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

Wicked problems, virtuous solutions

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

  • Published as “Wicked, entangled problems call for virtuous solutions”

Complex issues interweaving climate change, widening inequalities, pandemics, political unrest and more, were very much on the agenda this past week at the Victoria Forum.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

25 August 2026

703 words

We live in an era of polycrisis, which the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University defines as a situation in which “crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that cause major human harm.”  The Institute identifies a set of fourteen global systemic stresses that create systemic risk, including “climate change, biodiversity loss, widening inequalities, pandemics, financial instability, political unrest — all influenced by long-running demographic trends.”  

These stresses constitute wicked problems, defined by Rittel and Webber in 1973 as a “complex issue that defies complete definition, for which there can be no final solution, since any resolution generates further issues, and where solutions are not true or false or good or bad, but the best that can be done at the time.”

These wicked problems were very much on the agenda this past week at the Victoria Forum, an annual gathering jointly hosted by the Senate of Canada, the University of Victoria and Royal Roads University. The Forum “brings people together from across Canada and around the world to . . . explore the complex tapestry of challenges facing our world and search for solutions to them.”

Monday’s opening plenary featured Thomas Homer-Dixon, Founder and Executive Director of the Cascade Institute, and Dr. Courtney Howard, Chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance and a leading advocate in Canada for a Wellbeing society.

Professor Homer-Dixon began by laying out his Institute’s latest thinking on the polycrisis. The Institute is developing “a new, complexity-informed approach to policymaking: one that anticipates cascading failures across interconnected systems and integrates the best available knowledge about both known and emerging risks.”

Their work has enabled them to explore plausible futures for the planet in 2040. The bad news is that of the ten stable global scenarios they found, eight are as bad as or worse than today, with the most likely outcome being deterioration – which is where ‘business as usual’ is headed – and the second most likely being collapse. Of the two more positive futures, one is not so attractive because it would be a high-tech autocracy.

But the good news is that there is one plausible outcome they call the Hope Scenario.  This is not simply a speculative or aspirational future, said Homer-Dixon, but “a scientifically grounded basis for honest hope.” Such a future would involve a cleantech breakthrough in energy and in the agri-food sector, a managed roll out of AI, ‘guided’ pro-social and pro-environmental economic growth and a strong democracy, and would result in a low burden of disease. 

So how do we get there? In a speech at an international conference on urban health in 2014, I suggested wicked problems need virtuous solutions. By virtuous, I meant solutions that move us towards a more sustainable, just and healthy world, solutions that are rooted in a commitment to the public good. Dr. Howard’s presentation focused on that.

Her key message was that we have focused on money as the measurement of progress and success, but people and communities understand that wellbeing is about much more than that. They know it is about our level of human capability, our social relationships and the quality of our environment, as well as the quality of our institutions and our financial status.

But by focusing on the last of these, we have actually destabilized the other key elements of our wellbeing. So we need to measure these societal foundations and manage them to optimise for wellbeing. In the words of the World Health Organization, we need to become a Wellbeing society, “committed to achieving equitable health now and for future generations without breaching ecological limits”.

In the following plenary, Dr. James Orbinski, a highly respected leader of the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders and now Master of Massey College, put it very simply: “We have choice . . . We must make the right choice”, while Lord John Alderdice stressed we solve problems by coming together and by committing to a positive future.

In short, to address the wicked problems of the polycrisis we need to commit to working together to find virtuous solutions rooted in the common good. In my next column I will discuss some of the solutions discussed at the Victoria Forum.

© 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

Amalgamate what? For what purpose?

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock
  • Published as “Why amalgamate only two Greater Victoria municipalities?”

It makes absolutely no sense to discuss the amalgamation of the two largest municipalities into one super-sized municipality while leaving the rest of the capital region untouched.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

17 July 2026

708 words

I am troubled by the growing expression of support in these pages for the amalgamation of Saanich and Victoria. My concern is rooted in a couple of very simple points: This is the wrong amalgamation, and anyway, what is the problem being addressed, and how will amalgamation improve our lives?

We are a single Region of some 460,000 people, but with 13 municipalities, some of which are quite small. The report of the Citizens’ Assembly noted the two municipalities “function as a shared civic space, and its governance should reflect that.” Time and again throughout the report, much the same idea is presented – that impacts extend beyond single municipal boundaries. And time and again, they concluded a coordinated response through a unified municipality would be more effective.

