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

Reclaim the economy for people and the planet

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

We too often prioritize the economy over people and the planet, putting both in service of the economy.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

19 January 2026

699 words

As readers of this column know, I often refer to a piece of wisdom put forth by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in 2014: “Ecosystems sustain societies that create economies. It does not work any other way round.” The root of many of our problems, of course, is that we keep trying to make it work the other way round. Our current society and economy too often prioritise the economy over people and the planet, putting both in service of the economy.

But as the WWF notes, it is society that creates the economy, which is – or should be – a tool to improve the wellbeing of all, now and in the future, while also ensuring we remain within planetary boundaries. That, not coincidentally, is pretty much the definition of a Wellbeing society put forward by the World Health Organization.

So it is not surprising that the second of five action areas identified in WHO’s Geneva Charter for Wellbeing is to design an equitable economy that serves human development within planetary and local ecological boundaries – what increasingly is being called a ‘wellbeing economy’.

Which brings me to ‘Reclaim the Economy Week’, which runs from January 26th to February 1st. Organised by the Wellbeing Economy Alliance and Earth4All, two global organisations, the week focuses on two of the largest problems we face: “Our economies are driving inequality and environmental devastation.”

With respect to inequality, the latest World Inequality Report (WIR) noted: “Inequality has long been a defining feature of the global economy, but by 2025, it has reached levels that demand urgent attention.” The concentration of wealth has become extreme and it “is not only persistent, but it is also accelerating”.

In Canada, Statistics Canada reported in July 2025, “The income gap reached a record high in the first quarter of 2025; the highest income households gained from investments, while the lowest income households’ wages declined.”

Such inequality is not just about poverty, it has significant social implications, notes the WIR: “it reshapes democracies, fragmenting coalitions and eroding political consensus.” Importantly, they concluded: “These divides are not inevitable. They are the outcome of political and institutional choices.”

Extreme wealth also has ecological implications. A January 9th news release from Oxfam found that someone from the top 1 percent of the world’s population used their fair share of the world’s carbon budget – the amount of CO2 that can be emitted while staying within 1.5 degrees of warming – in the first 10 days of the year. It would take an individual from the poorest half of humanity three years to generate an equivalent amount.

These impacts of greed apply across all aspects of the natural systems that are our life support system. And yet we continue to urge economic growth, extol conspicuous consumption and market a high-consumption lifestyle.

The growing ecological disaster we face, driven by these forces, comes with a staggering economic impact, measured in the trillions of dollars, as the UN Environment Programme’s just-released report ‘Global Environmental Outlook – 7’ report makes clear:

  • The global cost of climate-induced extreme weather events in the past 20 years is estimated at US$143 billion per year . . . Costs have increased exponentially over the last five years, and cumulative costs from 2014–2023 are estimated at US$2 trillion, affecting 1.6 billion people.
  • Globally, the degradation of ecosystems will lead to a loss of services worth between US$10 trillion and US$44 trillion annually.
  • Globally, the estimated annual costs of land degradation are large, but uncertain, and range between US$18 billion and US$20 trillion.
  • The effect on global food production is a key concern, with a potential reduction of up to 33.7 million tons and a corresponding 30 per cent increase in world food prices by 2040.

Small wonder the report’s sub-title is “Why investing in Earth now can lead to a trillion-dollar benefit for all” – and actually, that should be ‘multi-trillion’.

Just as poverty and inequality are not inevitable, but “are the outcome of political and institutional choices”, so too is ecological devastation. As the Wellbeing Economy Alliance and Earth4All state, it is time “to unite to demand an economy that puts people and planet first.”

© 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

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

Making Canada better means focusing on wellbeing, happiness and quality of life

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

  • Published as ‘Canada could learn from Nordic countries about well-being.’)

Dr. Trevor Hancock

20 May 2025

702 words

It is to be hoped that the new cabinet committee on quality of life and well-being will look at lessons to be learned from the World Happiness Report, and in particular from the Nordic countries.

The 2025 World Happiness Report, with data from 2024, was released in March. As the 2023 Report noted, people “increasingly think of well-being as the ultimate good”, and “more and more people have come to believe that our success as countries should be judged by the happiness of our people.” That report went on to discuss how to measure a nation’s happiness and the factors that lead to increased happiness.

