The deeper challenges underlying our political unease

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

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

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

Renewing democracy for the 21st century

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

At a time when we have an unnecessary provincial election and when there are polarizing forces all around, it is hardly surprising that many people feel that our democratic system is under threat and that we need to consider how to improve it.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

11 October 2026

701 words

In 1947 Winston Churchill famously remarked “democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. He was also clear that “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise”, meaning it could be improved.

At a time when we have an unnecessary provincial election, when municipal elections are ignored by two-thirds of the electorate, when we see the craziness south of the border, when social media and AI are disruptive and sometimes polarising forces, it is hardly surprising that many people feel that our democratic system is under threat, that we need to consider how democracy could be improved.

But are we even clear what democracy is? The Canadian Oxford Dictionary defines it as “a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives”. But that is a somewhat narrow, electorally-based vision; show up once every four years and vote, and you are done.

A broader vision of democracy would be that it should try to involve as many people as possible in the choices and decisions that shape their lives. People Powered, a global hub for participatory democracy, defines it as a process that “enables community members to make the decisions that affect their lives, together with government.”

Note, ‘together with government’ – not by government, on your behalf.  This is the process of governance, how we make decisions together, which can occur at all levels from streets to the whole society and involves all the players, of which government is but one.

So it is noteworthy that just this past couple of weeks I have attended two local meetings focused on the challenge of improving democracy and governance. The first, launching an initiative called ‘Turning Down the Heat’, was focused on deliberative democracy. It asked ‘how do we turn down the heat and create conditions for more respectful, thoughtful, and productive public conversations?’

Organised by the External Affairs Committee of the Baha’is of Victoria, with the support of the Greater Victoria Peace School and the Victoria Multifaith Society, the meeting brought together a group of 20 or so local leaders from various walks of life to discuss the issue. You can learn more at the initiative’s website.

The second was a public meeting organised by the Institute of Public Administration of Canada (IPAC) Victoria Regional Group on ‘Citizens’ Assemblies & Democratic Renewal’, which explored how this approach could navigate contested policy questions and rebuild public trust.

In my view, a system designed largely in the 18th and 19th centuries and brought to maturity in the 20th century is no longer fit for purpose in the 21st century. Nobody back then anticipated the ways in which our present political system and associated media system would create fragmentation, polarisation and alienation.

If every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results it gets, as the Institute for Healthcare Improvement puts it, then clearly we need to change the system.  What does a system look like that delivers cohesion, collaboration and engagement?

I spent much of the 1980s and ‘90s working to create healthier communities across Canada and around the world. One of the lessons I learned can be applied to democracy: a healthy community (or, in this case, democracy) is built one home at a time, one street at a time, one block at a time and one neighbourhood at a time. So we need to start there. How do we engage people in conversations locally about their immediate concerns and how do we link that to local governance?

Implicit in this approach is the principle of subsidiarity, which begins with an assumption that every decision should be made at a block or neighbourhood level (e.g. removing fences from backyards), then decides what cannot be decided there (e.g. a regional transportation system, although some aspects might still be decided at a neighbourhood level, such as the best location for a bike rental station).

Following the municipal elections, I suggest we need to start a process of conversations in neighbourhoods throughout the region about what a participatory, deliberative democracy looks like at that local level, and how to get there.

© 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

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