Building community capital

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock
  • Published as “We can’t grow our way out of problems created by growth”

The challenges we face are a product of the economic and other societal systems we have created

Dr. Trevor Hancock

21 July 2025

700 words

Mark Carney may not have called his Bill C-5 – now the Building Canada Act – a big, beautiful bill, but it does come out of much the same mould as Trump’s bill. Essentially, it says we can and must grow our way out of our problems. But the problem is that growth itself IS the problem, as I wrote last month.

Our current economic system has taken us past seven of the nine planetary boundaries identified by Earth scientists, and has triggered a wide variety of other problems, constituting together a polycrisis. The cliff edge looms, and governments across Canada and around the world are hitting the accelerator!

But all is not lost. You know something important is up when Saul Klein, a former Dean of the School of Business at UVic and now CEO of the Victoria Forum, is co-author of an article in the Times Colonist (July 11th) that states: 

“For a long time, we believed that our systems just needed fixing, that they were broken or outdated. But we’ve come to realize something more unsettling.

These systems are not broken. Their negative outcomes are not bugs. They are features of the way they were designed. And they are producing exactly what they were incentivized to produce — environmental degradation, exclusion, concentration of wealth, and structural inequality.”

If the challenges we face are a product of the economic and other societal systems we have created then – as Einstein reportedly said – we can‘t solve problems by using the samekind of thinking we used when we created them. We cannot grow our way out of the problems created by growth. Nor can we just tinker with these systems, hoping we can make some reforms without changing the underlying systems. We need at the very least to transform them, we need revolutionary change.

A place to begin is to recognise that what we call capitalism is not true capitalism. It seems to have escaped the attention of mainstream economists, and the business and government leaders that embrace them, that there are four forms of capital. In addition to the economic capital that we are familiar with (basically, money and ‘stuff’, from widgets to large infrastructure) there is human capital – the attributes, abilities and wellbeing of individuals.

Then there is social capital – the ties that connect, through informal social networks to the publicly funded programs of the social contract to the underlying legal, political and constitutional systems that regulate our peaceful interactions.

Lastly, but by no means least, there is natural capital, the underlying bedrock of nature from which comes the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the source of all the materials and fuels that underpin our societies and economies.

As the Worldwide Fund for Nature so wisely put it a decade ago, “Ecosystems sustain societies that create economies. It does not work the other way around.” And yet, what Carney and all the world’s conventional capitalists are trying to do is to make it work the other way around – a fool’s errand if ever there was one.

Real capitalists are those who work to build what I call community capital, by building all four forms of capital at the same time – and there aren’t many of them. But we need to transition as quickly as possible to – at the very least – a broader system of capitalism. Indeed, we really need to move to an entirely different economic system, one rooted in nature and society, one that puts people and planet first, what many now call a wellbeing economy, part of a wellbeing society.

In their July 11th article, Saul Klein and his co-author, Arti Freeman, president and CEO of Definity Foundation, went on to write:

“To build a better future, it’s not enough to bridge divides, we must also re-imagine the systems themselves. That takes more than policy reform. It takes collective imagination as a strategy to envision new ways of organizing our economies, our democracies, and our relationships with one another and the planet.”

Undertaking this process of collective imagination is an important task everywhere, including here in the Greater Victoria Region. More on that, and on how to initiate this transition, next month.  

© Trevor Hancock, 2025

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the                                            University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Even more Dysfunctional by the Sea

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

  • (Published as ‘Save Our Saanich isn’t saving money’)

I am not sure what Save Our Saanich is trying to save, but clearly it is not money.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

18 July 2025

702 words

I wish I could take credit for the term ‘Dysfunction-by-the-Sea’, but long-time readers of this newspaper will recognise it was Jack Knox’s acerbic term for the Greater Victoria Region. But while Jack has retired – and is much missed – Dysfunction-by-the-Sea soldiers on. Two current examples could be found in the July 18th edition.

The first concerns the rejection of Saanich District Council’s plan to borrow $150 million to upgrade the District’s aging public works yard and buildings, which are old and don’t meet building code requirements. But the alternative process used to approve the funding for the project failed when just over 12 percent of eligible voters opposed the proposed borrowing.

There is so much wrong with this it is hard to know where to begin. The headline says that Saanich residents rejected the proposal, and Mayor Dean Murdoch was quoted saying “’I’m pleased to see democracy is alive and well” and that “the voters spoke and they don’t support it”. Well sorry, but no, no and no!

I am a resident of Saanich, and nobody asked me if I approved the borrowing, which I did. But this process, which was designed by the province, is heavily biased in favour of rejection and is not at all democratic. There were two choices open to me – obtain a form and submit it to say no, or say nothing. There was no option for me to sign a form to say yes.

So did the more than 87 percent of eligible voters who said nothing in fact approve the expenditure, or did they not care one way or the other?  We don’t know, but in effect those 12 percent may well have over-ruled a larger group of voters who would have approved, if given the opportunity. Clearly the voters have not spoken, and democracy is not alive and well, it is sick and dying.