At its simplest, the authors noted, “the natural way to measure a nation’s happiness is to ask a nationally representative sample of people how satisfied they are with their lives these days.” More particularly, they add, countries will only achieve high levels of overall life satisfaction “if its people are also pro-social, healthy, and prosperous.” (By ‘pro-social’, they mean “the outward- facing virtues of friendship and citizenship.”)

But they cautioned that it is not enough to just look at average happiness, but at who has low life satisfaction (or misery) and “to consider well-being and environmental policy dimensions jointly in order to ensure the happiness of future generations.” The way to prevent misery and protect the quality of life of future generations, they suggest, is to establish and implement human rights, including the rights of future generations.

The 2023 report noted that the key factors that “explain the differences in well-being around the world, both within and among countries, . . . include physical and mental health, human relationships (in the family, at work and in the community), income and employment, character virtues including pro-sociality and trust, social support, personal freedom, lack of corruption, and effective government.”

Notably missing from this list is the environment, but nobody who has been following the growing crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, and the links between poverty and unhealthy environments can be in any doubt that our wellbeing and quality of life is also linked to the quality of our natural and built environments. Hence the urging, noted above, to jointly consider well-being and environmental policy.

All this is particularly important right now because the new Liberal Government has just established a Cabinet Committee on Quality of Life and Wellbeing. Its mandate is to consider “ways to improve community safety and health, advance reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, and augment the overall quality of life and well-being of Canadians.” So what can Canada learn from other countries about achieving wellbeing, happiness and a good quality of life?

The obvious place to start is the Nordic countries. Once again, the 2025 Report finds, they “lead the happiness rankings. Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden are still the top four and in the same order.”  In comparison, Canada ranks 18th – down from 6th in 2013 – and the USA 24th.

This situation is so clear and consistent that in the 2020 report the authors devoted a whole chapter to exploring what they called Nordic exceptionalism. What they found is that “the most prominent explanations include factors related to the quality of institutions, such as reliable and extensive welfare benefits, low corruption, and well-functioning democracy and state institutions. Furthermore, Nordic citizens experience a high sense of autonomy and freedom, as well as high levels of social trust towards each other.”

Contrast that with what is happening in the USA, which seems to perfectly fit the 2020 Report’s description of a low trust society trapped in “a vicious cycle where low levels of trust in corrupt institutions lead to low willingness to pay taxes and low support for reforms that would allow the state to take better care of its citizens.”

It is to be hoped that the new Cabinet Committee on Quality of Life and Wellbeing will look at the lessons to be learned from the World Happiness Report, and in particular from the Nordic countries. They – and the government as a whole – should take a lesson from Thomas Jefferson, who noted in 1809, “The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” In the 21st century, that also means ensuring the sustainability of the Earth’s natural systems that are threatened by our pursuit of economic growth rather than quality of life, wellbeing and happiness.

© 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

With cruelty reigning to the south, Canada needs to keep flame of kindness burning

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

Who can forget Elon Musk’s disgusting celebration of the destruction of U.S. AID. How can anyone other than a psychopath celebrate the destruction of the lives and health of millions of people?

Dr. Trevor Hancock

25 March 2025

699 words

Back in the late-1980s the first President Bush expressed a wish for a kinder, gentler nation. A joke going round at the time, I recall, was that he had found it, it was called Canada, and now he was going to buy it.

Fast forward almost 40 years and we have a President whose whole approach seems based in nastiness and cruelty, the very opposite of kindness and gentleness. Indeed, I am struck by how often in the past couple of weeks I have heard the word cruel used in describing Trump, Musk and the US government as a whole.

We see that cruelty in Trump’s childish name-calling and belittling of people, his attack on the federal work force, his crushing of policies and entire agencies intended to protect and lift up the weak and disadvantaged. 

Who can forget Elon Musk’s disgusting celebration of the destruction of the US Agency for International Development, the largest single aid program in the world? We fed it into the wood-chipper, he exulted – chainsaw in hand. How can anyone other than a psychopath celebrate the destruction of the lives and health of millions of people that will result from such cruelty.

We also see it in Trump’s bullying not just of President Zelensky but of the entire nation of Ukraine, or his contempt for entire peoples and nations, be they Palestinians or Lesotho or Canada. We see it in his heartless and racist attitude towards immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers. He has not yet got around to proposing a final solution, but I won’t be surprised if he does.