But a combined Saanich/Victoria would still be bordering Oak Bay, Esquimalt, View Royal, Highlands and Central Saanich; aren’t they a shared civic space whose governance should reflect that? Moreover, while concluding “fragmented governance hinders effectiveness and accountability” and recommending amalgamation, they fail to recognise that this is equally true of the Greater Victoria Region (GVR) as a whole.

Nor do they explain why reducing the number of municipalities by one, leaving a fragmented region of 12 municipalities, one of them being half the population, is a solution. To me, it makes absolutely no sense to discuss the amalgamation of the two largest municipalities into one super-sized municipality while leaving the rest of the GVR untouched. Any rational discussion of amalgamation must look at the Region as a whole, and not just two municipalities.

The correct question here should be ‘what is the best way to govern this Region in the 21st century?’ The answer to that question needs to take into account the challenges of the 21st century, which include our ecologically unsustainable way of life, the extensive social injustices across the region, the challenges to democracy arising from social media and AI, and the rights of First Nations in this region, among other major concerns. I suggest the Assembly’s response should have been – ‘It would make more sense to amalgamate the GVR for that purpose, not just amalgamate the two largest municipalities’

Now I am not arguing here for a single regional municipality, although I would argue for amalgamation into several local municipalities, and that some functions should operate at the Regional level. But in my February 1st column “How would we reinvent local government from scratch?” I suggested we apply the principle of subsidiarity – an assumption that all decisions are local (how local, we might ask – street, block, neighbourhood?) and then ask which decisions does it not make sense to make at that level, but at higher levels?

More importantly, what is the purpose of amalgamation? How will my life as a citizen of Saanich be improved? In my February 1st column I also suggested we should start by imagining the entire system of local government disappeared overnight and we had to re-invent it from scratch; what would we want to create if we wanted a more sustainable, just and healthy community?

Well, it’s not at all clear in the arguments for amalgamation; there is no reference in the Citizens’ Assembly report to a vision of what we are trying to achieve, while the word ‘wellbeing’ appears only once, in a minority member report, and only about financial wellbeing.

In my 31st August 2025 column (“Let’s have a conversation about the future we want for this region”), I suggested 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 a comprehensive governance review should be done under the auspices of the provincial government, not just by a group from just two municipalities. 

As a citizen of Saanich, I will be voting against this ill-thought-out proposal to amalgamate these two municipalities, and I hope you will join me in voting it down. I also hope you will join me in calling on the province to conduct a comprehensive governance review of the Greater Victoria Region, one more suited to our regional nature and to the multiple challenges of the 21st century.

© 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

Why is Mark Carney undermining our environment?

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

​ Dr. Trevor Hancock

22 June 2026

700 words

I have noted several times recently in these columns that Mark Carney’s Mandate letter to his Cabinet a year ago does not identify the environment as one of the government’s seven priorities; indeed, the word ‘environment’ is not even mentioned. Now we can begin to see the consequences of this very deliberate omission.

Let’s start with climate change, which the World Health Organization (WHO) has recognised for some years as “the single biggest health threat facing humanity.” More recently, in May of this year, the Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health, convened by the  European Regional Director for the WHO, called climate change “a catastrophic threat to human health, security and social stability” and called on the WHO “to formally declare climate change as a public health emergency of international concern.”

That puts climate change in the same threat category as Covid, Ebola and other infectious disease outbreaks that WHO has declared a public health emergency. In fact, I would argue that it is a greater threat than any of these; as Carney himself said back in 2019, in his role as the UN special envoy for climate action, climate change is “the world’s greatest existential threat.”

So you would think he would act on that belief. But what has Carney actually done? A CBC News item on June 16th listed the following: “Eliminating the consumer carbon tax. Reversing the implementation of the oil and gas emissions cap.  Scrapping the electric vehicle sales mandate. Doubling down on fossil fuel subsidies for LNG and enhanced oil recovery. Charting plans to turn Canada into one of the largest suppliers of LNG in the world. Backing the construction of a potential bitumen pipeline to the West Coast.”

Small wonder that in November 2025 Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific project that tracks government climate action, “downgraded Canada’s overall rating to ‘Highly Insufficient’, primarily due to weakened policy ambition, slow implementation, and a widening gap between current emissions levels and Canada’s 2030 target” – and that was seven months ago!

