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Recurring Themes and Ideas in Marvyn’s Thinking and Writing

The ideas articulated and championed by Marvyn Novick are as relevant today as they were in his lifetime. They give us both an intellectual foundation and a moral compass to help us navigate our way to a more inclusive and just future. Marvyn’s work resonated not only because of its intellectual rigour but because it was grounded both in clear ethical positions and in the everyday experience of living in community. Also, Marvyn addressed his analysis and recommended action for progressive change to the full range of actors — political leaders and policymakers at all levels of government, leaders and non-profit organizations in the community sector and labour movement, and the social responsibilities of the private profit-making sector.

The full anthology, “Bringing the Ideas of Marvyn Novick to Life: An Anthology with Commentaries” can be found here. Individuals invited to write commentaries on selected works by Marvyn were asked to explore the core ideas or policy proposals in Marvyn’s writings, not only for their significance to the time when he was writing but for their relevance to the present day and the future social and economic well-being of Canadian society.

The Table of Contents of this anthology organizes Marvyn’s work under four main cross-cutting themes, selecting full text or excerpts from the primary source, accompanied by the commentary of an associate who knew Marvyn and whose own work is related to the specific theme. Where an excerpt of Marvyn’s writing is used instead of the full text, every attempt has been made to provide a link to the original, recognizing that Marvyn started his career in pre-digital times, so that on-line accessibility can be difficult for some of his earlier work.

Cities, Community Services and Civic Alliances

Marvyn, who met with Cabinet Ministers and Deputy Ministers to propose social policy action, did so confidently because he had knowledge and direct experience of the living conditions, opportunities and challenges of everyday life in community. Commenting on Marvyn’s landmark two-volume study Metro Suburbs in Transition (MSIT, 1979, 1980), David Hulchanski asserts that Marvyn “was the first to recognize, document, and make recommendations about the changing nature of postwar suburban neighbourhoods in the city.” According to Marvyn himself, Metro’s Suburbs in Transition “changed everything”:

The report got enormous coverage changing perceptions of who lived in the City. It helped build metropolitan alliances. People in the downtown, in Parkdale, in Kensington, in Regent Park and in east Toronto, recognized there were people similar to them in other parts of North York and Etobicoke [the suburbs]. The building of alliances started and this was quite important. But it just didn’t happen overnight. (The Black Creek Living History Project).

Importantly, Marvyn’s inspiration for investigating the reality of suburban life arose from his visit to and relationship with the leadership and residents of the Jane-Finch community in the mid-70s. His recommendations for city and provincial action on community resource development in the suburbs were based as much on a thorough analysis of 1976 census data as on his first-hand witness of the struggles of under-resourced suburban community life.

Wanda MacNevin, a single mother with three young children, had recently been hired by the Jane/Finch Child and Family Centre when she met Marvyn who was visiting Jane Finch for the first time. In her reflection in this anthology, she recounts this anecdote:

Marvyn told us about his experience parking his car behind the apartment building that housed the Jane/Finch Centre. The wind was strong, and he could barely walk around to the front door. Thinking about mothers and their children, he took it upon himself to find out about wind-testing in this area. Next thing I knew, Marvyn had made arrangements for some wind-tunnel studies to be done along Finch. There I was with one of his students, holding an instrument while walking along Finch. He was indeed an action-oriented person!

Metro’s Suburbs in Transition had an impact on Metro Toronto’s social development in the 1980s, and led to the development of significant future research such as the United Way’s Poverty by Postal Code (2004) and David Hulchanski’s The Three Cities Within Toronto: Income Polarization Among Toronto’s Neighbourhoods, 1970-2005, published by the Urban Centre at the University of Toronto. Long before that, however, Marvyn followed up MSIT with a deeper dive into neighbourhood supports, leading the Joint Task Force on Neighbourhood Support Services in 1983-84 to reinforce the importance of investing in local organizational capacity to meet local needs. The data base for this research came from surveying almost 100 locally driven support programs and discussing the findings with local leadership.

