Ideas - How to Flourish in a Broken World

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

The world is full of problems — our broken healthcare, out-of-reach housing, a democracy in shambles and a dying planet. Is it actually possible to fix this mess? IDEAS hears from people working to fix our most intractable problems at a time when it can feel easier to just give up. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 21, 2023.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Always large groups of little kids everywhere. Yeah, there must be a change of activity time um can you describe to me what you're seeing right now so we're walking down the farm lane

and we're heading to the sugar bush or the wood lot and we've got soybeans on our left. And we've got a vegetable garden on the right, which is a demonstration plot for the kids. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. The location is called Willow Grove Farm, and it's named after the Grove family, who were the original settlers on the several hundred acres. Willow Grove Farm lies between Toronto and Lake Simcoe. Susan Reeser and her family have a long history on this farm. So we're going to walk right by the old Grove Farm house

and my great-grandmother was part of that Grove family. So it's a couple hundred years, 200 years of Grove family. So it's a couple hundred years, 200 years of grow family. Fifty years ago, the Willow Grove farm was sold to Mennonite pastors. They turned it into a kind of retreat where kids from Toronto's struggling East End could learn about nature in green spaces. Spaces that are rapidly disappearing here and all over Canada with ever-increasing urban sprawl.

And we're coming up ahead to the compost pile where the manure from the animals goes. A row of spruce trees which would have been planted quite a while ago as a windbreak, I guess. The disappearance of farmlands and forests is accelerating. It's one more challenge piled onto the heap of problems we're already facing. Who doesn't feel as though it's all become one giant game of whack-a-mole, where you smack down one problem and another one pops right up. And then we're coming up to the apple orchard. We've got a thousand apple trees here. It can leave you paralyzed, wondering where you should even start. They come and learn about pollinators. Maybe one starting point is right

here. And then in the fall, they'll pick the apples. That we can actually flourish despite all the bad news and create something better for ourselves by helping create something for others. They'll learn a little rhyme. How do you know when an apple is ripe? It's eye to the sky and twist. So if you twist the stem gently and point this blossom end of the apple to the sky, if it comes off easily, your apple is ripe. And you can pick it and enjoy it.

Ideas producer Nahid Mustafa brings us this documentary called How to Flourish in a Broken World. Do you feel like you have some kind of special obligation here? Maybe or it feels like I care a lot and you see the land around you disappearing I always remember when I was a kid maybe around 10 or 12 we lived on what is now Warden Avenue our family farm and we'd go down towards the city and I remember asking my dad why do they have to build houses on these farms and because it used to be massy Ferguson farms down there, like some big farms and family farms. Well, it's easy for them.

They can just build on this good land. It's easy for them to build houses. There's no rocks that they have to get through. So it didn't make sense to me then, and it still doesn't make sense to me now why they have to still keep using good land that we need for food to create urban sprawl. Susan and I are with Alexis Whalen. She also goes by Lexi.

She works on local land use issues like protecting prime farmland and water resources. The three of us walk into the woods. It was August and the heat was unrelenting. Lexi, can you describe the space that we're entering now? So we've just entered the cool of the forest canopy, and it's just so lush and green, and it absolutely feels like a sanctuary from the wider world. And the breeze is just blowing through the top of the treetops and it's it's a natural

meditation just walking through these woods and hearing and listening the birds and the trees and the breeze and it's it's special this this woodlot is special because it's providing lungs of oxygen for our region and space for species to thrive. agile system that connects wild spaces to other wild spaces and providing a corridor for animals and insects to move and breed and thrive in the urban jungle. Why are we here? urban jungle. Why are we here? Yeah, I asked the Willow Grove Board of Directors and Executive Director if we could have our talk, interview here, just because it's so

symbolic of how agriculture and natural places are being encroached upon. In the last couple of years MZOs have been approved into land surrounding this area prematurely, more than a few decades ahead of schedule. So Willow Grove is still an oasis in the middle of it all. And hopefully it'll be here flourishing for people to visit for more decades to come. Both Susan and Alexis have been very explicit that Willow Grove Farm itself is not subject to an MZO. So just describe, so what is an MZO and what are you seeing in this area with those? So an MZO is a ministerial

zoning order from the province of Ontario and it allows the cabinet and ministers to basically override municipal planning and it just happened that the land around here, the person who owned the land, the land development company, the developer was able to basically fast track this land and get it approved for having houses and townhouses built on it, quite far from any other services in the surrounding areas. And so the MZOs that surround this place, can you talk a little bit about how you process that just on an individual basis? What are the feelings there?