Then in February the Canadian Climate Institute reported that Canada “is not on track to meet any of its climate goals, including its 2035 target and net zero emissions by 2050”. You can almost hear Steven Guilbeault, the former Environment and Climate Change Minister who quit Carney’s Cabinet, in his recent interview on CBC Radio’s The Current  (June 17th), wondering ‘Who is this man, and what have they done with Mark Carney?’

If it were only climate change, that would be enough to condemn Carney as a hypocrite. But it gets worse. The government just rushed through changes to Canada’s pesticide laws in an omnibus budget Bill that was only reviewed by the Finance Committees of the Commons and the Senate, not by Parliament’s health or environment Committees.

In a June 18th statement, a large number of major environmental and health organisations condemned the move because these “amendments grant cabinet broad authority to overrule the Health Minister and permit the use of any pesticide found to have unacceptable environmental risks.” As the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment noted, these amendments mean “Canada’s pesticide law will be based on financial considerations rather than health and the environment”, adding: “Science doesn’t disappear when it’s inconvenient; evidence of harm must outweigh short-term economic considerations.”

Then there are the Carney government’s moves to weaken key environmental standards under the Species at Risk Act and Impact Assessment Act. A June 3rd article in The Conversation by three leaders of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution raises concerns that “the reforms proposed in ‘Getting Major Projects Built’” – a recently released federal government discussion paper – “could threaten natural environments, species-at-risk and human health for generations.”

So back to the question in my headline: Why is Mark Carney undermining our environment? I don’t know, but it seems to me he is acting just as you would expect if you elect a mainstream economist and central banker as Prime Minister. When push comes to shove, the economy matters and the environment loses. Yet as I noted in a recent column, when the environment loses, we all lose. That is a lesson Mark Carney seems not to have learned.

© 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

It’s not just the ecosystem, our economy is socially unfit too

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

A recent intergovernmental report found that in 2023, public and private expenditures of US$7.3 trillion had direct negative impacts on nature

Dr. Trevor Hancock

2 March 2026

699 words

Last week I discussed a couple of recent global-level reports that identify serious problems with our current economic system. In particular, the UN Environment Programme, in its 2026 report “Global Environmental Outlook 7”, found that human-created climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation and desertification, and pollution and waste are undermining human wellbeing and “already costing trillions of dollars each year.”

The report recommended investing in the transformation of our societies and economies, because doing so will avoid or reduce these costs and will have huge economic benefits. Another report, this one in early February from the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) – the biodiversity equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – focuses on the relationship between business and biodiversity.

Prepared by a panel of public and private sector experts from 35 countries, the report found that in 2023, public and private expenditures of US$7.3 trillion, 2/3 of them from the private sector, had direct negative impacts on nature. These expenditures included “environmentally harmful public subsidies and private investment in high-impact sectors.”

Troublingly, that means governments are spending around US$2.4 trillion every year on environmentally harmful subsidies. Meanwhile, less than one-tenth of that amount from public and private sectors combined was “directed toward activities that contribute to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.” Looks to me like the definition of insanity.

But it’s not just about the way our current economic and societal systems harms the planet. Suddenly it seems to be dawning on people – at least, some people – that our economy is socially unfit too.

Writing in Time Magazine on January 27th, Professor Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty, stated our economic system “is fundamentally unfit for purpose”. It “only ever serve[s] a tiny minority”, he wrote, adding “it will always do so at the expense of the planet and the vast majority of people who live on it.”

The authors of the 2026 World Inequality Report (WIR) write: “Inequality has long been a defining feature of the global economy, but by 2025, it has reached levels that demand urgent attention.” Indeed, frankly, the level of inequality has reached obscene levels. This is highlighted by a finding in the report that “fewer than 60,000 multi-millionaires, control today three times more wealth than half of humanity combined” – that is, more than the poorest 4 billion people!

More broadly the report notes, those 4 billion people – half the world’s population – have only 8 percent of the world’s income and only 2 percent of its wealth. The authors of the WIR make the point that “Reducing inequality is not only about fairness but also essential for the resilience of economies, the stability of democracies, and the viability of our planet.”