As Mary Lewis writes in her commentary of the Task Force’s Report Neighbourhoods Under Stress (1984) this work “makes the case that this ‘ground level’ within a hierarchical human services system of public and city-wide agencies is critical because radical changes in family structure, forms of urban-suburban lifestyles and settlement patterns had led to an erosion of the primary support networks which traditionally formed the basis of social support”.

Neighbourhoods Under Stress became the key document of a very active advocacy campaign that resulted in the announcement in 1985 of a new funding program, called the Community and Neighbourhood Support Services Program (CNSSP). Lewis points out that Marvyn’s thinking on local leadership and local accountability in supporting community needs preceded by 20 years the emergence of “place-based” models of community support.

In his commitment to the local, Marvyn also recognized the danger of falling into a communitarian approach in the American tradition with little attention to and limited expectations of higher levels of public responsibility. This is reflected in his work with Inclusive Cities Canada in the early 2000s. In “Civic Alliances for a Mutual Canada” (2003), Marvyn linked the social and cultural diversity of Canadian communities to a very particular kind of Canadian citizenship:

It is within municipalities that basic states of social inclusion are cultivated and experienced. It is within civic communities that the relationships between citizenship and diversity are established. When social vulnerabilities and racial differences lead to serious disparities of circumstances and prospects, as is disturbingly evident in Canadian communities, then diversity is stripped of dignity and citizenship is devoid of mutual responsibility.

Notably, this research for the Laidlaw Foundation and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities combined Marvyn’s commitment to ground level research with people in communities and municipalities with the notion of horizontal linkages for promoting social change. The research was conducted locally by holding community soundings across six Canadian cities. The purpose was to generate a “cross-Canada civic alliance” for impact on senior government policymakers, breaking free of the typical vertical and bilateral pattern of policy advocacy between communities and cities and their respective provincial governments and the federal government.

Children, Families and Youth: A Collective Responsibility

Marvyn’s core values were reflected in no policy area more clearly than his thinking and writing about children and families. He showed his commitment to this area first in his community practice and voluntary work with Ryva, his wife, as she started a pioneering model of family resource centres in Toronto, the Children’s Storefront.

As Brigitte Kitchen points out in her commentary on A Fair Chance for All Children, Marvyn began to turn his attention to child and family policy issues in the mid-1980s, and especially to the issue of child poverty as he became, along with Brigitte and Christa Freiler, one of the founding members of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG). A Fair Chance for All Children argued that provincial social assistance was “a source of humiliation” for parents and made the case for a strong federal government role in addressing the needs of families with children, just as it did with elderly people.

Calling child poverty a shameful symptom of the “national neglect of children”, Marvyn and his colleagues called for a National Income Program for Children that included a universal child benefit, progressive taxation, and an expanded parental leave program available to both parents.

As part of CPAG, Marvyn helped in his contribution to Unequal Futures to reframe a focus of child and family beyond strictly poverty alleviation to the structural issue of inequality. As Brigitte writes in her commentary, Unequal Futures “placed the causes and responsibility for child poverty squarely on a ‘free market vision of the economy”. This in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the same period in which Marvyn was working with the Laidlaw Foundation on the Children-at-Risk Project and wrote the preface to John O’Neill’s book on The Missing Child in Liberal Theory. Marvyn’s Foreword and O’Neill’s book, which O’Neill acknowledges took shape from close discussions with Marvyn and other colleagues, are scathing critiques of neo-liberalism. Several themes are developed in this theoretical frame-work very relevant to current thinking on recovering the “commons” for creating an inclusive and socially just society.

O’Neill concludes his work with a section on The Canadian Commons, which Marvyn devoted a good deal of attention to in his Foreword. Marvyn affirmed the notion that “deep layers of intergenerational responsibility and relation are at the foundation of nationhood, essential to the healthy development of children, and are recovered through an understanding of the civic commons. . . . Children in the civic commons grow up with assurances that other people care about their lives.” (p. xi). The collective responsibility for our own and others’ children now and, as Gilbert and Ross say in their commentary, for future generations became a consistent theme in Marvyn’s thinking, which he characterized as an “ancestral and progenitorial bond of national continuity.” (p. vii).