process that just on an individual basis what are the feelings there oh frustration anger sadness that the our governments that are supposed to look after the common good the good of everybody clearly isn't looking after the good of everybody when they let these kinds of decisions benefit very few people, the land developers. And I don't want to make it sound like it's the land developers only. Lexi? Let's zoom over this way. stings of what's been happening on the outskirts of this little oasis is that just before the MZOs started to be approved for these new development parcels, Markham and Stovall was in the midst of a vision exercise. So it was a public engagement exercise where the community was invited to help collaborate on what they wanted to see for this larger block.

virtual table because it was during COVID, participating in conversations about what was the opportunity here that might deliver housing, but more importantly, how could it deliver more employment and opportunities for Markham and Stouffville? I think there were some who came to the table who said, how quickly can we put the pipes in to put water and sewer here and get ultimately more housing? on the composition and designation of this larger block who were envisioning how this particular parcel could play a role in a larger agri-food system in York and Durham. And so the sting is that the MZOs seem wildly inconsistent with the conversations that were happening in the wider community. But also, I think part of the narrative around affordability. Those houses are not going to be affordable. No. I mean, the people who work in Stove, they'll say at the Tims or any of the retail, they can't afford to buy a house here.

And any refugee, asylum seeker that comes to Canada can't afford to come and buy a house here. Alexis Whelan points out that the rush to build housing on farmland is coming at precisely the time when dwindling natural spaces need more protection than ever. We're taking large swaths of natural assets, farmland and sometimes wetlands that haven't been well protected or identified. And we are reclassifying those for urban spaces. And we have massive amounts of land that has already been designated for future urban growth. But around this particular area that we're talking about, those changes from agricultural land to urban have happened in addition to these vast other swaths, areas of land that have already been designated. Well, just in the last 15 years surrounding Stouffville and

Markham, Markham and Stouffville are about 10 kilometers apart. Stouffville was a bit of a, the slogan, country close to the city. Markham is now a city. You can see it year by year, where some of my cousins used to rent farmland from the developers to do cash cropping. They've lost that land. My cousin says yeah each year there's a little bit less for us to till and harvest. I took some video a couple years ago of them tearing up the land on Major McKenzie and now they're doing it all the way up here along Reeser Road and into Stouffville. There's houses houses houses houses single family dwellings people with pretty small backyards they're looking onto much moraine, if that's how they get it advertised, in meadowlands or however they call these subdivisions. They're not getting meadows.

They're just getting side-by-side brick houses with not a whole lot of services, not a whole lot to do around them. We're just walking under a black walnut tree. They're the bane of people's existence in the city. But if you're in the country, they're not too bad. The squirrels are attracted to them. You can see the green. They look like apples, but they're green.

That's a black walnut. And so early settlers would choose land where there were black walnuts because it means the land is fertile. But actually don't plant anything quite near the black walnut because the they put off toxins and so your garden might not grow if you have a black walnut nearby but they're okay to have they give a signal that it's good land the class one land that we talk about all the time so my friend jim likes to tell me that my house is on the best soil in Markham, which is true because all of our houses are ultimately on the best soil in Ontario. But there are about five or six black walnuts I can see from my bedroom window.

So it clearly was very fertile soil Susan that's always a tension to think about too though eh like that here we are living here uh and in some respects I mean I'm not saying that it's it's just something that I think about like I also yes live in a house that was on a new development. And when I moved in, I was surrounded by farms. Yeah. And now I'm not.

