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I Spoke Out about Health Care. The Premier of PEI Took It Very Personally

How a single quote sparked a political firestorm

I’m an anesthesiologist in Grande Prairie, Alberta, and for most of my career, I’ve worked on two questions. How do people and systems move through change successfully? What circumstances break them?

I spent years leading health system reform and reconciliation work—including as president of the Canadian Medical Association, the first Indigenous physician and the youngest person to hold the role—and the through-line of all of it was emotion. Not policy. Not strategy or resources. I came to understand that most failed attempts to fix hard problems in hospitals, in governments, and around kitchen tables fail for one reason: someone misread the emotion in front of them.

I eventually turned those insights into a book called The Outrage Cure, which was published a few months ago. That’s how I found myself in Charlottetown for a keynote and book signing. Following the events, I spoke with a reporter from the local newspaper, the Guardian. He was well versed in the topic he wanted to talk about: Prince Edward Island’s health system.

We spent most of the interview bouncing back and forth between two things—him steering toward PEI’s troubles, while I tied the themes and lessons of The Outrage Cure into our discussion. Somewhere in that conversation, I said something I viewed as unremarkable—that what physicians are living through in PEI is what they’re living through everywhere, and that government action had contributed to a loss of trust between doctors and the system. Governments across the country are going through this, and it’s been going on for years. To say health care workers generally mistrust the systems they work in should not raise the eyebrows of anybody.

What ran, days later, was that single line under a headline about PEI doctors losing faith in their government. It reached the floor of the legislature by the official opposition. And the premier, Rob Lantz, answered it with a line that made the rounds: he would take his cues from the doctors of his own province, he said, “not some doctor from wherever he’s from.” There were other things said, but I’ll let you search for those yourself.

I’m not sharing this to be a story about me but instead a story about misreading emotions. If there is a single skill this age of outrage demands, it’s the discipline of reading the emotion in front of you and linking it to what it actually means.

So let me help you, from my perspective, read this differently.

We are living in an age defined by outrage and betrayal, two emotions that are part of a causal chain that starts with problems we feel are worth solving and ends with us giving up on change ever happening at all. In The Outrage Cure, I map this out in great detail, through experiences I’ve been a part of over my lifetime. The relevant lesson is how common it is to collapse anger and outrage into the same thing, and how that collapse is behind most failed attempts to fix serious, complicated problems.

Anger is what we feel when something important is taken from us. It points outward as a call to “come help me.” It’s constructive, legible, and answerable, as long as someone is paying attention and responds. Betrayal is what anger curdles into when the people who were supposed to respond remain silent, minimize our calls to action, or otherwise reject them.

We ask ourselves whether those people—those in power, those who........

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