Canada lowered its flags for a leader the global press never quite learned how to describe, but whose absence the country felt immediately. The death of Kirsty Duncan on January 26, 2026, after a prolonged battle with cancer, was not a dramatic political event. It came instead as a quiet inflection point—six days after the Prime Minister of Canada declared in Davos that the world had entered a phase of “rupture, not transition.”
Professor Duncan—former Deputy Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, a scientist-turned-minister, and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007—embodied the best of what North American liberalism claimed to value, without ever being fully empowered to carry it forward. Trained as a medical geographer and an early authority on pandemics, she understood long before it became fashionable that public health, climate change, and institutional trust were not adjacent policy files, but a single question: how to govern complex systems.
After Obama, liberalism in North America struggled to imagine effective leadership. It narrowed into a constrained space between cautious management and symbolic representation, between moral reassurance and procedural comfort. In that narrowing, Duncan’s model was lost: a scientific policymaker who combined intellectual rigor with what was once called a “sunshine approach”—not as temperament, but as a governing philosophy grounded in transparency, empathy, and ethical seriousness. That approach ultimately collided with bureaucratic systems resistant to reform when reform imposed real moral cost.
Duncan was neither radical nor naïve. She believed institutions could still be repaired from within, if the will existed. She confronted quiet complicity within her own party with the same composure she brought to confronting extremism outside it. A question she posed calmly to those close to her—even at the height of illness—How do you catch a dictator?—was not rhetorical. It was diagnostic. She understood that the coming setback was not cyclical but structural: a decade, perhaps a generation, during which institutions would lose the capacity to enforce rules—not because rules were absent, but because the systems meant to sustain them were eroding.
The declaration of “rupture” did not create this reality; it named it. With it came the end of the era of reform-from-within. The question now is no longer how to save liberalism as an ideology, but how to govern complex systems—climate, technology, healthcare—in a fractured world that no longer waits for universal solutions.
It is in this context that the idea of variable geometry has emerged as a post-rupture logic: flexible, domain-specific coalitions; regulation where regulation remains possible; cooperation built around functions rather than fixed loyalties. This is not a rejection of the rule of law, but a shift from moral proclamation to institutional capacity—enforcing what can be enforced when comprehensive frameworks no longer hold.
With Duncan’s passing, the West did not lose a leader.
What was lowered instead was the scientific, optimistic method as a governing value within Western liberal democracy.
Discipline begins in Atturaif…
and is tested in the world.
Illustrative Footnote
Variable Geometry:
A concept in international law and governance describing an approach based on different coalitions and regulatory frameworks for different domains (climate, health, technology, trade), rather than a single comprehensive system or universal consensus. Originating in European practice, it is now increasingly invoked as a way to preserve governability and enforceability in a fragmented global order where all-encompassing solutions are no longer viable.
Prof. Dr. Malik Ãl-Dahlan
Professor of Law and specialist in international law; International Mediator.
Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews;
Emeritus Professor of International Law and Public Policy, Queen Mary University of London, and;
Member, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.