Dr. Trevor Hancock – Healthy people, healthy communities, a healthy planet

• Published as ‘Desire for better public policy sparked early ‘green’ parties’

The Values Party in New Zealand and the Ecology Party (initially called the People Party) in the U.K. were the world’s first two ecological political parties

Dr. Trevor Hancock

3 December 2024

699 words

Last week I wrote about three major shifts in perspective that took me from being a family physician to a broader concern with the health of communities, of societies and indeed of the global population and the planet itself. In my concluding major paper for my Master’s degree at the University of Toronto in the late 1970s, I identified two major principles that have guided my career ever since.

The first is ecological sanity. If you understand that there really is only one Earth, that we are one hundred percent dependent on the Earth’s natural systems for our very existence, and that there are indeed limits to growth – key points to emerge from the First UN Conference on the Environment in 1972 – then it would be insane to damage or destroy those natural systems. And yet, we do. So protecting and improving the health of the population – which is the raison d’être of public health – means protecting and restoring the Earth’s natural systems

The second principle is social justice, which has long been a guiding principle in public health. After all, public health’s goal is ‘Health for All’, where ‘All’ implies equity, fairness and inclusion. It means that while working to improve the health of the population or the community as a whole, public health particularly seeks to improve the health of the least healthy. And that means protecting the most vulnerable from health hazards, be they environmental, social or commercial.

Incidentally, looking back a few short years later, I realised I should also have included peace and non-violence as a third principle. There is no health in the midst of conflict, violence and war, as we so readily see today all over the world.

But I also became very aware of the role of public policy and governance – and ultimately, of political thought and action – in the creation of the conditions for health (or for illness). That led me to help develop what became internationally important ideas about ‘healthy public policy’ – public policy in all sectors, including in particular economic policy, that is good for health – and Healthy Cities; how to organise the governance of cities in ways that improve the health of the population.

That awareness also led to me becoming politically active in the 1980s. In its 1972 report ‘Blueprint for Survival’, The Ecologist noted: “Governments . . . are . . . refusing to face the relevant facts”, and called for “a national movement to act at a national level, and if need be to assume political status and contest the next general election.”

That made sense to me, and so when this call was answered in 1973, seven years before the German Green Party was founded, by the creation of the world’s first two ecological political parties – the Values Party in New Zealand and the Ecology Party (initially called the People Party) in the UK – I was there.

I became an area organiser for the People Party and attended the founding convention in Coventry in 1974, before coming to Canada in 1975. Here I began to look around for the equivalent and became part of a network of people working to establish an ecological political party in Canada. Eventually we succeeded and I became the first leader, helping to run the 50 candidates we needed in 1984 – I was one of them – to become a registered party (although I did not remain involved in the Green Party after about 1986).

There is one final important shift in perspective that I underwent in the mid-1970s, when I was introduced to ‘futurism’ by a fellow activist in the People Party. I quickly came to appreciate that good futures thinking is not about predicting the future, but in helping people think about the future they want (and the future they want to avoid) and then helping them to try to realise that future. 

In one way or another, then, I have been involved in thinking about and working on the health of the population and the environmental, social, economic, political and other determinants of health for over 50 years, and I remain committed to helping to create a healthy future for all.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

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

This is my 498th column and I am grateful for the platform the TC has provided me. But even though it has been a lot of fun — and a lot of work — all good things must come to an end.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

26 November 2024

700 words

Ten years ago, the Times Colonist (TC) published an editorial on preventive health care. As a public health physician focused on the health of the population I responded with a commentary in which I praised their focus on prevention but suggested that it did not go far enough. “Health care”, I wrote, “even preventive health care, is a relatively small contributor to the health of the population. This is because the main determinants of health lie beyond health care, in our communities and in our environmental, social, economic and political systems.”

I also suggested I could write more on this topic and Editor in Chief Dave Obee invited me to come in and talk with them. The result was this weekly column, which began on December 17^th 2014. The deal was sealed with a handshake, we never had a formal contract, and I have been very impressed both with that approach and with the fact that the TC has never once tried to push me to write about something, or not write about something, or even edit my work.

