Ottawa needs to wake up to the planetary health crisis

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

·      Published as “When it comes to sustainability, Ottawa ignores an inconvenient truth”

The federal government’s draft Federal Sustainable Development Strategy somehow fails to mention planetary boundaries or our ecological footprint, or to recognize ecological limits.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

13 April 2026

699 words

Last week I began an analysis of the federal government’s draft Federal Sustainable Development Strategy, which somehow manages to ignore planet Earth, fails to mention planetary boundaries or our ecological footprint or to recognise ecological limits and the need to invest in restoring our ecosystems and natural capital as a matter of national security.

So the question is – are these omissions a case of ignorance – have the federal scientists and others involved in developing this strategy never heard of planetary boundaries and ecological footprints? That seems pretty unlikely. How about their political masters – have they never heard of any of this?  That also seems pretty unlikely, they only have to follow the news, and presumably they do that, so they can’t be entirely ignorant.

It’s much more likely that this is a case of ‘ignore-ance’, the political and corporate act of knowing but ignoring what Al Gore many years ago called an inconvenient truth. When the  government’s priority is to grow the economy, “build an enormous amount of new infrastructure at speeds not seen in generations” and be a conventional energy superpower that exports fossil fuels, concern for the environment is an inconvenient truth that might get in the way.

That ‘ignore-ance’ is on full display in Prime Minister Carney’s Mandate letter to his Cabinet last May. Not only is the environment not one of the government’s seven priorities, the words ‘environment’ and ‘planet’ are not even mentioned, although the mandate letter says the Cabinet “must meet a series of unprecedented challenges”.  In what possible way can an ecological footprint equivalent to using five planets worth of biocapacity and the ongoing transgression of seven of nine planetary boundaries not be considered an unprecedented challenge?

The harsh truth is that we are exceeding the Earth’s limits, transgressing the boundaries of multiple Earth systems, and that this poses an existential risk to our society, our communities, our families, future generations and many of the millions of species with whom we share the Earth.

So a real sustainable development strategy would begin there, with a commitment to move swiftly towards a ‘One Planet’ Canada that operates within planetary boundaries. That would mean spelling out:

  • The extent to which Canada currently operates beyond planetary boundaries and takes more than its fair share of the Earth’s biocapacity and resources.
  • The environmental, social, health and economic implications of this in Canada and globally.
  • The transformation needed in our way of life and our economy in order to become a ‘One Planet’ Canada that not only does not transgress planetary boundaries but restores the damage we have done to the natural systems, in Canada and globally, that underpin our societies and our wellbeing.
  • The environmental, social, health and economic benefits and costs of doing so.

The strategy would also need to lay out broad initiatives needed to get us there, as well as specific sectoral policies consistent with creating a ‘One Planet’ Canada. The broad initiatives might include:

  • An ongoing process of nation-wide, community-based conversations about the situation we face and the future we want for our descendants, a process I have previously described as a People’s Commission on Wellbeing (24 August 2025).
  • A Parliamentary Standing Committee on a ‘One Planet’ Canada to hear and make public the evidence on the challenges we face and the progress we are making on an ongoing basis, and a Cabinet Committee on a ‘One Planet’ Canada to guide us there.
  • Follow the lead of Wales in passing a Wellbeing of Future Generations Act that establishes “a legally-binding common purpose – the seven well-being goals – for national government, local government, local health boards and other specified public bodies” and a Future Generations Commissioner ““to act as a guardian for the interests of future generations “(see my 18 August 2024 column).

Specific sectoral policies would need to be prioritised based on the contribution of the sector to planetary boundary transgressions, but would include at least the energy, agriculture, fisheries and food, built environment and transportation and the chemicals and extractive industries sectors.

Moreover, as a federation, all of these initiatives would need to be replicated at a provincial level and supported and implemented locally. Our descendants will thank us.

© 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

Hello Ottawa, please recognise we live on planet Earth

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

  • Published as “Draft Sustainable Development Strategy misses the mark”

In the entire 74-page, 22,000-word document, the word “Earth” does not appear once and the word “planet” appears just a single time.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

6 April 2026

706 words

Thirty-nine years ago, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway and Chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development, presented their report to the United Nations. The Commission’s report, Our Common Future, widely referred to as the Brundtland Report, proposed the concept of sustainable development, which it defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

The Commission’s title and mandate was clearly and explicitly to link environment and development and the Commissioners shared “a common concern for the planet and the interlocked ecological and economic threats with which its people, institutions, and governments now grapple”; remember, this was four decades ago.

So you would think that the federal government, in advancing its draft Sustainable Development Strategy, would provide a clear analysis of the state of the planet today and the challenges of sustainable development in the 21st century. And you would be completely wrong.

If you want a sense of just how out of touch this draft strategy is, consider this: In the entire 74-page, 22,000-word document, the word ‘Earth’ does not appear once – not once! – and the word ‘planet’ appears just once, and that only in a reference to the purpose of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Hello Ottawa! – it’s the 21st century out here, we live on planet Earth, sustainability is all about living within the limits of the Earth.

Oh, and you won’t find the word ‘limit’ used in reference to natural systems, only in reference to limited access and/or opportunity for people, and a brief reference to limiting global warming. This despite the fact that The Limits to Growth was published by the Club of Rome 54 years ago, warning of ecological and social decline or collapse by the mid-21st century – just 24 years or one generation away – and that the Brundtland Report identified “the idea of limitations” as one of two key concepts, adding  later that “ultimate limits there are”.