Marvyn challenged us to throw off the limited neo-liberal narrative in how we choose to talk about our world and our obligations to each other within it. As Sid Frankel says in his commentary on Summoned to Stewardship, an important lesson from Marvyn’s writing “relates to the importance of using language in a precise and strategic manner.” The term “stewardship”, which Frankel draws from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care,” and which Marvyn joined with “summoning” as an active call to action from a moral or ethical base, is one example.

In his commentary, Bob Glossop writes that Marvyn urged our understanding “that we are bound 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’. Marvyn’s frequent reference to a social “covenant” as a moral obligation to each other challenges us to discard the narrow and constraining neo-liberal language of economic “contracts”.

And, as all the commentaries in the Children, Families and Youth section of this anthology point out, Marvyn goes beyond “constructing a counter-discourse” (Frankel) to neo-liberalism and its capture of the policy agenda in Canada and the western world. As the resulting austerity gripped governments in the last two decades of the 20th century, he was a leader in Campaign 2000 in formulating policy proposals for the well-being of children and families and ending child and family poverty.

The mid-nineties were a particularly difficult time for social programs with the federal government’s introduction of the Canada Social Transfer (CST), and the end of the Canada Assistance Plan. While CPAG and Campaign 2000 had been calling for a stronger role for the federal government, the CST weakened the federal government’s influence over how the provinces used transfer funds. Anita Khanna and Laurel Rothman described how important Marvyn’s 1996 Campaign 2000 report, Crossroads for Canada, was in addressing this situation:

Amidst this tumultuous time for social programs, the main messages in Crossroads were bold and brave. When Crossroads called for increased public funding for social welfare it was one of the first, if not the first, national group to dare to move in that direction while the anti-deficit slayers continued to push loudly for more tax cuts. Crossroads stressed the importance of public funding, public policies and the intergenerational reciprocity needed to provide a healthy mix of income security measures and quality public services that would significantly reduce child and family poverty and enhance the life chances of all children. In addition, Crossroads projected the costs of substantial additional public investments and identified potential sources of funds to pay for them.

Although “deeply and bitterly disappointed” (Kitchen) that the Liberal Government favoured corporate tax cuts over family policy in the early 1990s, by the decade’s end the National Child Benefit was established and was the basis for major additional reductions in Canada’s child poverty rate by 2020.

Social Protection: Income Security Decent Work, and Progressive Taxation

Before neo-liberalism gripped and drove government policy in the 1980s, Marvyn was arguing that social and economic policy should not be conducted in two silos. Ina 1978 paper, “Is Social Spending Productive?”, Marvyn challenged the notion that social spending was not productive but a drain on a society’s resources. He suspected that “resistance to public spending can be, and often is, resistance to redistribution”.

Warning of the emerging leviathan, Marvyn expresses concern that the market sector is reticent to “accept the need for a balanced pattern of national development in which economic and social objectives are afforded the complementary status that is required”. Commenting on this perspective, Muszynski writes, “Those of us who worked with Marvyn during those years were always inspired by his incisive arguments about how [social] spending was not only essential to a socially just form of economic development, but it was essential to economic prosperity as well.”

The Reagan and Thatcher years entrenched neo-liberalism and began the serious erosion of the social welfare base that had developed since WWII. Social spending came under severe attack moving social welfare advocates to promote strategies of resistance. Such was the Declaration, A Time to Stand Together, A Time for Social Solidarity, framed by Marvyn and other community leaders in 1987, calling for community and labour solidarity for social and economic justice. In her commentary Laurell Ritchie asserts the need for cross-sectoral action for conversion to “a people-oriented economy and society that puts top priority on serving people’s basic needs. “

Market-driven public policy only worsened in the 1990s with governments adopting austerity policies to control growing public deficits and debt, placing blame on escalating social spending. Leading a group of social planning colleagues in 1994, Marvyn inspired Paying for Canada, which challenged conventional thinking that social welfare spending was producing Canada’s growing deficits. The report showed that severely declining public revenues from tax policy changes benefiting corporations and higher income Canadians was actually the source of the debt problem. Market ideology had infected public finances.