This is my 498^th column and I am grateful for the platform the TC has provided me. But even though it has been a lot of fun – and a lot of work – all good things must come to an end. I have decided that I will stop my columns at the end of the year, soon after I hit the 500 mark.

So in my remaining columns I want to first look back to the influences that have shaped my thinking and thus this body of work. Then I will look at what gets in the way of a healthy future for all, ending by laying out an agenda for a healthy future. This will require the creation of a wellbeing society that works within planetary boundaries, and at the local level the creation of healthy One Planet communities.

If you have been a regular reader of my columns you will know that while I trained in medicine, I later expanded my work to community health, healthy communities, societal wellbeing, planetary health and governance for health – public health, in short. Three major shifts in perspective took me there.

Looking back, I realised almost 30 years ago that one major shift in perspective lay in the year I spent in 1966/7 as an 18-year old volunteer teacher in Lundu, a small town in Sarawak, before I went to medical school. Only after I had spent over a decade as an international consultant helping cities and towns around the world learn how to create healthy cities and communities did I realise – when I went back to Sarawak in 1996 – that Lundu was where I first learned that health did not come from medicine alone, but from the community as a whole.

A second major shift in perspective came while I was still a medical student in London. I had started reading a new and somewhat radical magazine, The Ecologist. That made me very aware of the First UN Conference on the Environment, which was held in Stockholm in 1972.

A key conference book told us there is ‘Only One Earth’, while the Club of Rome told us there are ‘Limits to Growth’. But even more important, for me, The Ecologist published a special report for the Stockholm conference, Blueprint for Survival.

In it they were blunt in stating “if current trends are allowed to persist, the breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this planet, . . . certainly within the lifetimes of our children, are inevitable.” That helped me to begin to recognise the health implications of global ecological changes.

A third major shift came when I came to practice family medicine Canada in 1975. The year before, the federal government’s Lalonde Report recognised that health care was not the most important determinant of health, stating “future improvements in the level of health of Canadians lie mainly in improving the environment, moderating self-imposed risks and adding to our knowledge of human biology.” That helped open my eyes to the importance of looking beyond health care and moved me towards a career in public health.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

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

Both the COP16 global conference on biodiversity and the COP29 global conference on climate change have seen large numbers of corporate lobbyists working to delay action to protect their profits

Dr. Trevor Hancock

19 November 2024

702 words

It’s global conference season, and once again the corporate sector is spending huge amounts of money – money that comes from us when we purchase their products and services – to lobby for their own special interests. There are two big problems with this.

The first is that corporate interests often do not align with the public interest. Corporations exist to make profits and to return those profits to their shareholders. There are decades, indeed centuries of experience that show us that corporations are more than happy to make money by producing and selling unhealthy or dangerous products, polluting and damaging the environment, exploiting their workers, harming communities and undermining democracy.

The second problem is the dramatic imbalance between corporate power and the power of civil society organisations that are acting in the public interest to protect our wellbeing, our environment, our communities, workers and our democracy. While corporations are immensely wealthy and have large workforces devoted to their lobbying work, civil society organisations are often struggling to raise funds, and depend often on volunteers.

These two problems are highlighted in the recently completed COP16 global conference on biodiversity and the current COP29 global conference on climate change. Both have seen large numbers of corporate lobbyists working, for the most part, to obfuscate discussions and delay action so as to protect their business opportunities and profits.

“Representatives of business and industry groups more than doubled at the UN’s latest biodiversity summit”, according to DeSmog, an international organisation that exposes environmental misinformation campaigns. This increase was proportionally much greater than the 46 percent increase in overall attendance.

