What part of ‘global ecological crisis’ do they not get?

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

Most countries, especially the largest, the richest and the petro-states (which include Canada), continue to put their own national interests ahead of global concerns.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

25 November 2025

700 words

Another COP, another cop-out! As anyone who pays the slightest attention to the news must know by now, COP30 – the annual global climate change jamboree, this year in Belem, Brazil, ended, yet again, more with a whimper than a bang. The fact that the words ‘fossil fuel’ did not even appear in the final statement exemplifies that failure.

In an interview with The Guardian before COP30, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had said “we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years”. Said Simon Stiehl, the UN’s climate chief, after the final plenary “I’m not saying we’re winning the climate fight”, while Mr. Guterres stated “The gap between where we are and what science demands remains dangerously wide.”

COP30 was particularly embarrassing for Mark Carney and for Canada. Carney had once been the darling of the climate action community, as the UN’s Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance. But the UN-backed Net-Zero Banking Alliance, which he co-founded in 2021 and co-led, and which was supposed to find $100 trillion – yes trillion – to finance the transition away from fossil fuels, voted to shut down in October.

As for Canada, on November 18th, at COP30, Climate Action International (CAI) awarded us the ‘Fossil of the Day’ dishonour “because the new government of Prime Minister Mark Carney has flushed years of climate policies down the drain, and is completely ‘Missing In Action’ at a COP”. Moreover, added CAI, “in addition to the backsliding on policies tackling Canada’s climate-destroying pollution, his Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin has chosen inaction and silence where leadership was urgently needed.” 

The core problem is this: The world’s leaders – whether elected, inherited, self-appointed or corporate – simply do not get any part of ‘global ecological crisis’, never mind take it seriously.

Let’s start with global. Most countries, especially the largest, the richest and the petro-states (which includes Canada), put their own national interests ahead of global concerns. In the case of Canada, it’s not unusual to hear fossil fuel apologists argue that since we are so small – only 1.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions – nothing we do makes much difference, so why bother.

But only 8 countries – led by China, the USA, India and Russia – emit more than 2 percent of global emissions – although admittedly they emit about 60 percent of total emissions; we are 10th, by the way, on a par with Germany and South Korea. So if the all the other countries in the world took the view that they are too small to matter, we would fail to take action on 40 percent of emissions – not small at all.

Second, let’s think about ecological. It seems governments have trouble even thinking about ‘environment’, never mind ecological. The Carney government is a case in point. His mandate letter to his Cabinet does not identify any aspect of the environment as either a challenge for Canada or a priority for his government; indeed the letter doesn’t even mention the word. As for ecological, forget it. The environment seems to be seen largely as a resource to be exploited, something over which we exert dominion. In reality, as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) wisely put it in 2014: “Ecosystems sustain societies that create economies. It does not work any other way round.” In other words, ecosystems exert dominion over humans, a reality that is largely ignored.

Third, we are in crisis. Climate change, bad as it is, is just one of the seven (out of nine) Earth system boundaries we have already crossed. And the crossing of multiple planetary boundaries is just one of a multitude of crises that together constitute the polycrisis.

Back in 2020, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said “Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal.” It seems the memo did not arrive in the minds of those who are supposed to be our leaders. Well, they are leaders, in the same way that the lemming at the front of the pack is a leader, heading over the cliff. We need to stop being lemmings. And they need to recognise we face a global ecological crisis.

© 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

Carney offers 20th century responses to 21st century challenges

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

Both people and the planet are largely missing from the Carney budget. Instead, the government seems to be following the old Bill Clinton maxim: ‘It’s the economy, stupid’

Dr. Trevor Hancock

11 November 2025

698 words

It is said that during World War I, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau remarked that generals always prepare to fight the last war. Regrettably, it seems that this also applies to governments trying to manage our society. That seems evident from the Carney budget and his overall agenda, which propose a set of approaches more suited to the 19th and 20th centuries than to the new realities of the 21st century, focusing on infrastructure projects.  