Again, linking the social and economic spheres, Paying for Canada framed the issue as “what kind of social security programs we want, about what kind of economy we want and what kind of public finances would bring this about.” In her commentary Armine Yalnizyan called Marvyn a “thought leader” by countering the dominant market ideology that would sacrifice Canadians’ social security on the false premise that it was a drain on national wealth.

The dominance of neo-liberal ideology over the last thirty years has undermined social welfare policy and forced progressive policy thinking into “social protection”. Marvyn did not really concede that ground. He always maintained that governments had other options and did not accept the argument that cuts to social programs and taxes were necessary. He proposed an approach to social welfare that reflected current circumstances but would still provide the essential floor of stability and security for all while tailoring social supports to the wide diversity of conditions and circumstances of people in their everyday lives.

This was evident in the 1980s when he led the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Work and Well-being Project. At a time when mental health in the workplace was primarily seen as an issue of providing supportive responses to workers who were troubled on the job (e.g. employee assistance programs), Work and Well-Being addressed itself to “a broader analysis of the structural conditions that created pressures and hardships affecting the mental health and well-being of workers.” (Clutterbuck commentary). “Hence, he framed the policy issue for health and well-being in the workplace squarely on key pillars of the welfare state — income security, full employment policies, and strong public services.”

Marvyn proposed that public policy be shaped from a “life-cycle” perspective, providing basic security and essential supports in adaptive ways through the stages of life from birth through early childhood and education, entry into productive working life and eventually into retirement. He proposed an “integrated income model”, a mix of public and employment income that would adjust as needed for an individual’s “changing relationship to the labour market over the course of their working lives (e.g. educational opportunities, familial responsibilities, community participation, re-training needs).”

Marvyn’s thinking of forty years ago becomes relevant again today, of course, as the public policy discourse turns to notions of Basic or Guaranteed Income at all stages of life. Marvyn certainly felt that no one should fall below an income level that deprived them of the basic necessities of daily living including access to social and recreational opportunities. He was concerned, however, that Guaranteed or Basic Income models reduced government commitment to full employment policies and relieved pressure on both government and the private sector to invest in decent work opportunities for all.

Reviewing “Time for a Civic Declaration on Decent Work and Basic Incomes for All”, Jamie Swift notes, “As usual, Marvyn’s analysis was based on a keen sense of what was happening to the working class. He took note of the growth of ‘precarious employment’ and the gnawing insecurity of those ‘disconnected from the labour market temporarily or permanently’.” While Swift is a strong advocate of Basic Income, he credits Marvyn with raising important questions to keep the policy discussion on the issue properly balanced between Basic Income’s impact on the labour market and the access for all to rewarding employment opportunities.

Building a New Canada: Social Inclusion and Civic Solidarity

As neo-liberalism tightened its grip on public policy in the early 1990s, one glimmer of hope for a progressive counter-direction was the election of Ontario’s first New Democratic Government in 1991. Laurie Monsebraaten’s commentary reflects on Marvyn’s contribution to a provincial-territorial social services ministers’ conference in Toronto hosted by the new Government and chaired by Ontario’s Community and Social Services Minister, Zanana Akande. In the face of a “crippling recession” the new Ontario Government indicated a commitment to “investing in affordable housing, recommitting to social assistance reform and expanding non-profit child care.” The added burden of reduced transfers and devolution policies from the federal Conservative Government clearly threatened this agenda. As Monsebraaten writes, Marvyn’s address to the ministers focused on “the need for federal-provincial-municipal partnerships, universal programs and a ‘common mission’ to tackle problems facing vulnerable families and individuals.”