Of the 1,261 corporate delegates they counted – and these numbers are an underestimate, DeSmog admits, because its methodology is conservative – the largest number, 124, were from banks. This included “more than half of the 30 banks named as the biggest financiers of deforestation” in an October report from Forests and Finance. That report found that banks have invested $395 billion in deforestation since the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

There were also large numbers of delegates from the fossil fuel industry and big food and agriculture firms, as well as from the agrochemical and seed companies and the pharmaceutical industry – the latter intent on avoiding a tax on their use of genetic data from nature; Bayer alone brought 12 delegates, more than some countries. In addition, big tech is showing an interest in biodiversity because of the large data needs for monitoring biodiversity.

To make matters worse, Canada – along with Brazil, Mexico and Switzerland – included corporate representatives and their lobby groups in their national delegation, “lending pesticides and biotechnology representatives direct access to negotiations”, noted DeSmog. Unsurprisingly, environmental NGOs were concerned: In a related article in the Guardian, Oscar Soria, director of the Common Initiative thinktank, observed: “We certainly saw a stronger lobbying push for policies that favour agricultural productivity, and that clashed with the conservation goals and the position of civil society.”

Meanwhile, over in Baku, Azerbaijan, the 29^th Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Change treaty is underway. And surprise, surprise, the fossil fuel industry is there in strength too. The Kick Big Polluters Out coalition reported there are at least 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists, more than nearly every country and more than “all the delegates from the 10 most climate-vulnerable nations combined.”

Describing fossil fuel advocates as having a “chokehold” on international climate diplomacy, Caroline Brouillette, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, told Canada’s National Observer it’s time to “free COPs from the influence of big polluters”.

Lobbying by the private sector, using our money to lobby against our interests, has to stop. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, Canada barred corporate interests from the development of the new Canada Food Guide. It’s time to expand that approach more broadly.

If it can’t be stopped, here is another suggestion that would level the playing field: For every dollar they spend on lobbying, the corporate sector must give one dollar to authentic civil society organisations (not those set up and surreptitiously funded by the corporate sector). In addition, they should fund one delegate from those organisations and one delegate from a low-income country for every delegate they bring.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

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

Trump’s planned changes could increase the likelihood of a global economic downturn, war, worsening overheating, food crisis, pandemics, failed states, mass violence and humanitarian disasters

Dr. Trevor Hancock

12 November 2024

699 words

Thanks to tens of millions of Americans who just voted to turn the American Dream into the American Nightmare, we now have to deal with the consequences of a second Trump Presidency.

Let’s be clear: Donald Trump is not only a fascist who is a threat to democracy in America, as two former Generals – one his Chief of Staff, the other a former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – and others have said, he is also a thoroughly disgusting human being: Racist, sexist, a convicted felon about to be sentenced, an adjudicated rapist, a convicted libeller, a compulsive liar, a fraudster, a bully – the list goes on and on.

As President, he will “endanger public health and safety and reject evidence, preferring instead nonsensical conspiracy fantasies” and will “ignore the climate crisis in favor of more pollution”, according to the editors of Scientific American, who for only the second time in their 179-year history endorsed a candidate for President – and it wasn’t Donald Trump.

Trump and his sinister oligarch backers have a plan – Project 2025 – to dismantle key elements of the state, which will be against the best interests of many of those who voted for him. Of particular concern to me, as a public health physician, is the Scientific American editors’ observation that “Trump plans billion-dollar budget cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, and has “talked about ending the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy.”

To knowingly elect such a person as President beggars belief. That America has succeeded in raising a credulous population who cannot tell lies from truth, fiction from fact, distorted conspiracy theories from reality – or worse, who can differentiate but lack the moral compass to care about that, or about the massive moral failings of Trump – is surely the sign of a deeply flawed and failed state. 

However, beyond those largely domestic concerns that Americans must now deal with, Trump is also a massive threat to the rest of the world, a clear and present danger we all must deal with, as a report from the Cascade Institute published a month before the presidential election made clear.

The Institute, led by Thomas Homer-Dixon at Royal Roads University, “addresses the full range of humanity’s converging environmental, economic, political, technological, and health crises.” Using complex systems science approaches, they seek to anticipate future crises and identify opportunities for intervention.