Then there is Save Our Saanich (SOS), the group that spear-headed the rejection. I am not sure what they are trying to save, but clearly it is not money. The result of this fiasco is that there may need to be a full referendum, at considerable cost, or the work is postponed, which will increase costs. Meanwhile, thanks to SOS, staff will continue to work in buildings that don’t meet modern building code standards.

Then to add insult to injury, SOS president Nancy Di Castri is quoted saying “We have never been against them fixing up the old buildings”. So why incur extra costs for the municipality’s taxpayers and poor working conditions for staff, for a project you seemingly support?

Meanwhile, over in Victoria, the proposal to amalgamate Saanich and Victoria – perhaps the single most idiotic idea in municipal politics in recent decades – lumbers inexorably on. Victoria City Council, having with Saanich wasted a couple of hundred thousand dollars on a Citizens Assembly, has now voted unanimously to put it on the ballot in 2026.

There is nothing about this idea that makes any sense whatsoever. Why on earth would you want to amalgamate the two largest municipalities – between them comprising half the region’s population – while leaving the remaining eleven untouched? We would be left with one super-municipality and eleven smaller municipalities – some of them very small – that would be dominated by the super-municipality. And we would still be left with disjointed police, fire and other systems across the region.

It makes absolutely no sense to just look at these two municipalities in isolation, when what we really should be doing is a full review of regional governance. But since the local governments seem incapable of any such rational approach, it is time for the province to step in, stop the Victoria-Saanich process and commission such a review.

The question that should be put to a full regional Citizens Assembly is “what is the best governance system for this region in the 21st century? How do we govern this region (recognising that governance is more than just government) so as to maximise the wellbeing of all who live here – and all who will live here in future generations – while reducing our overall ecological footprint and protecting and enhancing the bioregion and all our relations?”

Imagine becoming Functional-by-the-Sea!

© Trevor Hancock, 2025

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the                                            University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

As the cliff edge looms, governments hit the accelerator

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

Ensuring the stability of society and the wellbeing of its members means ensuring that the ecosystems that support us are in good shape — and they are not.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

23 June 2025

701 words

Some may consider Prime Minister Mark Carney to be an economic guru but he is either ignorant of or chooses to ignore two fundamental truths in his rush to build the nation by growing the economy.

First, as the World Wide Fund for Nature eloquently put it in 2014, “Ecosystems sustain societies that create economies. It does not work the other way around.” Second, as Kenneth Boulding – a former President of both the American Economic Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science – stated way back in 1973: “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

So ensuring the stability of society and the wellbeing of its members means ensuring that the ecosystems that support us are in good shape – and they are not. A couple of centuries of industrialism, and 80 years of massive and rapid economic growth since the Second World War – referred to as ‘The Great Acceleration’ – have taken their toll, pushing us close to the cliff edge.

Let me be clear what I mean by the cliff edge. Earth scientists have just concluded that we have crossed the seventh of nine planetary boundaries they have identified. The latest is ocean acidification, sometimes called ‘osteoporosis of the sea’ because it thins the shells of calcifying species such as corals, oysters, mussels, clams, and pteropods (tiny sea snails). It has also been called  the ‘evil twin’ of climate change because it too is largely the result of carbon dioxide emissions.

In fact, a study published this month in Global Change Biology finds, based on revised and updated models, that the entire surface ocean crossed that boundary in 2000. As a result there are “significant declines in suitable habitats for important calcifying species”, particularly in the polar regions.

Add to that recent reports on catastrophic declines in insect species, even in protected forest areas, and in the birds, frogs, lizards and other species that eat them. An article in the Guardian in June quotes a prominent US entomologist, David Wagner, who documents insects all over the USA. Speaking of a recent trip to Texas  he said “There just wasn’t any insect life to speak of”, adding “I want to do what I can with my last decade to chronicle the last days for many of these creatures.”

Climate change underlies both ocean acidification and insect declines – and climate change is rapidly worsening. We see the evidence of this in Canada, with the early arrival of wildfires and extreme heat events in June this year. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported, global average concentrations of carbon dioxide exceeded 430 ppm for the first time in some 30 million years. A recent article on indicators of global climate change found human-induced warming has been increasing at an unprecedented rate in the past decade, due to “greenhouse gas emissions being at an all-time high” this decade “as well as reductions in the strength of aerosol cooling”.

And yet, Carney and his government ignore all this, egged on by corporate spin-masters who are using Trump’s dangerous actions as cover to push for the reversal of health and environmental protections and respect for the rights of Indigenous people in the name of ‘nation-building’.

The evidence of Carney’s ignorance – or ignore-ance – is clear in the mandate letter he gave to his Cabinet on May 21st. Not only is the environment not one of the seven priorities for the government, there is not a single use of the word ‘environment’ anywhere in this letter, and only a passing reference to climate change right at the end: “We will fight climate change”. Big hairy deal!

Nor is there any reference to wellbeing or quality of life in the Mandate letter, which is quite ironic, given that Carney has established a new Cabinet Committee on quality of life and wellbeing. Yet both are threatened by further harm to the Earth’s natural systems, and by riding roughshod over Indigenous peoples’ rights and health and environmental protections.

The unseemly rush to further exploit nature, and especially to make Canada a conventional energy superpower, merely accelerates us towards the cliff edge.

© Trevor Hancock, 2025

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the                                            University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy