Last week I suggested we need a national People’s ­Well-being 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 maximize the well-being 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........

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