In their report, Impact 2024, the authors consider the likely impact of a Trump presidency on “today’s highly perturbed global systems.” As a highly unpredictable systems disruptor, Trump as President would “make extreme outcomes more probable”, they concluded.

Specifically, they see a high likelihood of a trade war, a medium to high likelihood of triggering an arms race; a medium likelihood of ‘authoritarian contagion’ – “enabling further corruption and authoritarianism within the United States”, an economic downturn and xenophobia, and a low to medium likelihood of a weakening of multi-lateralism if Trump were to withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, the World Health Organization, and other UN agencies.

Moreover, they report, these and other changes triggered by Trump “could then interact to severely escalate the current global polycrisis”, including the possibility of a global economic downturn, a Great Power war, worsening global overheating, a global food crisis, global pandemics, failed states, mass violence and humanitarian disasters.

In an Addendum one week before the election, the Institute wrote, troublingly, that further developments since their original analysis indicated that “our initial analysis generally underestimated the inter-systemic risks of a second Trump presidency.”

The risks we face are already significant, the authors note: “In coming years, humanity’s collective predicament is likely to worsen regardless of the US election’s outcome, because global stresses are rising relentlessly.” Trump’s election just makes things worse, makes things less stable, in a situation where “global systems . . . are already fragile and vulnerable.”

This is not to say all this will come about: “The worst”, the report states, “is far from inevitable.” Much depends on whether, in the face of the polycrisis and the challenges posed by a Trump presidency, “we choose to come together or fall apart.”

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

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

Health Canada and its Pesticide Management Regulatory Agency see industry and its trade secrets as more worthy of protection than the health of Canadians and their environment

Dr. Trevor Hancock

5 November 2024

700 words

Over forty years ago, in the early 1980s, I co-led a major report on ‘Our Chemical Society’ for the City of Toronto’s Department of Public Health. In it we sought to step back from what we called the ‘chemical of the day’ problem – so many chemicals of concern, so many requests to look at them, one by one – to take a broader and more in-depth look at the systemic challenges of living in a society literally perfused with human-made chemicals.

We also raised concerns about the relationship between government regulators and the chemical industry. I vividly recall, on more than one occasion, commenting that Health Canada’s Health Protection Branch should be re-named the Industry Protection Branch, because it seemed more focused on protecting the chemical industry than protecting public health.

What brought this decades-old report back to my mind was the recent exposé by Marc Fawcett-Atkinson in Canada’s National Observer of the unethical shenanigans at Health Canada’s Pesticide Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA). In a series of articles in recent weeks, and as far back as a year ago, he has documented the agency’s failings, noting that “Since 2020 alone, that agency has been called out for colluding with pesticide companies, attempting to increase pesticide residue limits on food and failing to release data needed to assess pesticide risk.”

Specifically, in an October 17^th article he reported that the PMRA “collaborated with an agrochemical giant to undermine research by a prominent Canadian scientist to stave off an impending ban of a class of pesticides harmful to human brains and sperm and deadly to bees, insects and birds.”

That agrochemical giant was Bayer, which in 2021 had proposed a doubling of the allowable limit of glyphosate, a widely used pesticide, in some food products; a request that the PMRA accepted. But as professors Marc-André Gagnon and Marie-Hélène Bacon noted in a November 2023 article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the basis for that decision was shrouded in secrecy, under the guise of confidential business information; clearly it is still the case that Health Canada and its PMRA see industry and its trade secrets as more worthy of protection than the health of Canadians and their environment.  

That was very clear to Parliament’s Standing Committee on the Environment and Sustainable Development in its comprehensive report on pesticides in 2000. The Committee stated it was “seriously concerned about the divergent goals of the PMRA” to both promote the agricultural industry and to safeguard health and the environment, noting that “To a certain extent, the PMRA is already a captive of the pesticide industry.”