As Ecojustice lawyer Melissa Gorrie and I pointed out in a recent article in the Hill Times “this government’s old-school idea of nation-building is focused on new infrastructure, as if Canada is just a construction company, not a society. But a nation is much more than a collection of infrastructure projects.”  

We went on to suggest that if Mr. Carney really wants a nation-building project he consider the task of making Canada a Wellbeing society. Such a society, according to the World Health Organization’s Geneva Charter for Well-being is one that is “committed to achieving equitable health now and for future generations without breaching ecological limits.”.

That focus on people and planet seems to me to be both a simple and profound statement of what should be the central purpose of government and the broader task of societal governance. As Dr. Theresa Tam noted recently in her final report before stepping down as Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer: “Well-being is gaining momentum globally as a shared policy goal and approach, focused on creating the conditions for current and future generations to thrive on a healthy planet”.

Yet both people and the planet are largely missing from the Carney budget. Instead, the government seems to be following the old Bill Clinton maxim: “It’s the economy, stupid”. I suppose if you hire an economist – a central banker, no less – as your Prime Minister, that’s what you should expect to get. But at this time of multiple crises, it’s not what is needed.

With respect to people, the Maytree Foundation, an organisation “committed to advancing systemic solutions to poverty and strengthening civic communities”, noted in its analysis of the budget: “The missing ingredient in the government’s nation-building recipe is people, especially those who live on low incomes and who continue to struggle with the high cost of living.”

Moreover, their analysis continued, “we had hoped the federal budget would acknowledge the growing crises of poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, and inequality, seeing them not just as social challenges, but as economic liabilities that undermine both productivity and cohesion.” Sadly, that is not the case, leaving Maytree to express the hope that as the government “finds its footing” it will come to realise that “For a true ‘Canada Strong’ approach, the government needs to start seeing social programs as nation-building projects worth investing in.”

As to the planet, at a time when we have crossed seven of nine planetary boundaries, it seems absent from the government’s overall understanding of the 21st century challenges we face. This is exemplified by Mr. Carney’s mandate letter to his Cabinet in May.

In it he identifies “a series of crises” Canada faces without once even mentioning the environment or the planet. He then outlines an agenda for his government that focuses on the economy, while climate change gets a brush-off reference towards the end: “We will fight climate change.”

So here we are, in the week in which COP30 opens in Brazil, amidst record-breaking global temperature increases, increasing and accelerating greenhouse gas emissions and record storms and wildfires, and Canada is backing away from Mr. Carney’s expressed commitment to fight climate change.

In an article in Canada’s National Observer Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, a senior researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, wrote: “In many respects, this is the most harmful budget from a climate perspective since the Harper era.”

At a time when we face not just ecological but serious social and technological challenges, the last thing we need is a 19th century set of solutions aimed at infrastructure and more growth in extraction and consumption. Our 21st century challenges need 21st century solutions, but Canada’s political establishment – Liberal, Conservative and NDP alike – seems incapable of responding appropriately.

© 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

The inconvenient facts Carney and the Premiers ignore

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

Dr. Trevor Hancock

20 October 2025

701 words

Prime Minister Carney wants Canada to be an energy superpower, including in ‘conventional energy’ (read fossil fuels). Far from being the climate action champion we expected him to be, he seems to have swallowed his principles in a rush to get short term gain at the expense of long-term pain.

His “dismal” record was summed up recently by Anna Johnston, a staff lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law: “In just a few months, Carney’s government has walked back key federal climate policies, including the consumer carbon price, the electric vehicle mandate, and – alarmingly – Canada’s commitment to its 2030 emissions reduction target.”

Add to that other policies that are supportive of the continued expansion of the fossil industry and it is easy to see why Johnston concludes that for Carney’s government “climate action is no longer a priority, even as the climate crisis worsens.”