You also might have thought that one quarter of the way through the 21st century, and almost 20 years after the concept was first launched, there would be some reference to planetary boundaries. Earth system scientists have identified “nine Earth system processes essential for maintaining global stability, resilience and life-support functions” and have identified boundaries for each, “thresholds that keep life on Earth within a safe operating zone”, boundaries which we should not transgress.

As of 2025, we have crossed seven of those nine boundaries, one of which is climate change – and for all seven, the trend is worsening. But search the Strategy and you will find no reference whatsoever to planetary boundaries. Yes, climate change is a focus of attention, as is biodiversity loss, as too is pollution. But the latter is restricted to broad and conventional references to air, water and waste pollution; there is no reference to ‘novel entities’ such as nano-particles of plastic or food-chain contaminants. And don’t look for a reference to other key Earth systems of concern; ozone layer depletion, biogeochemical flows of nitrogen and phosphorus and ocean acidification are not mentioned at all.

How about the ecological footprint, which measures “the ecological resource use and resource capacity of nations over time”? Globally, we are now using the equivalent of 1.7 planet’s worth of biocapacity every year; in Canada, we use around 5 planet’s worth. In other words, if everyone lives the way we live, we would need four more planets, but there is no Planet B, never mind Planets C, D and E. Again, you would think the Strategy would say something about this: Guess again – not a single mention.

Then there is national security – or rather, there isn’t!

In a notable speech in October 2025, Defence Minister David McGuinty explicitly linked Canada’s national security to what he called our ‘natural security’: “Investing in and restoring our ecosystems and natural capital is strategic preparedness”, while the government’s own report, ‘Disruptions on the Horizon 2024’, identified biodiversity loss and ecosystems collapse as the second most likely and second most impactful of 35disruptions for which Canada may need to prepare.

More on this, and on what the strategy should say, next week.

© 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

What does it mean that “environmentalists have lost, big time”?

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

Environmentalists are in the business of human survival and wellbeing, so if they’ve lost, humanity has lost.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

22 March 2026

702 words

In an interview in the Times Colonist (21 March 2026) marking his approaching 90th birthday, David Suzuki said “we’ve lost, environmentalists have lost, big time”. But what does it mean that environmentalists have lost? Who is we? What have we lost? And if we have lost, who has won, and what does winning mean?

First, let’s be clear what business environmentalists are in. We – and I count myself an environmentalist – are in the business of protecting and restoring nature, both for the protection of nature itself as something with inherent worth and for the protection of both human and non-human life on Earth. That is to say, environmentalists are both bio- or eco-centric and – for the most part – anthropocentric.

In being bio- or eco-centric, we are saying that nature is of value in its own right. As far as we know, we are the only planet in the universe that has life, which makes it precious beyond measure. (I agree there could be life elsewhere, but we have yet to find it, and it’s probably too far away, in other solar systems or other galaxies, for us to have meaningful interaction with it.)

That also means that the myriad of other species with whom we share this one small planet have inherent worth (although as a public health physician I might draw the line at the smallpox, Ebola, Covid and other deadly viruses). That is why we seek to protect ecosystems and different species from harm.

Now admittedly, there are some, known as deep ecologists, at the edges of eco-centric philosophy and ecology, who might argue that the Earth would be better off without humans, or with a much smaller and less technologically powerful population of humans.

But while I can sort of understand that viewpoint – well, here we are! And as a physician, I am of course interested in the wellbeing of people, of humanity as a whole. So I guess you could call me eco-anthropocentric.

What brings these viewpoints together is that humanity springs from nature, is part of and entirely embedded within nature, and completely dependent upon nature for our very survival, never mind our health and wellbeing. Every breath we take, every drop we drink, every mouthful we eat comes from nature; all the materials and fuels we use and depend upon come from nature.

Nature removes, decontaminates and recycles many of our wastes, protects us from UV solar radiation and, for the past 12,000 years, has provided a generally benign, warm and stable climate that has enabled the development of agriculture and civilisations around the world.

In a very profound sense, then, environmentalists are in the business of human survival and wellbeing, in balance with nature.  We should all be environmentalists!

So if we say environmentalists have lost, we are really saying humanity has lost. Now we haven’t quite lost yet, but we are in serious danger of undermining the most fundamental systems that are essential for life on Earth – all life, not just humanity. As I have repeatedly stressed in this column, we have crossed planetary boundaries for seven of nine key Earth systems, just one of which is global over-heating.

Now I don’t think we need worry about the planet, it’s been around 4.5 billion years. Nor do we need to worry about saving life on Earth; although we are creating a sixth great extinction, life has survived five previous extinction events. I am not even sure we need to worry about humanity; we are a tough, resilient and highly adaptable species, able to survive in some form almost anywhere.

But society – well, that is much more vulnerable. In 2014 the Worldwide Fund for Nature observed that “ecosystems sustain societies that create economies. It does not work any other way round.” So when ecosystems decline or collapse so too do the societies that depend upon them and the economic systems they have created.

Then who exactly can be said to be the winners here? The wealthy corporations and people who are inflicting damage on nature and trying to defeat environmentalists? And what exactly have they ‘won’? Short-term gain for long-term devastation? Think their grandchildren will be thanking them?

© 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

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