The real rupture we face: What Mark Carney’s next speech needs to say

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

Published in the Hill Times, 13 Feb 2026

The real rupture we face: what Carney’s next speech needs to say

A recent report from the United Kingdom warns that ‘critical ecosystems are at risk of collapsing,’ and if ‘current rates of biodiversity loss continue, every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse.’

Dr. Trevor Hancock

1 February 2026

696 words

In his much-lauded Davos speech, Mark Carney talked of “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality”. He was referring to power and geopolitics, and more specifically – although without naming him – to Donald Trump. All well and good, as far as it went – but it did not go far enough.

For while there is much that might be praised in Carney’s speech, and much that might be debated, what is really significant is what he failed to address. Consider that the following words did not appear once in his entire speech: Environment, ecology, ecosystem, climate, biodiversity, pollution, planet, boundary, limit.

And yet we face a much more profound and significant rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and beginning of a harsh reality than anything, short of nuclear war, that Trump may visit upon us.

  • Here is a real rupture in the world order: The accelerating transgression of planetary boundaries for seven of the nine Earth systems considered vital to the stability of our societies, to our wellbeing and indeed to our very existence.
  • Here is the end of a pleasant fiction: That life can go on much as it is, that economic growth can continue for ever in the finite system of the Earth, that everyone, everywhere, can have more stuff.
  • Here is a harsh reality, courtesy of the World Wide Fund for Nature: “Ecosystems sustain societies that create economies. It does not work any other way round.”

“The power of the less powerful”, said Carney, “starts with honesty.” Fine, so let’s start with some honesty about what our current economic system is doing to the planet, and what that means for our wellbeing, the wellbeing of future generations and the myriad species with whom we share the Earth.

Mr. Carney might want to read the October 2025 speech by his Minister of Defence, David McGuinty, at the 4th Montreal Climate Security Summit. “Our security and our prosperity are fully dependent on a healthy and functioning environment”, he said. And he very explicitly linked Canada’s national security to what he called our ‘natural security’: “Investing in and restoring our ecosystems and natural capital is strategic preparedness. It is national defence. And it’s natural security.”


He might want to read his own government’s report ‘Disruptions on the Horizon 2024’, which identified biodiversity loss and ecosystems collapse as the second most likely and second most impactful of 35disruptions for which Canada may need to prepare.

He might want to look at the UK Government’s national security assessment of global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, released January 20th. Noting that “Nature is a foundation of national security”, the report stated: “Critical ecosystems are at risk of collapsing. If current rates of biodiversity loss continue, every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse”.

Finally, as an economist, he might like to look at the UN Environment Programme’s ‘Global Ecological Outlook’, also released in January 2026. Among its key messages: “The scientific consensus is that following current development pathways will bring catastrophic climate change, devastation to nature and biodiversity, debilitating land degradation and desertification, and lingering deadly pollution – all at a huge cost to people, planet and economies.”

But the report, sub-titled “Why investing in Earth now can lead to a trillion-dollar benefit for all”, has another key message: “investing in a stable climate, healthy nature and land, and a pollution-free planet can deliver trillions of dollars each year in additional global GDP, avoid millions of deaths, and lift hundreds of millions of people out of hunger and poverty in the coming decades.”

Quoting Vaclav Havel, Mr. Carney cautioned we can’t live within a lie. Perhaps the biggest lie is that we can continue on our way pretty much in a ‘business as usual’ mode, with some adjustments. But the facts don’t bear this out, we can’t keep living this lie. So Mr. Carney can add to his growing international stature by delivering another speech, perhaps at the UN this time, about this much greater and more profound rupture we face, and what we need to do about it.

© Trevor Hancock, 2026

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

Zero-based governance for the CRD

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

o   Published as “How would we reinvent local government from scratch?”

What decisions should be made at the municipal level? The regional level? By the province? Federally?

Dr. Trevor Hancock

26 Jan 2026

700 words

This year the Capital Regional District marks its Diamond Jubilee. It was created in 1966 as a federation of seven municipalities and five electoral areas to provide coordination of regional issues and local government in the Greater Victoria region. At the time, it had a population of under 200,000. Back then nobody knew about climate change, the famous Club of Rome report on the limits to growth was still six years in the future, there was no internet, no social media and robots were firmly in the realm of science fiction.

Well, today, the CRD is 13 municipalities and 460,000 people and all those issues are today’s reality. So what is the system of governance we need to address the realities of the 21st century? Just amalgamating some or all of the CRD is not going to cut it, that’s a 20th century solution to 21st century problems.

So here’s an idea: Why don’t we mark the Diamond Jubilee by engaging the CRD’s residents in a participatory democracy exercise of zero-based governance design. It’s an idea inspired by my work in the 1990s on zero-based health planning, which was based on the concept of zero-based budgeting. The idea, popular for a while in the 1970s and thereafter, was very simple: Start with a clean sheet (zero base) every year and build the budget you need, rather than just taking last year’s budget allocation and tweaking it.

“Part of the problem that we face in health care planning”, I wrote in a 1991 article, “is that we are starting where we are now; our present system and all its facilities have evolved over decades, and as such all of the errors that we unwittingly made in the past are incorporated into the system. Only too often, attempts to improve the system begin with the existing system and figure out ways to change it without having a clear sense of what the system ultimately should look like.” (Does that sound a bit like the CRD today?)

So I proposed a thought experiment: Imagine the entire health care system disappeared overnight and we had to re-invent it from scratch.  The result of that thinking literally turned the health system on its head. We would begin with everything needed to keep people healthy and only at the end would we need specialty care and hospitals.

This wasn’t just an empty exercise. At the time I was part of a team of urban planners, architects, social planners and others developing a proposal for a planned new community, Seaton, northeast of Toronto. But our team was not just designing the hard infrastructure of mains and drains, roads and housing, but a complete community, including the ‘soft’ infrastructure of its social systems – health, education, social services and governance.

However, it’s not often that we get an empty slate on which to develop a new system, so in practice, we need to envision the system we need, then ensure all our system decisions move us in that direction. 

So now imagine the entire system of local government disappeared overnight and we had to re-invent it from scratch; what would we create? I suggest we start with a principle in governance called subsidiarity, which begins with an assumption that all decisions are local (how local, we might ask – street, block, neighbourhood?) and then asks which decisions does it not make sense to make at that level? (As an admittedly extreme example, we don’t want decisions about whether we should have capital punishment made at that level, I suggest.)

OK, so now what decisions should be made at the municipal level? The regional level? By the province? Federally? A related question for all of those levels is HOW the decisions should be made. Who should be involved, and how? – remembering that we now have social media and the internet, and increasingly, AI.

I don’t have a blueprint, I don’t know what the answers would be, but I think this would be a much more useful exercise than carrying on with business as usual and wrangling about various forms of amalgamation. Does the CRD have the political will and imagination to do something like this? Time will tell.

© Trevor Hancock, 2026

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