The Premiers are no better. Danielle Smith is of course in a class of her own; there isn’t a fossil fuel expansion proposal she hasn’t fallen in love with. But in general the provinces provide various forms of support for fossil fuel extraction, transportation, export and clean-up, the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) noted in January. The IISD reported an OECD estimate that in 2023 the provinces and territories provided $4.6 billion in fossil fuel subsidies.

These subsidies are not going away. In a study released in September the IISD reported “The governments of Canada and British Columbia are set to provide more than CAD 3.93 billion in support to the [B.C.] liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry by the end of 2030.” That includes “$2.16 billion by the end of 2030 from the BC government through foregone revenue, reduced electricity rates, and investment in enabling infrastructure.”  

But there are a few inconvenient facts that Mr Carney and the premiers are either unaware of – which seems unlikely – or are choosing to ignore.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) just announced that CO2 levels increased by 3.5 parts per million (ppm) in 2024, reaching an unprecedented high of 424 ppm. This was “the largest one-year increase since modern measurements began in 1957.” Two other key greenhouse gases – methane and nitrous oxide – also reached unprecedented highs in 2024.

Unsurprisingly, The WMO reported that “the global temperature in 2024 was the highest recorded in the observational record dating back to 1850” and that “for the first time, it passed the significant 1.5 °C mark relative to the pre-industrial period.”

Three main factors drove the increase in CO2, the WMO reported: continued fossil fuel emissions, increased emissions from wildfires (themselves linked to higher global temperatures) and reduced land and ocean sinks that usually absorb a lot of the CO2 we emit.

When it comes to emissions, the September 2025 Production Gap Report found “Governments, in aggregate, still plan to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C.”

Those higher temperatures drive the other two factors driving higher CO2 levels. Both are examples of positive feedback loops at work; changes that are self-reinforcing. Higher temperatures bring more wildfires that create more CO2 that leads to higher temperatures. And those higher temperatures also lead to droughts that reduce the ability of forests and grasslands to absorb CO2, while warming of the oceans reduces their ability to absorb CO2.

Chillingly, the WMO reports, “There is a significant concern that terrestrial and ocean CO2 sinks are becoming less effective, which will increase the fraction of [human created] CO2 that stays in the atmosphere, thereby accelerating global warming.”

It now looks as if we are on the cusp of, if not already beyond, the first critical tipping point in climate change, according to the just-released Global Tipping Points Report. The authors have concluded that “warm-water coral reefs are crossing their thermal tipping point and experiencing unprecedented dieback . . . Polar ice sheets are approaching tipping points, committing the world to several metres of irreversible sea-level rise that will affect hundreds of millions.”

In the face of such evidence, ongoing support for expanded fossil fuel extraction and use is at best a moral collapse and at worst, the crime of ecocide.  

© 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

The problem is income inadequacy, not affordability

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

The bottom half of the population has seen its share of national income dropping, while the top one per cent’s share has grown dramatically.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

22 September 2025

702 words

Food Banks Canada just released its annual report on poverty in Canada. Key findings are that one in ten Canadians are living in poverty, over 40 percent are paying more than 30 percent of their income on housing (which is the Statistics Canada definition of unaffordable housing), and 40 percent are feeling worse off compared to last year.

Of course the core business of food banks is hunger and food insecurity. The latter is defined by Statistics Canada as being unable to or uncertain of the ability to acquire or consume an adequate diet or sufficient food in socially acceptable ways. A May 2025 report from Statistics Canada stated that in 2023 one in four people in Canada – and almost half of people in one-parent families – reported they were living in food insecure households.

That was a roughly 15 percent increase over 2022, and the third annual increase in a row. Moreover, most of that increase was among those -19 out of 25 percent – who experienced moderate to severe food insecurity. This situation has led a number of cities in Ontario to declare food insecurity emergencies. The CEO of Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank noted in a CBC interview that “we need to feed more than one in 10 Torontonians.”

