Amalgamate what? For what purpose?

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock
  • Published as “Why amalgamate only two Greater Victoria municipalities?”

It makes absolutely no sense to discuss the amalgamation of the two largest municipalities into one super-sized municipality while leaving the rest of the capital region untouched.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

17 July 2026

708 words

I am troubled by the growing expression of support in these pages for the amalgamation of Saanich and Victoria. My concern is rooted in a couple of very simple points: This is the wrong amalgamation, and anyway, what is the problem being addressed, and how will amalgamation improve our lives?

We are a single Region of some 460,000 people, but with 13 municipalities, some of which are quite small. The report of the Citizens’ Assembly noted the two municipalities “function as a shared civic space, and its governance should reflect that.” Time and again throughout the report, much the same idea is presented – that impacts extend beyond single municipal boundaries. And time and again, they concluded a coordinated response through a unified municipality would be more effective.

But a combined Saanich/Victoria would still be bordering Oak Bay, Esquimalt, View Royal, Highlands and Central Saanich; aren’t they a shared civic space whose governance should reflect that? Moreover, while concluding “fragmented governance hinders effectiveness and accountability” and recommending amalgamation, they fail to recognise that this is equally true of the Greater Victoria Region (GVR) as a whole.

Nor do they explain why reducing the number of municipalities by one, leaving a fragmented region of 12 municipalities, one of them being half the population, is a solution. To me, it makes absolutely no sense to discuss the amalgamation of the two largest municipalities into one super-sized municipality while leaving the rest of the GVR untouched. Any rational discussion of amalgamation must look at the Region as a whole, and not just two municipalities.

The correct question here should be ‘what is the best way to govern this Region in the 21st century?’ The answer to that question needs to take into account the challenges of the 21st century, which include our ecologically unsustainable way of life, the extensive social injustices across the region, the challenges to democracy arising from social media and AI, and the rights of First Nations in this region, among other major concerns. I suggest the Assembly’s response should have been – ‘It would make more sense to amalgamate the GVR for that purpose, not just amalgamate the two largest municipalities’

Now I am not arguing here for a single regional municipality, although I would argue for amalgamation into several local municipalities, and that some functions should operate at the Regional level. But in my February 1st column “How would we reinvent local government from scratch?” I suggested we apply the principle of subsidiarity – an assumption that all decisions are local (how local, we might ask – street, block, neighbourhood?) and then ask which decisions does it not make sense to make at that level, but at higher levels?

More importantly, what is the purpose of amalgamation? How will my life as a citizen of Saanich be improved? In my February 1st column I also suggested we should start by imagining the entire system of local government disappeared overnight and we had to re-invent it from scratch; what would we want to create if we wanted a more sustainable, just and healthy community?

Well, it’s not at all clear in the arguments for amalgamation; there is no reference in the Citizens’ Assembly report to a vision of what we are trying to achieve, while the word ‘wellbeing’ appears only once, in a minority member report, and only about financial wellbeing.

In my 31st August 2025 column (“Let’s have a conversation about the future we want for this region”), I suggested the people, organisations and institutions of the Greater Victoria Region (GVR) must come together both to understand the challenges we face and engage in an act of collective imagination leading to a better future. Such a comprehensive governance review should be done under the auspices of the provincial government, not just by a group from just two municipalities. 

As a citizen of Saanich, I will be voting against this ill-thought-out proposal to amalgamate these two municipalities, and I hope you will join me in voting it down. I also hope you will join me in calling on the province to conduct a comprehensive governance review of the Greater Victoria Region, one more suited to our regional nature and to the multiple challenges of the 21st century.

© 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

National food security? Not without natural security

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

The federal National Food Security Strategy lacks important discussion on how our current agri-food system harms the environment.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

28 June 2026

701 words

The Carney government recently released its National Food Security Strategy (NFSS). Unfortunately, the strategy only serves to show that the government doesn’t really understand food security, particularly when it comes to the environment and health, neither of which figure much in the strategy. I will discuss the neglect of the environment in this column and the neglect of health in a future column.

It should be glaringly obvious that ultimately food security depends upon having a healthy environment, and that producing food in environmentally harmful ways undermines food security. Yet not only does the word ‘environment’ only appear ten times in the 27-page strategy, eight of those times are not actually about the natural environment but about the technology of ‘controlled environment agriculture’, meaning greenhouses.

Nowhere in the NFSS is there a discussion of the way in which our current agri-food system harms the environment. Yet the October 2025 second report of the EAT-Lancet Commission on a healthy, sustainable and just food system (The Lancet is one of the world’s leading medical journals) noted that when it comes to the transgression of planetary boundaries for many of the nine Earth systems that are vital for life on Earth: “food is the single largest cause of planetary boundary transgressions, driving the transgression of five of the six breached boundaries.” (Since then we have crossed a seventh boundary, ocean acidification, to which agriculture also contributes).

Specifically, the Commission reported, agriculture accounts for 85 – 90 percent of total pesticide use and 73 percent of total antimicrobial use, while it contributes around half to three-quarters of flows of nitrogen and phosphorus to surface waters, which cause algal blooms and dead zones. Agriculture is also responsible for two-thirds of all freshwater use, while “Unsustainable land conversion, particularly deforestation, remains a major driver of biodiversity loss and climate change.” In addition, agriculture contributes 30 percent of all human-generated CO2 emissions that cause global heating, and a quarter of the CO2 emissions that contribute to ocean acidification.

Good luck finding much of that in the NFSS. Pesticides are only referred to in terms of making it easier to use them, while anti-microbials are not mentioned at all. Nitrogen is mentioned once in passing, phosphorus not at all, and fertilizers only in terms of problems with supply and improving availability. The word water, bizarrely, does not appear once in the report, nor does biodiversity or ocean acidification or – even more bizarrely – greenhouses gases or carbon/ CO2 emissions.

Yet these environmental effects, to which Canada is a significant contributor (the NFSS notes Canada is “the world’s ninth largest exporter of agri-food products”) have a large and growing impact on food security. Climate change alone is a major concern, as a recent joint Food and Agriculture Organization/ World Meteorological Organization report notes. The combination of rising temperatures and heatwaves, drought and water scarcity “represent a systemic risk to global food security and to the livelihoods of more than 1.23 billion people who rely on agriculture.”

Yet the NFSS only mentions climate change four times, and only in the context of it being one of “the global issues beyond Canada’s ability to directly control” that are impacting our agri-food system and increasing costs. No suggestion here that Canada bears any responsibility for climate change or that it could do something about it by reducing the agri-food system’s greenhouse gas emissions. Perhaps that is because the Carney government’s policies are moving Canada away from our climate change targets and are increasing our fossil fuel extraction and exports.

Add to that the impacts on food supply and food quality of ocean acidification, algal blooms and dead zones due to nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, as well as widespread use of pesticides and antibiotics and food chain contamination with plastic nano-particles and it is clear that our current agri-food system creates environmental insecurity.

In a largely overlooked October 2025 speech, David McGuinty, the Minister of Defence, explained that “Our security and our prosperity are fully dependent on a healthy and functioning environment” before concluding that “Our national and natural security are inextricably linked.” That certainly applies to our food security, but the new national Food Security Strategy disastrously fails to make that connection.

© 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