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