You would think that might have led to some significant changes – and you would be wrong. Almost quarter of a century later, in June 2023, Bruce Lanphear – a distinguished environmental health scientist at Simon Fraser University and a member of the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health – resigned as co-chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the PMRA. In his resignation letter he wrote:

“Should industry representatives – who have a clear and undeniable financial conflict of interest – be allowed to serve on the Pest Management Advisory Council? Absolutely not. . . .  I worry that the Scientific Advisory Committee – and my role as a co-chair – provides a false sense of security that the PMRA is protecting Canadians from toxic pesticides. Based on my experience over the past year, I cannot provide that assurance.”

It seems to me there is something rotten in the state of PMRA. Moreover, this is just the tip of the iceberg, symptomatic of a far wider problem; the close and unhealthy ties between industries that harm health and the environment and the federal and provincial governments. Whether it be the chemical, plastics, fossil fuel, agriculture or extractive industries, they exert an undue influence over public policy, extracting counter-productive subsidies, tax breaks and other benefits, while hiding behind ‘confidential business information’, and in the process undermining democracy.

At a time when we are crossing six of nine key planetary boundaries, we really need to look at and work to change the way those ties operate. Perhaps it is time for a Senate or Parliamentary inquiry, or at the very least, a complaint to the Integrity Commissioner.  

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

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

• Published as  “Loss of nature has huge impact, but doesn’t get attention it deserves”

Aside from the food we eat, water we drink and plant materials we use for fuel, building materials and medicines, other vital ecosystem services include carbon storage, oxygen generation and pollination

Dr. Trevor Hancock

22 October 2024

699 words

There was a lot of attention paid in the recent election campaign to the provincial deficit, by which various politicians and commentators meant the budgetary deficit. But important though that might be, there is another deficit that is much more concerning, and yet largely ignored; our natural capital deficit.

Natural capital was defined at a World Forum on Natural Capital in 2017 as “as the world’s stocks of natural assets which include geology, soil, air, water and all living things.” Natural capital, it was explained, is the source of a wide range of ecosystem services that are essential for humanity, including in particular “the food we eat, the water we drink and the plant materials we use for fuel, building materials and medicines.”

Other vital ecosystem services include carbon storage in plants, oxygen generation by  phytoplankton in the oceans, pollination of our crops and of plants in general, and protection against flooding provided by forests. So important though climate change is, the loss of biodiversity and the impairment of ecosystem functions is at least as important.

But because its effects are not “eminently visible . . . immediate . . . measurable and easy to understand”, the World Economic Forum (WEF) noted in June, the loss of nature does not get the level of attention it deserves.

Yet its impacts are vast. In a November 2023 article based on interviews with leading experts around the world, the Guardian reported that if we carry on as we are, these ecological changes “will result in major shocks to food supplies and safe water, the disappearance of unique species and the loss of landscapes central to human culture and leisure by the middle of this century.”

This also has massive economic consequences. The WEF noted in a 2020 report that “$44 trillion of economic value generation – over half the world’s total GDP – is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services.” The World Bank concurs, finding in a 2021 report that “if certain ecosystem services collapse (pollination, carbon sequestration and storage, fisheries and timber provision)” then by 2030 alone “the global economy could lose $US 2.7 trillion.”

In a 2023 article on ‘Earth Overshoot Day’ – August 2^nd that year, the day on which humanity’s ecological footprint exceeds the equivalent of one Earth’s worth of bio-capacity production – Jack Dempsey a Fund Manager at Schroders, a large global investment manager – succinctly summed up what it means to have a global ecological footprint of almost two Earths: “This creates a deficit – the only way we can maintain this deficit is by permanently depleting Earth’s stock of natural capital, i.e. going into debt in financial terms.”

The issue of our natural capital deficit is, in effect, the focus of the 16^th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, which convened this past week in Cali, Colombia. The Convention is the international legal instrument for “the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources”. As of May it has been ratified by 196 nations, one of which is Canada.

But in reality we are decimating biological diversity and using natural resources unsustainably and  in ways that are inequitable. As the World Bank stated earlier this year, “nature and the associated renewable natural capital is in decline, despite being the most precious asset that many countries have to tackle climate change, end poverty, improve resilience, and ensure sustainability.” 