This is happening, we should remind ourselves, in one of the richest countries in the world.

Often, this situation is presented as an issue of affordability; food, housing and other basic needs are just too expensive. But while that is true, there is another way to look at it, as Valerie Tarasuk – a prominent Canadian food researcher at the University of Toronto – notes in that same CBC interview: “I think we have a fundamental problem with income that needs to be addressed.”

That fundamental problem with income is not new. In its 2022 report the World Inequality Lab noted: “Income and wealth inequalities have been on the rise nearly everywhere since the 1980s, following a series of deregulation and liberalization programs which took different forms in different countries.”

What they mean, of course, is the adoption by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA of neoliberal economic policies that were then adopted more widely. That is true of Canada too, as the Lab’s report on Canadamakes clear: “Income inequality in Canada increased significantly from 1982 until the mid-2000s.”

Between the Second World War and the mid-1980s the bottom half of the Canadian population had around 20 – 22 percent of Canada’s pre-tax income, while the top ten percent had a bit under 30 percent and the top one percent had between 6 and 7 percent. By 2005 that was dramatically different: The bottom half of the population received just 17 percent of pre-tax income, the top ten percent had reached 38 percent and the top one percent got 14 percent.

In other words, the bottom half of the population – half, note – saw their share of national income decline nearly one fifth, while the top one percent more than doubled their share. Since then, the report notes, “income inequality has decreased slightly although it remains far above the levels observed in the early 1980s.”

This inequality was worsened because while pretty much everyone paid between 40 and 44 percent of their income in taxes overall in 2022, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reported last year, the 90-95th percentile paid only 37 percent and the 95-99th percentile paid just 34 percent – less than the lowest ten percent, who paid 35 percent. Shockingly the top one percent paid a mere 24 percent of their income in total taxes.

The 2022 World Inequality Report made a vitally important point about this situation. Noting there are significant differences in the extent of the growth of inequality between different countries they concluded “inequality is not inevitable, it is a political choice.”

So it is up to us. Do we want to perpetuate the poverty, hunger and unaffordable housing situation for low-income Candians? Or do we want to go back to the decades after the Second World War when the rich paid their share and the bottom half took a larger share of the income?

© 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

Let’s have a conversation about the future we want for this region

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

We have a tendency to both defer to and blame government, to expect it to solve all our problems

Dr. Trevor Hancock

25 August 2025

701 words

Last week I suggested we need a national People’s Wellbeing Commission to craft a new vision for Canada, one focused on how we become a society committed to equitable health now and for future generations while living within planetary boundaries.

As I noted in an article in July, we need a similar process to answer the same question locally: How do we govern this region 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?

I am now in the process of developing a proposal to do just that. At the core of that proposal is a simple idea: We have to talk with one another, we need conversations everywhere we can, involving as many people as we can – and particularly young people, whose future we are creating – about the future we want.

Key to this idea is the difference between government and governance. We have a tendency to both defer to and blame government, to expect it to solve all our problems while we get on with our lives. Too often our default mode is to see ourselves simply as taxpayers, looking to get the most we can for the fewest dollars – and when we don’t get it, being grumpy! In that respect, we are not acting differently from our role as consumers.

But governance is different. I have always liked the definition put forth more than two decades ago by UN Habitat, the UN’s Human Settlements Programme. “Governance”, UN Habitat stated, is “the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, plan and manage the common affairs of the city.”

As a public institution – and not the only one – government is just one of the ways in which we do that. But decisions made by citizens, First Nations, businesses, civil society organisations, land-owners and developers, faith communities and many others also shape and manage the city. We are all in it together.

As Saul Klein and Arti Freeman (Times Colonist, July 11th) wrote: “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.”

So 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 an approach has been called ‘anticipatory democracy’, a concept proposed by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Future Shockand expanded on by my good friend and colleague Clem Bezold, who founded the Institute for Alternative Futures. There are good examples of anticipatory democracy projects from which we can learn from communities in Germany, Japan and elsewhere.

