What do you do with the mad that you feel…
When you feel so mad you could bite…
When the whole wide world seems oh so wrong?”

Almost sixty years ago, Mr. Rogers wrote those lyrics.

And in 1969, he used those very lines to open one of the most important conversations about public education and public responsibility in North America.

He didn’t walk in with a budget.
He walked in with a truth…
A truth about emotion.
A truth about impulse.
A truth about human behaviors.

And today, I’m standing in front of you with the same truth.
Because the work I’m here to talk about begins in the place we rarely acknowledge ,
the moment when emotion becomes action.

WHY THIS MATTERS , THE THREE-SECOND WINDOW

Gender-based and intimate-partner violence does not begin in a courtroom.
It doesn’t begin with a charge.
It doesn’t even begin with the act itself.

It begins in the three seconds
between a feeling
and an action.

And here’s why those three seconds matter:

Neuroscience shows that it takes about three seconds for the emotional brain and the rational brain to collide.
That is the natural interruption window.
Long enough to stop the impulse.
Short enough to change the outcome.

Violence doesn’t happen in minutes.
Violence happens in mere moments.

So if we care about prevention,
we need to operate inside those moments.

Mr. Rogers also wrote:

“When the whole wide world seems oh so wrong…”

That’s the instant where harm is born ,
in confusion, and frustration

And then he wrote the line that guides my work today:

“You can stop when you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong.”

That sentence contains the entire blueprint of prevention:

• Recognition

• Interruption

• Choice

• Accountability

That’s the architecture of behavior change.
That is the architecture of public safety.

WHY I’M HERE , THE CIVIC PURPOSE

And that is why this week, I’m traveling to Ottawa
to meet with MPs and Senators
with this song in my heart.

Because the question Mr. Rogers asked children in the 1960s
is the same question some adults still cannot answer today:

“What do you do with the mad that you feel?”

And what happens when you don’t know?

Canada is paying the price every single day:
in policing,
in courts,
in prisons,
in shelters,
in emergency rooms,
in the lives and futures shattered by preventable violence.

When the public pays the cost of emotional dysregulation,
then emotional regulation is public policy.

THE PROJECT , TRANSFORMATION OF DANGEROUS SPACES

Transformation of Dangerous Spaces
is a national prevention intervention
designed to create that three-second pause
before harm occurs.

We take familiar spaces, bathrooms, and locker rooms
the kinds of rooms where silence grows,
where stress accumulates,
where pressure builds

And we transform them into controlled environments
that slow people down long enough to consider:

• What am I feeling?

• What do I believe?

• What am I about to do?

• What else is possible?

This is not decorative art.
This is not passive viewing

This is not awareness.
This is not metaphor.

This is behavioral interruption.
This is civic education.
This is national prevention infrastructure.

We are bringing this across Canada ,
coast to coast.

WHY  MPs AND SENATORS MATTER

Policies can punish behavior,
but they cannot prevent it.

Legislation can respond to violence,
but it cannot reach the moment where violence begins.

Only interruption can do that.
Only reflection can do that.
Only education can do that.

Art can do that.

And that is where you come in.

Canada needs prevention tools
that operate where violence actually starts ,
in emotion,
in impulse,
in silence,
in social norms,
in the three seconds before someone crosses a line
that they can never uncross.

Nearly sixty years after Fred Rogers wrote that song,
we are asking the same question he asked then
only now, the stakes are much higher.

“What do you do with the mad that you feel
and how do we make sure it never becomes violence?”

Because if we can change the moment,
we can change the outcome

If we can change the outcome,
we can change the story.

And if we can change the story,
we can save lives.

Thank you.