Yeah. It's just, my cousin came to visit from the States and she said, wow, they just put up a whole damn town. Right. I was like, yes,

they have. I mean, there was nobody else there really for maybe six or eight years. And then suddenly it's just a building boom yeah and i'm like i'm part of the problem well at least at least your area was planned and but the the frustrating thing is these mzos are unplanned and that's um don't feel guilty about it because we all are on land that was originally farmland. Ultimately, we have better data and information feeding into the system now. So across North America, we built these rambling subdivisions with cul-de-sacs and pavement to house new communities.

But then we failed to factor in for the long-term impact of sealing and urbanizing that massive space. And so, yes, we paved over a lot of farmland in the past. Yes, we paved over a lot of farmland in the past, but I like to think that we're much wiser now. And conserving land also means conserving dollars. And in an affordability crisis, conserving dollars or redirecting them to another place that has a broader community good is just wise decision making. Using flourishing as a way to think about the good life goes back centuries. Angie Hobbs thinks about it all the time. My name is Angie Hobbs and I'm the Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield in the UK.

I asked her to reflect on what she heard from Susan and Lexi. Well, I found that very moving. It really brought home to me how in our personal narratives of our lives, the allocation in time and space in a particular place is very important. a particular place is very important. It really showed how our individual and communal flourishing depends so greatly on our local environment in terms of healthy food supply, clean air and water, beautiful sanctuaries to visit, but also in the built environment, access to affordable housing, but also in the built environment, access to affordable housing, transport infrastructure, local jobs. We need a vision of what we think a flourishing local community would look like, including both the natural, farmed and the wild and the urban areas. So we're here talking about flourishing and the idea that flourishing can help us think about the world in possibly more useful ways. Can you talk to me a bit about how

you think about the term flourishing? Yes. Well, from my philosophical perspective, flourishing is not the same as happiness or pleasure, even though on some interpretations, it may well include happiness as one of the constituents. For me, flourishing is about the actualisation of our potential, the fulfilment of all our intellectual, imaginative, affective, physical faculties. So it's something we can always aim for, even in those situations where feeling happy, let alone experiencing pleasure, is neither possible or even appropriate. But there's all, you can always say to yourself in these really difficult, challenging circumstances, what can I do? How can I best use my faculties to further my own good or

the common good? So that brings me to the question of how individual flourishing relates to human flourishing. Because in my version, your individual flourishing, to some extent, depends on the flourishing of your community. And in fact, in turn, it will further the flourishing of your community. That's a two way interaction. But it certainly partly depends on it. your access to clean air and water, your access to housing, your access to job opportunities, your cultural and leisure opportunities, all those are part of the community that you live in. So you can't really divide your individual flourishing from the community flourishing where you live. One of the reasons for that, I think, is that individual and communal flourishing are both intimately interconnected in that our intellectual

and moral virtues, our moral excellences, are required for both of them. So if we're going to fulfill our intellectual and moral capabilities, then that will inevitably involve furthering the flourishing of our community and doing good in our community. Why do you think that we arrive at different conclusions if we're using flourishing as a frame as opposed to some other principle, whether it's improvement or betterment or progress. It might be helpful if we compare an ethical approach based on flourishing with perhaps the two other main ethical approaches around at the moment. So an approach based on consequences, the greatest good of the greatest number, or an approach based on deontology, on an ethics of rights and duties. Now, personally, I'm working to include certain human rights and certain good

consequences in my version of an ethics and politics of flourishing. But there are significant differences, I think. An ethics of flourishing is an agent-centred approach rather than an act-centred approach. We're asking, how should I live and what sort of person should I be? Those really basic questions. So we're thinking about a whole person living a whole life, or a whole group of people living their whole lives. It's an ethics which I think is sensitive to the complexities of the lived human experience. And that's one of the reasons I find it very attractive. Sometimes it's called well-being, and I'm comfortable with the term well-being. I prefer flourishing because flourishing is active, and also because it links