I suggest the creation of a GVR Futures Council that will bring together leaders from key sectors across the GVR. The Council would be responsible for providing overall strategic direction to a multi-year process of extensive public engagement to consider the challenges we face and potential responses. While some of that engagement can be virtual, the vast majority of it must be in-person, face-to-face conversation.

There are many ways in which such conversations can be organised, from a program of Kitchen Table Conversations – a well-established social technology – to citizens’ assemblies; from creating shared stories of place to neighbourhood vision workshops, from a computer model/video game of the region (think SimCity); from ‘idea and practice incubators’ to a web-based platform to identify, map and make available the people, businesses and organisations in this region that are creating the future we need.

In short, we need to shift from being mere taxpayers – grumpy or otherwise – to being engaged citizens, helping to co-design the future we want for our children and grandchildren, one in which we maximise the wellbeing of all who live here – and all who will live here in future generations – while living within planetary boundaries.

© 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

Let’s talk about becoming a Wellbeing society

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

Our economic and social system is trashing our environment, undermining our health, and creating large health inequalities.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

18 August 2025

702 words

Last month I noted a growing recognition that the many challenges we face, from environmental degradation to concentration of wealth, structural inequality and exclusion, are a product of the economic and other societal systems we have created. If that is the case, we clearly need to radically change the systems that are the source of the problems. As Saul Klein and Arti Freeman stated (Times Colonist, July 11th), we need to “envision new ways of organizing our economies, our democracies, and our relationships with one another and the planet.”

So how do we do that? That is work I have been doing, one way or another, for decades. My work on population and planetary health has led me to a deep understanding of how our economic and social system is trashing our environment, undermining the most fundamental determinants of our health, while creating large health inequalities. As a health futurist, I have led projects from the local to the global about envisioning a preferable future and figuring out how to get there. My work in public health and health promotion has had a strong focus on how we create healthy cities and communities.

Nowadays I am especially focused on how we create what the World Health Organization calls a Wellbeing society. To that end, I am the Interim Convenor of an emerging national health sector coalition that is working both to address the health implications of crossing multiple planetary boundaries and on the creation of a Wellbeing society as a way of addressing this and other elements of the global polycrisis we face.

One approach we are impressed by is the Welsh Wellbeing of Future Generations Act, the first and so far the only such legislation in the world. The Act requires “public bodies in Wales to think about the long-term impact of their decisions, to work better with people, communities and each other, and to prevent persistent problems such as poverty, health inequalities and climate change”.

It also establishes the position of a Commissioner for Future Generations as an independent officer of the legislature whose job it is to protect and promote the needs of future generations, report on progress, make recommendations and provide advice.

This laudable legislation came about because Wales, when it was created in 1998 as a country within the sovereign stateof the UK, put in its founding constitution an explicit duty to promote sustainable development.

This led, in 2007, to the public recognition that “we need to cut Wales’ ecological footprint by 75 percent to live within our fair share of the planet’s resources”. Then in 2009 the then First Minister announced a new vision, One Wales, One Planet, followed in 2011 by a Bill “embedding sustainable development as the central organising principle in all actions across government and public bodies”.

But what I find particularly important was that in 2014 there was a large national conversation about The Wales We Want “involving thousands of people sharing their views on what would improve their communities”. It was “one big involvement exercise – by the people, for the people”, and it was seen as crucial to supporting the passage of the wellbeing of Future Generations Act, according to the current Future Generations Commissioner.

Which is why I am proposing the creation of what I call a People’s Commission on Wellbeing, modeled on the People’s Food Commission of the late 1970s. Such a Commission should travel across the country – both in person and virtually – engaging people in discussing the Canada they want for their children and grandchildren, crafting a new national vision and considering how to get there.

The Commission needs to be based on the public recognition of the scale and severity of the ecological and social challenges we face – something that our governments have not yet done. But it also needs to identify the positive local actions already underway.

