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

Building community capital

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock
  • Published as “We can’t grow our way out of problems created by growth”

The challenges we face are a product of the economic and other societal systems we have created

Dr. Trevor Hancock

21 July 2025

700 words

Mark Carney may not have called his Bill C-5 – now the Building Canada Act – a big, beautiful bill, but it does come out of much the same mould as Trump’s bill. Essentially, it says we can and must grow our way out of our problems. But the problem is that growth itself IS the problem, as I wrote last month.

Our current economic system has taken us past seven of the nine planetary boundaries identified by Earth scientists, and has triggered a wide variety of other problems, constituting together a polycrisis. The cliff edge looms, and governments across Canada and around the world are hitting the accelerator!

But all is not lost. You know something important is up when Saul Klein, a former Dean of the School of Business at UVic and now CEO of the Victoria Forum, is co-author of an article in the Times Colonist (July 11th) that states: 

“For a long time, we believed that our systems just needed fixing, that they were broken or outdated. But we’ve come to realize something more unsettling.

These systems are not broken. Their negative outcomes are not bugs. They are features of the way they were designed. And they are producing exactly what they were incentivized to produce — environmental degradation, exclusion, concentration of wealth, and structural inequality.”

If the challenges we face are a product of the economic and other societal systems we have created then – as Einstein reportedly said – we can‘t solve problems by using the samekind of thinking we used when we created them. We cannot grow our way out of the problems created by growth. Nor can we just tinker with these systems, hoping we can make some reforms without changing the underlying systems. We need at the very least to transform them, we need revolutionary change.

A place to begin is to recognise that what we call capitalism is not true capitalism. It seems to have escaped the attention of mainstream economists, and the business and government leaders that embrace them, that there are four forms of capital. In addition to the economic capital that we are familiar with (basically, money and ‘stuff’, from widgets to large infrastructure) there is human capital – the attributes, abilities and wellbeing of individuals.

Then there is social capital – the ties that connect, through informal social networks to the publicly funded programs of the social contract to the underlying legal, political and constitutional systems that regulate our peaceful interactions.

Lastly, but by no means least, there is natural capital, the underlying bedrock of nature from which comes the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the source of all the materials and fuels that underpin our societies and economies.

As the Worldwide Fund for Nature so wisely put it a decade ago, “Ecosystems sustain societies that create economies. It does not work the other way around.” And yet, what Carney and all the world’s conventional capitalists are trying to do is to make it work the other way around – a fool’s errand if ever there was one.

Real capitalists are those who work to build what I call community capital, by building all four forms of capital at the same time – and there aren’t many of them. But we need to transition as quickly as possible to – at the very least – a broader system of capitalism. Indeed, we really need to move to an entirely different economic system, one rooted in nature and society, one that puts people and planet first, what many now call a wellbeing economy, part of a wellbeing society.

In their July 11th article, Saul Klein and his co-author, Arti Freeman, president and CEO of Definity Foundation, went on to write:

“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.”

Undertaking this process of collective imagination is an important task everywhere, including here in the Greater Victoria Region. More on that, and on how to initiate this transition, next month.  

© 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