us to the natural world, and it clarifies, it illuminates how closely we're linked to the natural world. Why do I find this a really helpful ethical approach? I think because it's pretty easy to get most people to agree that they at least care about their own individual flourishing, even if they say initially that they don't particularly care about the greatest good of the greatest number, the consequentialist approach, or even if they say they don't really care about human rights, a duty and rights-based approach. And if you can then get these people who've agreed they care about their own individual flourishing, if you can then get them to see how intimately interconnected their individual flourishing is

to the flourishing of their local community and indeed larger national and global communities, then it's relatively easy, I think, to bring them on board. So I find it a user-friendly approach. I find it's a very human approach. Different versions of a good life rather than one monolithic notion of the good life. And I find that appealing, yes. Oh, hi. Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you. Sorry about that. Oh, that's okay. No worries. I came in here earlier to find parking, but I had to just park on the street. Oh, no worries. No worries. I'm already recording.

Do you want me to turn it off so we can talk? Or I just like to record the greetings. Okay, so maybe we can just actually start with an introduction with my name is and what you do. So my name is Dr. Nimoy Lewis, and I'm an assistant professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University. Yeah, so I didn't grow up in this neighborhood, but I spent quite some time around in this neighborhood. I had lots of friends who grew up in this neighborhood that I went to high school with. And over the years, we've seen a lot of changes in the community here

in where we see the growth of financialized landlords in this community and a lot of private developers as a result of renovations that were made to the Westin GO Station to accommodate the Union Pearson Express. And it's one of the two stops that it makes in the city of Toronto, going from Toronto Pearson Airport to Union Station as the terminal station. So what this neighborhood offers is access to reliable transit, especially for those who work downtown. It gives them the opportunity to live outside of the downtown core and not have to pay some of the exorbitant rents that we see that are being charged in the downtown core, but it gives them access to

a more affordable type of living. So currently right now, there's a rent strike that is happening at one of the buildings just, we're heading towards it, just west of here, and it's at 33 King Street. This building was bought by a company called Dream Unlimited. This company actually, its parent company is Blackstone Group, which is one of the world's largest private equity firm in the world. They're based in New York. So essentially what we're seeing right now, they're actually renovating the exterior of the property. So they're changing the balconies, currently repainting the exterior of the property.

currently repainting the exterior of the property. So this essentially, in the long run, is going to be another above-guideline rental increase for the work that they're actually now completing with respect to improvements that they've made to the property. The law in Ontario allows landlords, for reasons including renovations, to raise rent by up to 9% spread out over three years. That's the above-guideline increase, or AGI, that Nimoy Lewis is talking about. He says old post-war properties, like the one we're standing in front of, are attractive to landlords and investors because there's a lot of growth potential for profits. The formula goes something like this.

Buy a building cheap because it's old or the location isn't great or maybe both. Do major renovations. Start raising the rent. And as the building becomes less affordable, long-term tenants leave and the rents can go way up. So we're standing right now on the northeast corner of Western Road of Lawrence in the former town of Weston in the former borough of the old city of York. And so if you look across the street, there's a development sign there. And if we go just north of here where we're standing at Little Avenue, there's going to be another development sign. And then there's also another development at the corner of Western Road and Lawrence, in which is slated to provide approximately just over 920 purposeful rentals. The difficulty is that not a lot of those units are affordable units.

Not a lot of those units are affordable units. And if they are building affordable units, the challenge is that a lot of the units that are deemed affordable are realistically out of reach for a lot of folks in this community, which are, this is a community that is comprised of low to moderate income folks. It's one of the top three dissemination areas in the city of Toronto with one of the highest black populations in which this community has approximately over, is over 75% black.

Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed.

My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. ShortSighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. ShortSighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. Nimoy Lewis studies housing at Metropolitan University in Toronto. He says large infrastructure projects like the Westin Go Station in Toronto that connects the outskirts of the city to the downtown core solve a lot of problems. But they also create a lot of problems. Improved transit, gentrification and growing unaffordability are deeply intertwined. But without some kind of safety net, the knock-on effects make vulnerable people even more vulnerable. I think there's so many pieces that don't get addressed. And I think in order to attack this problem, or what I call not a crisis,

but rather more of an emergency that requires an immediate intervention. We continue now with How to Flourish in a Broken World from Ideas producer Nahid Mustafa. Right at the corner at Weston Road in Lawrence, there's sort of like a parquet. And this has always been sort of where a lot of gathering takes place. Nimoy and I head back to Weston Station. Some people have stopped to have a chat at the tiny parkette at Weston and Lawrence. There's an older woman lying down on a concrete bench, relaxing and watching the world go by. Nimoy-Lewis points out how behaviors that have usually been seen as

normal and acceptable can become sources of tension as new people move into the area. A woman lounging in the sun is suddenly cast as a loiterer, a disruption. Confrontations ensue. The police are called. And soon enough, what was once normalized is now criminalized. And it's one of those things that I often think never gets challenged. Because when you think about safe space, you often have to also think about safe for whom. Nimoy Lewis spent a lot of time in Weston as a kid and grew up in a neighborhood like it. It's not merely a matter of scholarly inquiry for him. It's also deeply personal.

You know, when I first started my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, I knew that there were changes that were happening in my community. But I didn't have the sort of the concepts or the theories or the grammar to convey what those changes are and after pursuing my degree I began to understand sort of the changes that are happening and for me this work became also personal it became personal for me in order to protect the culture and the history and the vibrancy of these communities and to help people who reside in these communities to be able to remain in these communities. And a lot of folks

like to talk about, you know, describe issues like this that are happening in these communities as displacement and gentrification. I don't necessarily think that those concepts or terms have the utility to accurately describe the harms that are actually being committed in these communities. harms that are actually being committed in these communities. I adopt a term used quite commonly by my intellectual mentor, Ananya Roy, who would describe the processes and the outcomes in these communities as more of banishment, expulsion that is happening, and where low to moderate income folks are being banished and expelled from these communities as a result of the changes that are happening in communities like the town of Weston, Little Jamaica and even the communities along the Finch West LRT. And I think the term

displacement gives you this sort of idea that if I get removed from this building here at 33 King, that I can go down the street to another apartment building. But because of the proliferation of these types of landlords, these folks don't have anywhere to turn because they leave from this building, they're going to experience the same sort of issues that they experienced at their previous residence. So it helps us to not only foreground the role of the state, but it also helps us to foreground key financial actors that are undermining what I call the government's efforts to helping more Canadians realize the human right to housing. realised the human right to housing.

Here again, we see the absolute crucial importance of bigger picture planning and interconnected planning, that you need to have a sense of what you want your community as a whole to look like and where you're going to have affordable housing in it and how communities can be not just created, but also maintained. That balance between different socioeconomic groups and new and old communities and so on. You need a vision, not because you're some romantic idealist, but because you need that direction of travel. One of the things that I'd like to get at in this piece is really how you tie the wisdom of the ancients around flourishing with what you're seeing today. So can you say something about how you understand where this concept of flourishing

began and how we can potentially use that as a frame to talk about all of these issues, whether it's environment or healthcare or housing? Yes, the concept of flourishing. Eudaimonia in ancient Greek starts with Plato and is developed by Aristotle. And I think it is very helpful for us today, so long as we update it and modify it in ways which I'll explain in a bit. I mean, yeah, Plato does sometimes frame flourishing in terms of the actualization of our potential, but he more often uses the language of psychic harmony, really musical language, the harmony that he believes exists when the reasoning spirited and appetitive parts of our psyche in his system, a tripartite psyche, the reasoning spirited and

appetitive parts are in tune with each other, with reason in control. And in his work, The Republic, And in his work, The Republic, this psychic harmony is claimed to be a state of mental health. Really interesting phrase. It's the first time we see that phrase in Western literature. And this internal harmony is said to constitute both our flourishing, our eudaimonia in the Greek, and our excellence, our aretaire. They're said to be the same thing, this internal state. Now, Aristotle, on the other hand, Plato's pupil, he does always use the language of the actualization of our potential, of the fulfillment of our different faculties. And he says that for any natural living species, including humans, the goal of that species, the telos in the Greek, is to achieve fulfilment of its form, its essence, what it is to be a human, for instance.

And both Plato and Aristotle see the intellectual and moral excellences as not just necessary for our flourishing, but actually is constitutive of it. In Plato's case, wholly constitutive of it, and in Aristotle's case, the main constituent. So they don't divide our flourishing from our morally and intellectually excellent lives, which is interesting. We've become rather nervous about this word virtue. I think we kind of think it has a rather oppressive Victorian tone in modern discussions. There can quite often be there can quite often be dismissing of the cultivation of virtues as virtue signalling. And I find that rather cynical, rather lazy. It seems to me that whatever your religious beliefs, human societies throughout history have encouraged certain qualities and forms of behavior and praised those qualities as virtues precisely because both individually and communally, we need those qualities in order to live good lives. So I

want us to feel, I want to bring back the word virtue into fashion a bit. I want us to feel less uncomfortable about using it. This idea of virtue and how virtue can be a guiding light, but virtue is also a bit of a dirty word, I think. How do you reconcile this idea for possibly a set of new virtues with this idea that people also feel that they want to live free and that liberty is something that is kind of, in some sense, antithetical to a prescribed virtue. That's such an interesting question. I mean, I think we'd be less worried about this word virtue if we consider that in ancient Greek, the word arater simply means excellence. And we might be less worried about saying intellectual and moral excellences. Well, here's what Plato would say to the challenge

you've just posed. He would say that if we want to be truly free, we have to be able to make choices for ourselves. And choice, acting from choice is different from just acting on a whim. To act from choice, you need to have full and accurate information and you need to be able to reflect on it. So you make a real choice and you're not just being swept along with the crowd. To do that, you need intellectual excellences. You need to sort of know how to search out the information how to assess it how to critically examine it you need the moral qualities to be able to make good judgments about it so Plato would say that without these intellectual and moral excellences you can't be truly free.

You may think you're free, you're doing what you want, you're acting on a whim, but you're not actually free. You're not running your own life. You're actually letting other people, whether they're media moguls, whether they're politicians, maybe even algorithms lead your life for you. So you've talked about the ancient conception of flourishing. In your philosophical framework and the way that you're thinking about flourishing in a very modern way, there are some significant differences between that and what Aristotle and Plato were talking about. So can you say something about that? What is the difference between the old way and the new way? I'll just talk about the new way that I'm trying to develop. I won't speak for everybody in the

world who's working on flourishing and virtue right now. I mean, I think we owe a huge amount to Plato and Aristotle. They are the foundation stone here. Plato and Aristotle may be the foundation stone, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't turn it over and have a good hard look at what's underneath it. Because firstly, both Plato and Aristotle relate human flourishing to a single ideal and rank humans in a hierarchy according to how closely they can approximate to this single ideal. So very regrettably, they think that mentally and physically disabled people can't achieve full flourishing. In Aristotle's case, he also thinks that women can't achieve full flourishing because they are not fully rational in Aristotle's view. achieve full flourishing because they are not fully rational in Aristotle's view. And Aristotle also very unfortunately believes that there are some humans born to be natural slaves. They just don't possess sufficient reasoning ability to govern their own lives. So they have this hierarchy and various categories of human cannot achieve full flourishing on it. So I would strongly want to argue against that.

And what I would like to do is instead of having one human ideal, I would want to say that our individual flourishing is tied to our particular faculties, whatever they may be, and the best fulfilment possible of those particular faculties. So we end up again with not just one notion of the good life, but lots of different notions of a good life. And for me, that's really, I mean, I had a very severely mentally and physically handicapped sister, and I really want to fight against the notion that people with various forms of disability can't live flourishing lives. And this links to the second way in which I want to kick back against Plato and Aristotle, because they think that because, in their view, some humans are not capable of rationally directing their own lives, they think that in these cases, it's better off for those humans if their lives are run by somebody else or some other group

of people who are more intellectually able and better educated. The notion of the philosopher rule is in the Republic here, and Aristotle has something not entirely dissimilar in his politics. his politics. So again, I want to fight against that and say no. Personal autonomy, self-rule, being the governor of my own life is really important to my individual flourishing. I would want to interpret our intellectual faculties as only being capable of proper fulfilment if autonomy is built into the picture, if we're running our own lives. So getting rid of that single notion of a human ideal where a lot of us fail, I want to get rid of that. And I want to include autonomy in the picture of intellectual fulfillment. fulfillment. Hi. So good to meet you. How are you? Good to meet you. Yeah. We can just start right now. Do you want to? Okay, sure. Maybe we can just sort of get out of the way for a second.

My name is Andrew Buzari. I'm a primary care physician and founding executive director of Cattuzzo Social Medicine at University Health Network. To me, in some sense, what I've seen is that flourishing in some ways is about survival. I mean, that's what we have been facing from life and death. And I think when you look at the rates for people who were unhoused through the pandemic, they were five to 10 times more likely to die. When you look at the aspects of people who are living in poverty, they live 20 to 30 years less. So when I think of the term human flourishing, I really do push on this element of, well, what is humanism going to look like in the healthcare system? And so if that means flourishing for people is going to be the idea that we can now talk about how people should be able to access food and food security.

When that wasn't asked before, that help wasn't there. I think that can help people dictate how they want to thrive in their own life. And yeah, I mean, I think as we're talking more about human flourishing than self-care, I think that's probably a positive thing. I think as we're talking more about human flourishing than self-care, I think that's probably a positive thing. We know poverty can be such an exacerbating driver, such a wicked driver of bad health outcomes, whether it's mental health or physical health. And then you're sort of left in tatters to try to figure out in this sick care system which door to enter, how to coordinate all of this care. And more and more, it's feeling much more disparate, much harder to access. And I think,

you know, SoundTimes and all the workers and the leadership there do a great job of really trying to help bridge between the mental health and physical health system. But just knowing between acute care to long-term care to what's happening in terms of housing to primary care, it's just so fractured. So what do you hear from people that come in? I mean, I think we have to be really clear about the data that when we're looking at social housing wait lists in Toronto, it's now 10 to 14 years. And what I think is driving a lot of distress for those of us working in these spaces is that if you're seeing someone in their 40s or 50s as a patient and when you look at the data around people who are unhoused living half as long as the general public in their 40s or 50s

the promise of housing may most likely be outside their window of life and that when we talk about how cruel and wicked the policies are is what i think all of us are trying to reconcile on the ground and advocate for in terms of these band-aid solutions in many ways in the health care system are not going to alleviate or heal a lot of the worsening health that's being driven by anti-human policies that is not putting people and humans first when we talk about poverty reduction we talk issues around housing access to food security and child care these are major we call the social determinants of health, but I think it's such an academic term and we should really push on it to be really the moral determinants of health. These

are real moral failures and policy failures that are driving people to health outcomes that are continuing to pour into the health care system in a way we just haven't seen before. Social assistance in Ontario, for example, is about $1,200 a month. Dr. Buzari points out the rental loan for a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto averages more than $2,000. I came here to talk about health care, and we've specifically been talking about housing. And so talk to me about that.

Talk to me about the nexus of the kind of health care that you are working in and the problem of housing. And so talk to me about that. Talk to me about the nexus of the kind of health care that you are working in and the problem of housing. Is that the critical breaking point? I just think we can't disconnect it much longer. I think part of the challenge is we've never really designed health systems as well for people who've been unhoused, right? We actually, within our own medical discipline, have been able to codify, quote-unquote, bad behavior. We'll say, well, patient is not adherent to the regimen, medical regimen, or patient is noncompliant. Really nice, fancy terms that you get trained in medical school to write down when a person doesn't show up to their primary care visit or when someone's not taking their medications. How are we expecting people to take their medications when we've failed them on the

