I watched leaders stand before cameras without the usual choreography of certainty. Nobody rushed to fill the silence. They did not claim mastery over what could not be explained or repaired. They stood inside grief, hand in hand.
I wept.
When did unity in vulnerability become exceptional?
The images travelled far beyond Canada. Journalists described the unity as remarkable.
I found myself asking why. Why is it so remarkable when leaders across political parties stand together and are vulnerable to each other and the world?
I was humbled.
The tragedy in British Columbia stands on its own. My reflection is about leadership, not equivalence.
What stayed with me was their willingness to acknowledge limits without pretending they could be erased. And that raised a harder question: why does it seem to take catastrophe for us to stand together in that way?
Tragedy confronts us with limits all at once. The loss is shared. The facts are undeniable. Ageing involves limits as well, but they unfold gradually and unevenly. Because they are dispersed across families and years, we rarely recognise them as a collective reality.
Where Unity Fractures
What struck me was not only the emotion of that day, but the alignment.
Leaders who often disagree stood together without calculating advantage. They did not dilute their positions. They did not erase their differences. But for that moment, they placed something larger ahead of party, platform, and persona.
I have worked in the field of ageing long enough to know how rare that posture is.
Across the United Nations Decade of Healthy Ageing, I have seen extraordinary commitment. I have also seen fragmentation. Agencies develop parallel frameworks. Civil society organisations compete for the same funding pools. Academic leaders defend their evidence base. Governments protect jurisdictional authority. We issue joint statements. We convene side events. We agree on language. Yet sustained alignment is fragile.
Alignment appears. It does not always endure.
I do not say this critically from the outside. I have been inside these processes for decades. I know the pressures. Funding cycles shape priorities. Boards expect visibility. Organisations must demonstrate impact. Reputation matters. Independence is valued.
None of that is trivial.
But independence can harden into isolation. Healthy competition can become guardedness. Strong leadership can tip into territoriality. When that happens, the ageing agenda fragments. Governments then receive multiple asks rather than one clear signal. Reform becomes incremental. Responsibility diffuses.
The demographic shift does not lack evidence. It lacks sustained, collective discipline.
The Discipline of Alignment
What moved me in that moment of tragedy was not consensus on policy. It was the absence of ego. The willingness to stand visibly aligned in the presence of limits.
In the ageing field, we speak often of collaboration. We sign memoranda. We endorse declarations. We create networks. And there are moments, particularly within WHO processes and global forums, where genuine alignment happens. I have seen it. I have helped build some of it.
But it is easier to align when crisis forces urgency. It is harder when the issue unfolds slowly, when no single headline demands unity.
Ageing does not erupt. It accumulates. Because it does not command a singular moment of reckoning, it allows us to retreat to our respective mandates.
The question this leaves me with is uncomfortable.
We know the demographic trajectory and the workforce implications. We also know that longer lives will include periods of reliance.
Why does it remain so difficult to act in concert before systems fracture?
Unity in ageing cannot be episodic.
It cannot depend on scandal or mortality spikes. It requires leaders who are willing, consistently, to subordinate ego to shared purpose.
That is not sentimental. It is structural.
Fragmented leadership produces fragmented systems.
And those systems are lived by people whose vulnerability is anything but fragmented.
Unity Without Catastrophe
If tragedy teaches us anything, it is that we are capable of unity when limits are undeniable.
Ageing tests whether we can act with the same unity before crisis forces us.
Unity in ageing policy is not symbolic. Humility is not retreat. It accepts that longer lives will include reliance and commits to protecting dignity within those limits.
If we can stand together when catastrophe strips away illusion, we should be able to stand together when the trajectory is clear.
Jane, you've named something essential here — that the slow unfolding of ageing's limits gives leaders permission to retreat into silos where urgency should demand convergence.
In the U.S., that fragmentation isn't just inefficient. It's been monetized. People have been commoditized.
The for-profit healthcare industry — insurers, private equity firms, pharmacy benefit managers — has built a trillion-dollar architecture of extraction that depends on advocates, policymakers, and communities never aligning long enough to challenge it.
The question I keep returning to: if political rivals can sit knees-to-knees on a plane to stand with a grieving community, what would it take for those of us who believe that growing old should not mean growing expendable to find that same plane?
People have always been exploited and devalued in the service of profit.
But every generation that bent the moral arc closer to justice did so by refusing to look away. Tutu said, "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." The ageing field has been neutral long enough. The people we serve cannot wait for us to find it convenient to stand together.
Having worked alongside aging systems, I've seen how fragmentation erodes what sustained alignment could achieve. Divide and conquer doesn't seem to do it. The place to start is shared accountability structures — agreed metrics, joint reporting, and funding incentives that reward collective impact over individual visibility. But when you have organizations like WHO that have for years been held in high regard and now come under false scrutiny from my government, it is hard to settle on standards. Our Dept of Health and Human Services has now divided the country. Their recommendations are without scientific rigidity and hospital, physician, consumer groups and states are issuing their own guidelines. We are moving further apart here than together.