- 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“For a long time, we believed that our systems just needed fixing, that they were broken or outdated.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
Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy
Dr. Trevor Hancock - Healthy people, healthy communities, a healthy planet 