That cruelty extends beyond humanity to the planet as a whole. We see it in his rejection of the reality of human induced climate change and his commitment to expanding fossil fuel use, as well as in the wholesale abolition of environmental protections and the slashing of environmental science staff. Indeed George Monbiot, a renowned environmental writer, wrote in the Guardian recently that Trump, Musk and their followers are waging war against life on Earth.

As James Parker wrote recently in The Atlantic, it seems as if “kindness has become countercultural”. So perhaps Trump sees Canada as a threat because we are proof, right on his border, that it is possible to be kinder, gentler, more caring, more committed to the rule of law. 

If so, he intends to eliminate that threat by taking us over, crushing our economy, our independence, our sovereignty, our culture, our very existence.  And if that sounds like Putin’s attitude towards Ukraine – well, bingo, two peas in a pod! 

Now I am not suggesting we are a beacon of rectitude, there is plenty of cruelty and nastiness here in Canada. But the big difference is that as a nation, kindness, caring and gentleness towards others is still an underlying, if at times somewhat threatened, motivating force. 

We see it in our social programs, which are a social contract expressing solidarity and caring for each other. We see it in the mosaic of multi-culturalism that doesn’t just recognise but celebrates diversity. We see it in our proud, if now somewhat tattered but still extant commitment to peace-keeping – and the same could be said of our commitment to protecting the environment. We see it in our slow groping towards truth-telling in the history of our relationship with Indigenous people and our moves towards recognition and reconciliation.

Kindness, gentleness and consideration towards others has also been the underlying rationale for a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, which Trump and his fellow-travellers contemptuously dismiss as ‘woke’.

Now I am not going to defend every aspect of ‘wokeness’, there are times I too find it silly, irritating, performative and exasperating. But what I see at its heart is an attempt to recognise, protect and promote the inherent worth, dignity and rights of individuals, and that is a good thing.

Given we have a cruel tyrant to our south, maybe our most important job right now as Canadians  is to keep alive the flame of kindness, gentleness and caring, of compassion towards others, no matter whom or where they are, of respecting and protecting our environment. That must be Canada’s response to Trump.

© 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

We do not inherit the Earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

  • Published as “We need to take steps to be better ancestors”

At a time when Trump, Putin and many others are doing everything they can to jeopardize the wellbeing of future generations, we need to work to protect them

Dr. Trevor Hancock

18 February 2025

701 words

Last month I began to explore a set of aphorisms that I find helpful in addressing the immense challenges of the 21st century. This month, I turn to an aphorism that became popular in the 1970s – “we do not inherit the Earth from our parents, we borrow it from our chldren”.

Often attributed to Duwamish Chief Seattle in the 19th century and seemingly popularised by Wendell Berry in the early 1970s, this is, simply put, the embodiment of the principle of inter-generational rights and justice.

That is, of course, hardly a new idea; as the attribution to Chief Seattle suggests, it is rooted in Indigenous values and beliefs. Many claim it goes back to the ‘Seventh Generation’ way of thinking attributed to the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. Since a generation is roughly 20 – 25 years, seven generations takes us out about 150 years.

A modern wording of this concept forms the fundamental principle of sustainable development put forward in 1987 by the Brundtland Commission: To meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

These ideas are now – finally – beginning to find their way into public policy and even in to law. Wales led the way a decade ago, introducing a Wellbeing of Future Generations Act. The Act requires public bodies in Wales – including government ministries, local authorities, local Health Boards and a number of other public authorities – to think about and report on the long-term impact of their decisions.

In addition, the Act established the position of Commissioner for Future Generations. The Commissioner describes his role as “to be the guardian of future generations” and to “provide advice and support to government and public bodies”, as well as to report on progress.

These ideas have also been taken up at the UN, with the Secretary General, Antinio Guterres,  championing the focus on future generations. His 2021 report ‘Our Common Agenda’ highlighted the importance of considering the needs and perspectives of future generations in shaping the future of global governance. Then in 2023 he released a series of Policy Briefs, the first of which was entitled ‘To Think and Act for Future Generations’, and established the UN Futures Lab. It is a global network that helps the UN system use futures thinking and strategic foresight in planning, policymaking, and decision-making.

In September 2024 the UN hosted a Summit of the Future which, among other things, resulted in a Pact for the Future and a Declaration for Future Generations. The Pact committed the international community to “protect the needs and interests of present and future generations.” After the Summit, Mr. Guterres announced he would soon be creating the position of a UN Envoy for Future Generations. 