The solution advocated by the World Bank, WEF and others, is to “bring nature into the center of economic decision-making.” But while that approach has merit – it’s certainly better than just ignoring it, as we have done for a couple of hundred years – it is not a sufficient response.

Because nature is not just an economic asset, to be used wisely. A 2018 report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development distinguished ‘market natural assets’ – the resources we extract and use – from ecosystem services that are vital to life and thus “are, effectively, priceless.” And to this we should add the economically uncountable role that nature plays in human culture, leisure and spirituality.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

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

• Published as  “Environmental costs of growing food aren’t reflected in the price we pay”

A 2021 paper prepared for the UN Food Systems Summit estimated that the true cost of food, globally, should be about three times what it is

Dr. Trevor Hancock

1 October 2024

701 words

Carbon pricing, my topic last week, is a form of pollution pricing. But air pollutants from fossil fuel combustion and greenhouse gas emissions from a variety of sources are not the only forms of pollution we face. And pollution pricing itself is just one aspect of the broader field of full cost accounting.

The concept is very simple; much of what we do has an impact on something – the environment, other people, our communities, other species, future generations. That impact may be beneficial in some way – providing food, water, housing and other basic needs, improving health and safety, creating jobs and so on – but seldom is it wholly beneficial, with no negative impacts.

Those negative impacts have economic as well as environmental, social and health costs. However, little to none of that is included in the costs of the products or services we use, meaning they are considerably under-priced, making this a market failure.

These hidden costs are considered to be ‘externalities’, which the Canadian Oxford Dictionary defines as “a side effect or consequence, esp. of an industrial or commercial activity, which affects other parties without this being reflected in the cost or price.” As the late and noted wellbeing economist Herman Daly pointed out, these costs are classified as external “for no better reason than because we have made no provision for them in our economic models.”

Our failure to fully account for those costs makes our society childish, lazy and selfish. Childish in that we act as if when we close our eyes it is not there, or it will go away. Lazy in that we really can’t be bothered to do the thinking and the work involved in understanding and properly accounting for those costs.

And selfish, in that we want our goods and services on the cheap, and we really don’t care about the harms to people elsewhere, to the natural systems we depend upon, or to future generations. That of course works well for the private sector – it keeps their prices low and their profits high; for governments, because it makes for happier voters today; and for citizens, because it is cheap.

Growing food in today’s world, for example, has massive environmental, health and social costs that is not reflected in the price we pay.

A September 19^th article in the New York Times reported on the hidden environmental costs of food. Based on research by True Price, a Dutch non-profit group, they estimated that the true price of a pound of beef, retailing at Walmart in the USA at $5.34, is actually $27.36. The difference is largely due to the costs of land system change, but also greenhouse gas emissions from cattle and their manure, and water use.

Beef, of course, is consistently identified as the worst offender. The true price for a pound of cheese is only $7.50 compared to a retail price of $3.74; for chicken, $4.03 v $2.20, and for tofu, $2.63 v $2.42. But remember, these are only the hidden environmental costs; we also need to factor in the health costs associated with the sort of food we eat.

We know a large part of the food produced by the agri-food industry – often highly processed, with high levels of salt, fat, ‘empty’ calories and a plethora of additives – as well as the amounts of food, has led to an epidemic of obesity, as well as to heart disease, diabetes and cancer. To the costs of the resulting  premature death, disease and lost productivity we should add the social costs of unsafe, unhealthy and underpaid work in many agri-food sectors.

Altogether, a 2021 paper prepared for the UN Food Systems Summit estimated, the true cost of food, globally, should be about three times what it is, while “sustainable and healthy food is often less affordable to consumers and [less] profitable for businesses than unsustainable and unhealthy food.”

Just as paying the full price for carbon emissions and air pollution can encourage a healthy switch in behaviour, so too paying the full cost for our food will encourage a switch to a low-meat diet with many health and social benefits, and in particular with much less environmental harm. Our descendants will be grateful.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

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