most basic human right of housing? In the 70s, when you look at our social housing stock, we actually had closer to 10% of all housing was social housing. And what we've seen is that atrophy over the years, and those are active policy choices, to now less than 3%. And so, again, this is why a major driver as to why we're seeing so much homelessness and people who are being who are unhoused at this time. And again, it's active policy decision. You know, I hope, you know, these people that ask those questions of what people deserve, well, I would, you know, these people that ask those questions of what people deserve, well, I would flip the question back around to people and say, when we know that if you're born into a certain neighborhood, you know, if you're born into this neighborhood

in Regent Park or in St. Jamestown versus Rosedale or Forest Hill, the probability is totally different in your likelihood of living an extra 10 to 12 years. So you lose 10 to 12 birthdays just by where you were born in the city of Toronto. And I don't think that's fair. I don't think any children came into it about deserving or undeserving. So the question I think to the politicians or people who like to espouse that frame is, well, how many birthdays lost per neighborhood are you willing to accept? I found that piece really powerful and moving. moving, it really brings home how reliant our health is on our local environment and our access to housing. At one point, you said, oh, I thought we were going to have a conversation about healthcare. And here we are talking about housing. Of course we are. If people can't sleep comfortably,

if they can't wash easily, if they can't feed themselves healthily, then it's going to be so difficult for them to be healthy. And it really resonated with me when one of the speakers said, it's really impossible for these people to access healthcare. And yet we punish them. We say they're non-compliant. We make it their fault. We make it sound as if they're being the difficult ones, when in fact, they're trapped in a system when it's really impossible for them to access healthcare. So I thought that was a really powerful piece. You also think about flourishing in terms of healthcare, and you've done some work on that file for the NHS. Can you talk about that work a little bit? Yes. Last year, I was asked by the UK National

Health Service to write an ethics review of a report that they had written on how to reduce inequalities in access to planned care, which had been bad in the United Kingdom even before the pandemic, but became greatly exacerbated by the pandemic, that certain socioeconomic groups were just not getting, they weren't even getting on the waiting lists. And when they were getting on the waiting lists, they had longer delays and just worse outcomes at every stage. They had longer delays and just worse outcomes at every stage. And in my review, I suggested that at various points in the care pathway, an ethical approach based on flourishing could be helpful in tackling the challenges, particularly in response to the prioritisation of waiting lists, where there are huge ethical issues. I mean,

probably the most difficult ethical issues are about how to prioritise waiting lists. And I argued that if you are considering patients within the same class of clinical need, then you can consider their overall circumstances and how much their flourishing is affected while they wait. Just look around us, look at what is happening. The world is literally in flames at the moment and an ethics of flourishing and a community approach to flourishing are really our only chance of putting out the fires. There is no plan B because there is no planet B. So are we going to prove ourselves intelligent enough and empathetic enough and moral enough to save the human species? I certainly hope so. I think we can. People really are starting to wake up to the fact that this kind of virtuous behaviour isn't a choice anymore. It's really our only hope of survival, not just in the long term,

the hope of survival, not just in the long term, but in the short term. And if we want to have any kind of comfort of life and be able to go on holidays and not, etc, etc, we have to exercise these intellectual and moral virtues. There isn't any other choice. Aristotle said that the human is a political animal. And by that, he didn't mean we're the kind of animal that goes around putting notices through people's letterboxes necessarily. He means we're the kind of animal that's designed to live in a polis, in a community. And I think you just have the evidence right now all around us about how true that is. You've been listening to How to Flourish in a Broken World. Thank you to Susan Reeser, Alexis Whel, and Willow Grove Farm in Markham, Ontario.

Angie Hobbs, Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Nimoy Lewis, Assistant Professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University. And Andrew Buzari, Primary Care Physician and Founding Executive director of Gattuso Social Medicine at the University Health Network. This episode was produced by Nahid Mustafa. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Laura Antonelli and Orande Williams. The senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly and I'm Nala Ayyad. Nettopi For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.