This was a theme that Marvyn consistently adhered to throughout the 1990s and into the New Millennium and accompanying it was the promotion of new perspectives on how to create shared inter-jurisdictional policy commitments and actions. One such concept was the notion of creating “civic solidarity” across local communities to resist the ravages of the neo-liberal agenda. Just weeks before the newly elected Harris Government in Ontario began to dismantle provincial systems for health, education and social service supports, Marvyn’s address to the 1995 Annual Meeting of the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto was titled “Civic Solidarity: Foundations of Social Development for the 21st Century”. In her commentary on this talk, Susan McGrath writes, “Marvyn believed in civic solidarity to over-come what he called a ‘dogma of privilege’.” Marvyn called on community-based organizations like the “the now Social Planning Toronto and its allies to mobilize in civic solidarity … forthe soul of our city, our province, and our country.” McGrath points out that that call remains relevant to our present times as another Conservative Government committed to a privatization and anti-democratic agenda reigns in Ontario today.

“Social inclusion” was another major concept that Marvyn joined with others to advance as a joining force for progressive change entering the new century.

Leading a cross-Canada exploration for the Laidlaw Foundation on the value of adopting a social inclusion framework as the foundation for a national policy agenda, Marvyn spoke at a National Conference on A New Way of Thinking? Towards a Vision of Social Inclusion in Ottawa in 2001. He proposed a structural agenda for universal social inclusion, which consisted of:

a)Human development policies. Consistent with his thinking on personal growth and development through the life cycle, Marvyn advocated for public policy support for learning throughout the life stages and across multiple environments from formal education to arts, cultural and recreational spheres to workplace-based opportunities.

b)Civic vitality. Marvyn looked to local municipalities where people lived and were most closely connected to political decision-making as the domain for the highest probability of regenerating a civic vitality that had eroded over the previous decades. He called for “national policies of investments in infrastructures and institutions, and local practices that foster inclusive environments in neighbourhoods and public settings”.

c) Living standards. Marvyn argued for concentrated energy and effort to restore and fortify a social security system seriously undermined by more than two decades of neo-liberal austerity. He writes, “A structural agenda for universal inclusion will require a return to the recognition that high quality public goods are critical contributors to collective and personal states of well-being and vitality.” In a way, this thinking presaged his later attention to the notion of the social commons.

Marvyn joined the “civic solidarity” and “social inclusion” discourse in his policy advocacy and strategic thinking on social development in the remaining years of his life. Recognizing the limitations of bilateral vertical relationships between the municipal-provincial-federal jurisdictions to effect sustainable progressive policy change, he remained committed to promoting civic solidarity within the community and municipal sector and promoted the building of strong horizontal relationships of shared commitment and support across communities. The idea was that cross-community and even cross-Canada voices of support for inclusion and equity would have greater impact on policy-making and political decision-making at senior levels of government. Indeed, that approach had demonstrated impact on the federal government introducing the National Child Benefit in 1998 after years of cross-Canada organizing and reporting on child poverty levels locally, provincially and nationally by Campaign 2000.

Marvyn worked in a similar way with the Social Planning Network of Ontario and the 25 in 5 Network for Poverty Reduction in 2008-09, mobilizing local support for a shared policy agenda in more than 25 communities across Ontario to influence the Ontario Government to pass its Poverty Reduction Plan.

Joey Edwardh describes how this cross-community approach worked in the Inclusive Cities Canada initiative (2003-2005) when Marvyn and his associates conducted “eleven community soundings funded and organized by the Laidlaw Foundation in urban regions across Canada [which] brought together civic leaders, agency professionals, and social advocates committed to building and sustaining inclusive communities.”

These soundings led to a series of civic panels “from diverse civic sectors and cultural backgrounds” and “co-chaired by a senior municipal official and a senior community leader… The panels demonstrated that civic leaders from different regions of Canada shared many common concerns and proposed a wide range of complementary priorities.”

Not only did this approach fortify local understanding of and commitment to policies of inclusion and equity but Edwardh reinforces that they also served as “an example of local democratic practice, where ideas and experiences converge, generating shared knowledge and strategies for change.” Marvyn saw this cross-Canada network-building approach “as a vehicle for joint municipal and community input into the development of social infrastructure policies and practices which address vulnerability and diversity in large and small municipalities.” He continued, “creating horizontal networks across communities with hubs outside of Ottawa. . . would ground national perspectives in daily community life, and ensure that work at the local civic level was recognized as having national significance.”