So in what conceivable way is this level of inequality fair, just and appropriate? Why aren’t those 60,000 people rushing to share their wealth – and if they won’t, why aren’t we taxing it and redistributing it? How many millions or billions does anyone actually need anyway? As in previous reports the authors make the vital point that “These divides are not inevitable. They are the outcome of political and institutional choices.”

In a forthcoming report to the UN Human Rights Council, Professor de Schutter will be presenting an action agenda to reduce extreme poverty that outlines some of the choices we need to take. His proposals fall under five pillars, with adaptive governance and participatory decision-making underpinning them all.

The first pillar is focused on “how economic systems can be reimagined to prioritise sustainability and wellbeing over consumerism and GDP growth.” It includes ideas about progressive taxation, subsidy realignment, tax enforcement and embedding social purpose in corporate activity. And there is much, much more.

The fact we are making bad political and institutional choices is not only true for inequality and poverty but for the public and private sector policies that lead us to spend vast sums of money on causing environmental harm and piddling amounts on protection and restoration. It’s time we changed the political choices we are making if we want to ensure the wellbeing of people and the planet for this and future generations.

© 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

Zero-based governance for the CRD

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

o   Published as “How would we reinvent local government from scratch?”

What decisions should be made at the municipal level? The regional level? By the province? Federally?

Dr. Trevor Hancock

26 Jan 2026

700 words

This year the Capital Regional District marks its Diamond Jubilee. It was created in 1966 as a federation of seven municipalities and five electoral areas to provide coordination of regional issues and local government in the Greater Victoria region. At the time, it had a population of under 200,000. Back then nobody knew about climate change, the famous Club of Rome report on the limits to growth was still six years in the future, there was no internet, no social media and robots were firmly in the realm of science fiction.

Well, today, the CRD is 13 municipalities and 460,000 people and all those issues are today’s reality. So what is the system of governance we need to address the realities of the 21st century? Just amalgamating some or all of the CRD is not going to cut it, that’s a 20th century solution to 21st century problems.

So here’s an idea: Why don’t we mark the Diamond Jubilee by engaging the CRD’s residents in a participatory democracy exercise of zero-based governance design. It’s an idea inspired by my work in the 1990s on zero-based health planning, which was based on the concept of zero-based budgeting. The idea, popular for a while in the 1970s and thereafter, was very simple: Start with a clean sheet (zero base) every year and build the budget you need, rather than just taking last year’s budget allocation and tweaking it.

“Part of the problem that we face in health care planning”, I wrote in a 1991 article, “is that we are starting where we are now; our present system and all its facilities have evolved over decades, and as such all of the errors that we unwittingly made in the past are incorporated into the system. Only too often, attempts to improve the system begin with the existing system and figure out ways to change it without having a clear sense of what the system ultimately should look like.” (Does that sound a bit like the CRD today?)

So I proposed a thought experiment: Imagine the entire health care system disappeared overnight and we had to re-invent it from scratch.  The result of that thinking literally turned the health system on its head. We would begin with everything needed to keep people healthy and only at the end would we need specialty care and hospitals.

This wasn’t just an empty exercise. At the time I was part of a team of urban planners, architects, social planners and others developing a proposal for a planned new community, Seaton, northeast of Toronto. But our team was not just designing the hard infrastructure of mains and drains, roads and housing, but a complete community, including the ‘soft’ infrastructure of its social systems – health, education, social services and governance.

However, it’s not often that we get an empty slate on which to develop a new system, so in practice, we need to envision the system we need, then ensure all our system decisions move us in that direction. 

So now imagine the entire system of local government disappeared overnight and we had to re-invent it from scratch; what would we create? I suggest we start with a principle in governance called subsidiarity, which begins with an assumption that all decisions are local (how local, we might ask – street, block, neighbourhood?) and then asks which decisions does it not make sense to make at that level? (As an admittedly extreme example, we don’t want decisions about whether we should have capital punishment made at that level, I suggest.)

OK, so now what decisions should be made at the municipal level? The regional level? By the province? Federally? A related question for all of those levels is HOW the decisions should be made. Who should be involved, and how? – remembering that we now have social media and the internet, and increasingly, AI.

I don’t have a blueprint, I don’t know what the answers would be, but I think this would be a much more useful exercise than carrying on with business as usual and wrangling about various forms of amalgamation. Does the CRD have the political will and imagination to do something like this? Time will tell.

© 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

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 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