By bringing people together locally it would solidify and strengthen local networks and local action, while also weaving a national Wellbeing Society Network. Hopefully, it would also lead to the passage of Wellbeing of Future Generations Acts federally and across Canada and the creation of Future Generations Commissioners. What a worthwhile legacy that would be!

© 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

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

Making Canada better means focusing on wellbeing, happiness and quality of life

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

  • Published as ‘Canada could learn from Nordic countries about well-being.’)

Dr. Trevor Hancock

20 May 2025

702 words

It is to be hoped that the new cabinet committee on quality of life and well-being will look at lessons to be learned from the World Happiness Report, and in particular from the Nordic countries.

The 2025 World Happiness Report, with data from 2024, was released in March. As the 2023 Report noted, people “increasingly think of well-being as the ultimate good”, and “more and more people have come to believe that our success as countries should be judged by the happiness of our people.” That report went on to discuss how to measure a nation’s happiness and the factors that lead to increased happiness.

At its simplest, the authors noted, “the natural way to measure a nation’s happiness is to ask a nationally representative sample of people how satisfied they are with their lives these days.” More particularly, they add, countries will only achieve high levels of overall life satisfaction “if its people are also pro-social, healthy, and prosperous.” (By ‘pro-social’, they mean “the outward- facing virtues of friendship and citizenship.”)

But they cautioned that it is not enough to just look at average happiness, but at who has low life satisfaction (or misery) and “to consider well-being and environmental policy dimensions jointly in order to ensure the happiness of future generations.” The way to prevent misery and protect the quality of life of future generations, they suggest, is to establish and implement human rights, including the rights of future generations.

The 2023 report noted that the key factors that “explain the differences in well-being around the world, both within and among countries, . . . include physical and mental health, human relationships (in the family, at work and in the community), income and employment, character virtues including pro-sociality and trust, social support, personal freedom, lack of corruption, and effective government.”

Notably missing from this list is the environment, but nobody who has been following the growing crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, and the links between poverty and unhealthy environments can be in any doubt that our wellbeing and quality of life is also linked to the quality of our natural and built environments. Hence the urging, noted above, to jointly consider well-being and environmental policy.

All this is particularly important right now because the new Liberal Government has just established a Cabinet Committee on Quality of Life and Wellbeing. Its mandate is to consider “ways to improve community safety and health, advance reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, and augment the overall quality of life and well-being of Canadians.” So what can Canada learn from other countries about achieving wellbeing, happiness and a good quality of life?

The obvious place to start is the Nordic countries. Once again, the 2025 Report finds, they “lead the happiness rankings. Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden are still the top four and in the same order.”  In comparison, Canada ranks 18th – down from 6th in 2013 – and the USA 24th.

This situation is so clear and consistent that in the 2020 report the authors devoted a whole chapter to exploring what they called Nordic exceptionalism. What they found is that “the most prominent explanations include factors related to the quality of institutions, such as reliable and extensive welfare benefits, low corruption, and well-functioning democracy and state institutions. Furthermore, Nordic citizens experience a high sense of autonomy and freedom, as well as high levels of social trust towards each other.”

Contrast that with what is happening in the USA, which seems to perfectly fit the 2020 Report’s description of a low trust society trapped in “a vicious cycle where low levels of trust in corrupt institutions lead to low willingness to pay taxes and low support for reforms that would allow the state to take better care of its citizens.”

It is to be hoped that the new Cabinet Committee on Quality of Life and Wellbeing will look at the lessons to be learned from the World Happiness Report, and in particular from the Nordic countries. They – and the government as a whole – should take a lesson from Thomas Jefferson, who noted in 1809, “The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” In the 21st century, that also means ensuring the sustainability of the Earth’s natural systems that are threatened by our pursuit of economic growth rather than quality of life, wellbeing and happiness.

© 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