompass the dispersed knowledge of a free society. The progressive leader who promises to manage uncertainty is promising something structurally impossible, an alteration of reality for that is what the actual removal of uncertainty would mean. But the promise is politically useful, because its failure simply generates fresh uncertainty, which in turn refreshes the demand for further management. The mandate becomes self-renewing. It is a manipulative gift that keeps on giving. The implication is that every failed intervention justifies the next one, and the citizen who notices the pattern is accused of adding to the very uncertainty the state was called in to resolve.
The third assumption is that citizens cannot handle the truth of their own human condition. This is the most corrosive element, and it deserves the bluntest language. The constant repetition of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty is not an expression of empathy. It is a form of maternalistic emotional manipulation. The politician who names your dread constantly and then offers himself as the remedy is, like a devouring mother, engaged in the same dynamic as any controlling figure who manufactures dependency. The message, stripped of its parliamentary cadences, is simple: you cannot manage your own life without us. Seek us. Hang on to us. The implication is the slow atrophying of civic competence. Citizens trained to feel helpless become helpless. The psychology is self-fulfilling. A population that has outsourced its risk assessment to the state loses the habit of performing it independently, becoming more anxious and more dependent, which is precisely the outcome the state’s permanent-emergency model requires.
The psychology of it has parallels elsewhere. A parent who constantly told a child that the world was frightening, that dangers lurked everywhere, and that safety existed only in the parent’s presence would be recognized by any competent psychologist as fostering anxious attachment. The child never develops the capacity to assess risk independently. The child never builds the confidence that comes from navigating difficulties without a hovering authority. The child remains permanently dependent, permanently afraid, permanently grateful for protection that was never necessary. We would call this abuse. We would call it a failure of the most basic parental duty: to prepare a young person for the world rather than to make the world seem too terrifying to enter alone. The progressive governance model replicates this dynamic at scale. The anxious citizen is the child. The state is the manipulative parent. And the endless incantation of uncertainty is the mechanism by which autonomy is discouraged and dependency is cultivated.
There is also a darker political function. If the present moment is defined by dangerous uncertainty, then anyone proposing a different course is adding to the chaos. The conservative who questions a carbon tax, the premier who asserts provincial jurisdiction, the citizen who objects to credential inflation or regulatory overreach: all become sources of instability. Nenshi’s claim that Alberta’s uncertainty is ‘self-inflicted’ by the UCP is the clearest expression of this logic. Political opposition itself becomes a symptom of the disease that only progressives can cure. Disagreement is pathologized. Dissent is reframed as recklessness.
So what is to be done? The conservative disposition is not to deny or minimize uncertainty. It is to model and develop the courage to meet it, which is precisely what a responsible parent does with her child. She does not pretend that dangers do not exist. She does not amplify them until the child cannot function. She equips the child with the skills, the resilience, and the confidence to navigate a world that is genuinely uncertain and genuinely demanding. That is the honest response to the human condition. It is also the response that produces adults capable of governing themselves.
At the individual level, the pushback begins with recognition. When a politician opens a grocery store speech with a line about the fractured international order, you are not being informed. You are being managed. Played. Notice it. Name it. The language of permanent crisis is designed to make you feel that your judgment is insufficient at the moment, that you need guidance from above. It is not true, and it never was. The appropriate response is not rage but refusal: a quiet, firm refusal to accept the proposition that you are helpless.
Beyond recognition, the answer is the same as it has always been. Develop skills. Take on problems directly. Build competence through engagement with difficulty rather than retreat from it. Forge the kind of community, in families, in neighbourhoods, in voluntary associations, that makes people less dependent on the state and more capable of navigating an uncertain world on their own terms. Prosperity is created by individuals and communities who accept the terms of an uncertain world and act within them, taking calculated risks, learning from failure, adapting to conditions no planner could have foreseen.
This is the tradition of self-reliance that built the Western Prairie provinces, that settled a vast and unforgiving landscape, that created industries and institutions without waiting for permission or subsidy from distant capitals. It is a tradition that treats the citizen as an adult, capable of making decisions, bearing consequences, and thriving precisely because no one promised to make the world safe for him.
The leaders who invoke uncertainty at every turn are working to extinguish that tradition. They are conditioning citizens to become patients, clients, dependents, and to see that dependency not as a diminishment but as a relief. They are working to replace free people’s agency with the comforting fiction that someone in Ottawa or Victoria can make the world predictable.
No one can. No one ever could. And a people who understand this, who refuse to be frightened into submission, who meet the world’s irreducible openness with confidence rather than trembling, will do more than survive the uncertainties ahead. They will grow. They will prosper. They will remain, in the deepest sense of the phrase, strong and free. They will survive COVID-type politically amplified crises with their sanity intact.
Progressives cannot stop themselves. Their project is to keep people dependent on them, using any tool at their disposal. The bribes of some unnecessary services are the most visible example, but the weaponization of anxiety has the same goal. Being aware of it is the first step toward pushing back and preventing the manipulation.
Death is certain aka M.A.I.D.S. = DEMOCIDE. Taxes are un-lawful aka CANADA INC. captured Canada the Nation of "we the people". Canada has had an ECONOMIC COUP de TAT. I'm 73. I know what I'm looking at. D.E.I. = C.C.P. SOCIAL CREDIT system. Honestly I sound like a raving TROLL as I try to wake Canadians up. Censorship = "Mind police will kill any society". Just saying.
Wow! Brilliant article. Just brilliant. Concise, to the point, and easy to read. And, everything these politicians are doing - see above in the article - is working. According to the polls, if an election were held today, Carney would win a huge majority. He would win in all of Canada except Alberta and Saskatchewan. And even there, he would take a few seats. So, yeah. Why mess with success? And, that is one reason why Canada is in the situation that it is.