Most governments go along with the agendas of powerful corporations and obscenely wealthy individuals, at the expense of people and the planet.
Dr. Trevor Hancock
27 October 2026
700 words
Surveying the political scene after the recent provincial election, it seems to me there is a lot of discontent and unease out there. We saw the NDP ejected in favour of a relatively unknown, inexperienced and potentially fragmenting alternative, the newly minted Conservative Party. I am not so sure this was a vote for the Conservatives so much as it was a vote against the NDP.
But as Fair Vote Canada points out, this was not what BC voted for. The Conservatives got less than half the vote (48 percent), but 69 percent of the seats. Meanwhile the NDP, with 38 percent of the vote, got only 29 percent of the seats and – even more unfairly – the Greens got just 2 percent of the seats despite winning 11 percent of the vote. There is something rotten in the state of the B.C electoral system!
What we have just seen, in my view, is not so much people voting for something as voting against the governing power. I think this reflects a sense of unease, not yet well enough defined or articulated except by the Greens, that at a quite deep level things are not working well, that we are in trouble; people know it, they know the government is not fixing it and they want a change – any change as long as it’s not the status quo.
What underlies this unease, I think, are a pair of larger problems. Almost 50 years ago, I wrote about what I found to be the two core principles of public health – ecological sanity and social justice. They have been the guiding principles of my work ever since. But sadly, the pursuit of ‘business as usual’, ramped up even more by neoliberalism, has left the world more ecologically insane and socially unjust than it was even then.
Last month Earth4All, an initiative of the Club of Rome in collaboration with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the BI Norwegian Business School, released the results of a survey conducted by Ipsos across 17 of the G20 nations, including Canada.
In their report – titled ‘Rebuild Trust: Rigged economies, fractured societies and the case for change’ – they state:
“People across the G20 want their economies transformed, but they no longer trust their governments to achieve this change. Seven in ten say there is too much inequality (70 percent), that the system is rigged to benefit the rich and powerful (65 percent) and that the economy needs major change (69 percent).
Yet only 31 percent believe their government will make decisions that benefit people 20 or 30 years from now.”
Two years ago, they did a similar survey but focused on the global environment. They found 6 out of 10 people are very or extremely worried about the state of nature today, with 7 out of 10 believing Earth is close to climate and nature tipping points. Seven out of 10 also agreed that approving or permitting actions which cause serious damage to nature and the climate should be a criminal offence.
People aren’t stupid. They experience the obscene inequalities in wealth and power all over the world – why else do you think they are rioting in Europe? They also know we are losing the fight against climate change and are crossing other ecological boundaries and heading in the wrong direction.
They sense that the system is not working, and that more of the same will make things worse, not better. And yet they can see that for the most part governments are either actively or passively going along with the agendas of powerful corporations and obscenely wealthy individuals, sacrificing people and the planet for profits and power.
We need bold and visionary leadership to address these challenges, leadership that will squarely face the ecological insanity and social injustice of the 21st century, recognise its roots in a mistaken economic development paradigm – and the stark implications of this for future generations – and articulate a hopeful and transformative vision for a more sustainable, just and healthy future. I doubt we will get that from the Conservatives, any more than we did from the NDP.
© Trevor Hancock, 2026
Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the
University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy
