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
Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy
Dr. Trevor Hancock - Healthy people, healthy communities, a healthy planet 