Commentary by: Robert Glossop

Close to a quarter of a century ago, Marvyn Novick spoke to journalists and reminded his audience that we are all under a moral obligation to choose our words well. Not just our words but our topics too and the frames of reference we employ and the evidence we discover to make our case. Way back then, Marvyn wrote about the responsibility of the ‘media’ to bring hard truths to bear upon our private and public decisions.
He was well aware of how our individual appetites and fears are manipulated by corporate advertising and political messaging in the service of a global political economy that succeeds only by pitting one group against the other: the interests of old against the young, of the short-term present against the future, a future that will be inhabited not by us but by our children and their children and their children.
Marvyn spoke to a group of assembled journalists and reminded them that the media creates or fails to create the ‘moral space’ within which citizens can reflect upon how we all draw upon the collective resources of the communities and societies in which we live and how we all owe a debt to the investment that others have made in us. It is all too popular these days to criticise the ‘mainstream media’ as the purveyors of so-called ‘fake news.’
To be sure, Marvyn was highly critical of the media for having failed in its obligations to inform and, yes, even educate us, the citizenry, about: how much tax Canadians pay relative to the citizens of other advanced economies; equally important, what taxpayers get for the taxes they pay; and, last but not least, the skewed distribution of government expenditures that favour those who need it least over those who need it most. Marvyn did not dismiss nor condemn the ‘mainstream media’ as “the enemy of the people.” He criticised it because of what he perceived to be its failure to fulfil its essential role as a tool of the people.
Marvyn was ahead of his time. And to be sure, there is good purpose in reading today what this prescient teacher, talented and lucid writer, committed activist and public intellectual wrote years ago. In this short speech, Professor Novick reminds us that what we today call the ecological determinants of health are simply the places families, schools, arts venues, communities and public institutions of health care and civic engagement —- that nurture us — or not.
In these few short pages, he doesn’t just describe but also explains what lies behind the persistence of child poverty: he examines the diminished purchasing power of wages such that family incomes can be sustained only by a greater dedication of family time to paid employment; he decries the erosion of our commitment to the government’s role to protect the universal benefits that had been, since the inception of the welfare state, the means with which we would care for one another; and, he laments that the covenant between generations is threatened because children are now thought of as the sole responsibility of their parents within ‘villages’ that have abdicated their responsibility to nurture both the parents and children to whom the future belongs. As such, he accomplishes a lot in a few short pages.
It is worth repeating that for Marvyn it is our duty to children and to the children they shall bear that is fundamental. This inter-generational commitment is not negotiable. We do not make a contract with the children who will someday take our place. Instead, we must come to know, deep down inside, that to be human is to know that our time here is limited and that our duty is to care for those who come after us as well as this place we bequeath to them.
When Marvyn writes about the covenant of care that exists between the young and the old, he insists that all of us in our roles as neighbours, fellow workers, employers, corporate investors and as citizens have an obligation to commit ourselves not just to the most efficient means with which to accomplish short-term goals and profits but instead to a vision of communities in which it is acknowledged – in both word and deed, in policy and practice — that we depend upon one another. Marvyn knows that, as he says, “The lead agents in generating the covenant of care will have to come from the institutions of civic life. That means all of us. It will require alliances, movements, but most importantly a shift in practices. If we remain addicted to the trafficking of market life, then our professions of care will be betrayed by our desires. We will continue to abandon the young. That is why the challenge is as much cultural as it is structural.”
I and many others miss Marvyn and, I think, especially so now as we struggle to distil the essential lessons to be derived from this era of Covid19. Back in 1996, he observed: “In Ontario, in the midst of severe reductions to essential public services such as primary education, libraries, health care, public transit, social housing, postsecondary education, we are rewarded with tax cuts” that serve the interests of the few.” To be sure, prior to the pandemic, governments espousing a neo-liberal agenda were often elected on the premise that governments and their spending and rules and regulations and their efforts to manage the lives we live together were the problem. Governments were, we were told, unnecessarily meddling in the lives of their individual citizens.
Ironically, the very same governments who promised to reduce the scale of government are the very same governments that now have had to, for the public good, restrict our travels, mandate our personal behaviours, and assume public debt in order to reduce the massive number of private tragedies embedded in the stories of failed small businesses, personal bankruptcies, unpaid rents, overtaxed food banks, squandered dreams and, finally, lost loved ones.
For a year now, our public health officials and our elected representatives of whichever political persuasion have told us that “We are all in this together.” Marvyn did not need a pandemic to understand this fact of life. I do wish that he were still with us to help us capture and preserve this essential lesson and to help us strike an agenda that acknowledges that human agency, human freedoms in fact, do not reside in us as atomised individuals separate and apart from one another. Like him, we need to understand that we are bound together by a covenant that rests not just on the dignity of the individual but, as Immanuel Levinas, one of Marvyn’s mentors taught, on the dignity of the ‘other’.
A link to Marvyn’s presentation can be found here.
Robert Glossop, C.M., Ph.D. is the former Executive Director of Programs and Research for the Vanier Institute of the Family and an Honorary Life Member of the Laidlaw Foundation.