What We Can Learn From Marvyn Novick

“Those who are missed the most are those who have brought hope into our lives”, wrote Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. In the conclusion to his 2005 book, To Heal a Fractured World, The Ethics of Responsibility, he identified this as one of the important lessons he learned throughout his life.

This quote calls to mind the ways in which Marvyn brought hope into the lives of his students, his colleagues, the local communities he worked with, and the broader social policy community. As one commentator wrote: “Summoned to Stewardship was a beacon of hope that was broadly discussed among those interested in poverty reduction. It set out an alternate view that could sustain us through these dark times” (Frankel).

Marvyn’s legacy to us are those very things that brought him hope and sustained him through “dark times”, namely:

Resisting cynicism

Cynicism never seemed to be an option for Marvyn despite setbacks and disappointment in the slow pace of progress, the attacks on the dignity of vulnerable people, and the recurring waves of austerity and neoliberalism. He could be angry, even outraged, but never cynical. He likely would have agreed with the observation that “cynicism diminishes those who practise it” (Sacks, 2005).

Opening one’s heart to people’s lives and lived experiences

“The achievements we struggle for must be anchored in people’s lives; they must touch the intimate worlds of the people we want to reach”, Marvyn wrote in preparation for a 1998 roundtable on family policy. In her reflection, Gillian Novick commented on her dad’s perspective on the interaction of policy and family life which was influenced by her mother Ryva’s work with The Children’s Storefront, the first family resource centre in Canada.

When he was working on ideas about policies that would impact family life, he was also hearing real, local and lived experiences of the people who were affected by the policies and services. This affected him deeply and in every part of his work… Families, people on social assistance and others in economically insecure positions needed the same sense of security and dignity as his own family, so that we all can feel secure, do our best, contribute and flourish.

Focusing on what people have in common

Marvyn’s lifelong commitment to solidarity, universality, social inclusion and, later, the social commons were all reflections of his undying belief in the power and strength of people’s common humanity. He was attracted to the concept of social inclusion because “inclusion asks us to look at how we connect with others, how we share with others. It requires us not to dispense with differences but asks us how differences can be accommodated within commonalities”. Marvyn recognized that divisions arise “where people want to deal with the violations they’ve experienced: misogyny, homophobia, racism…” but argued that “if it stays there, we miss … that at some point, outrages have to become transformative agendas for social change” (Ish Theilheimer commentary).

A vision of a better future

Throughout much of his decades-long career, Marvyn found the social policy climate to be defensive and timid. His antidote was to articulate a vision of a better future and to put forward bold policy proposals that operationalized that vision. He maintained that Canadians and the social policy community, in particular, should not accept the inevitabilities of the global dynamic of neoliberalism and austerity. He consistently argued that national options do exist even when we are told by governments that they have no options. Marvyn contended that arguing against this opens up a “moral space” where a vision of a better future can flourish. He reminded us that “our advocacy must be to ensure transformational change and to resist anything else” (Khanna and Rothman).

THIS GUY IS BRILLIANT! He has an amazing mind and a ton of experience…He has taught me so much about life and responsibility of caring for others through social policy!

Marvyn Novick is brilliant, kind, radical, progressive and very, very wise. He taught me things I think about and draw on every single day. He is approachable and caring despite a rough exterior. He is almost too good for this world … but we need him!!!

Peter Clutterbuck is a long-time friend and colleague of Marvyn Novick in the social planning movement.

Christa Freiler is a friend and colleague who worked with Marvyn on initiatives related to child poverty and family policy, suburbs and neighbourhoods, and inclusive cities.

Peter Clutterbuck and Christa Freiler
Peter Clutterbuck and Christa Freiler
  Peter Clutterbuck is a long-time friend and colleague of Marvyn Novick in the social planning movement. Christa Freiler is a friend and colleague who worked with Marvyn on initiatives related to child poverty and family policy, suburbs and neighbourhoods, and inclusive cities.
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