Meanwhile, on the legal front, Ecojustice noted in an October 2024 press release that the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University reported that 630 new climate lawsuits were filed around the world between July 2020 and December 2022. “Courts around the world”, Ecojustice noted, “are increasingly ruling that climate change poses an existential threat to our most cherished human rights and ordering governments to set and implement science-based reductions targets.”

Indeed, the International Court of Justice just completed hearings on the obligations of states in respect of climate change, while here in Canada, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled in October 2024 that Ontario’s actions to weaken its climate targets are subject to challenge under the constitutional rights of Ontario youth and future generations to life, security of the person, and equality. 

At a time when Trump, Putin and many others are doing everything they can to jeopardise the wellbeing of future generations, particularly by prioritising fossil fuel use, there is no more important task than working to protect future generations. We need to demand that both the federal and the B.C. governments pass a Wellbeing of Future Generations Act and appoint a Commissioner for Future Generations.

At a local level, the CRD  and local municipalities should commit to working with young people to help shape the policies they need for a healthy, just and sustainable future. As Jonas Salk once noted, “our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.”

© 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

Our ‘ignore-ant’ elites blindly adhere to ‘business as usual’

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

Many of our so-called leaders don’t want to change because they get so much benefit — wealth, power, status — from the way things are

Dr. Trevor Hancock

21 May 2024

700 words

My colleague Paul Kershaw is a Professor of Public Health at UBC and founder of Generation Squeeze, a “Think and Change Tank” that promotes wellbeing for all generations. It does so “by turning evidence into action and rejuvenating democracy to protect what is sacred for younger and future generations: a healthy childhood, home and planet.” He has been very effective in raising issues of concern and getting public policy changed.

Recently we have been discussing the content of a session we are planning on planetary health and a wellbeing society at the Victoria Forum this August. In the process of that discussion, Paul wrote:

“I doubt we need a session that makes the case we have crossed planetary boundaries, or that wellbeing frameworks matter, or that Indigenous knowledge is critical to thinking sustainably over generations.” 

A reasonable point; one would like to think these issues are already well understood, at least in principle. But he then made the case that – sadly – we do indeed need such a session, by adding: “Except that the governments and corporations that drive our economies and societies are not behaving as if they have heard or understand this.”

Now this is from someone who is well steeped in public policy and well connected to the policy-making process and to policy-makers. So when he says that our government and corporate leadership is not paying attention to these important issues, it worries me.

What they are not hearing or understanding is really very simple: We only have one planet, and its natural ecosystems are the source of all life – not just humanity but every single living thing. And yet our demands considerably exceed the biocapacity and resources of the Earth.

We behave as if we have and can use the resources of several planets. Indeed, the more bizarrely delusional of us actually seem to believe we can and should move to another planet – presumably so we can repeat the process there!

But back here on Earth, where we actually live, we have crossed six of nine suggested planetary boundaries and are approaching two others, one of which is climate change.

Now it’s hard to believe that governments and corporations are not hearing or understanding this; indeed, I am sure they are. But what Paul is saying is that they are not behaving as if they have heard or understood what is going on. They are practising what Elizabeth Ellsworth, in a 1997 book, called ‘ignore-ance’ – “an active dynamic of negation, an active refusal of information”.

I can imagine several reasons that lead to this inability to face reality and act accordingly. In responding to Paul I suggested possible reasons for this ignore-ance: It may be that many of our leaders – and indeed many people in general – don’t believe it is really that bad, or can’t easily face the implications. Or perhaps people believe that somehow someone, somewhere, will come up with a technological fix that will allow us to carry on much as we are.

But I suspect that for many of our so-called leaders, they don’t want to change because they get so much benefit – wealth, power, status – from the way things are. And therein lies the nub of our problem; self-interested blind adherence to ‘business as usual’, to an economic system and underlying core values that plainly work against our long-term interests.

The result is an inability or unwillingness to play a leadership role in the massive and rapid transformation needed to stave off ecological decline, even collapse. And when ecosystems decline or collapse, so too do the communities and societies embedded within them, and the economies they create.

As the old adage has it, if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. And since this government and corporate elite has shown itself unwilling to or incapable of addressing the problem, it clearly IS the problem.

But it is not just the behaviour of our elites, the problem is more profound than that. They are merely reflecting and acting upon a set of deep cultural values that are unfit for purpose in the 21st century, as I start to discuss next week.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

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