A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Children in government care Sept. 29, 2006 Everything you need to know about what’s going wrong in B.C. communities these days is summed up in the depressing little report released last week on the health status of children in permanent government care. If you’ve ever wondered where lost souls come from, look no farther. Child and Youth Officer Jane Morley and provincial health officer Dr. Perry Kendall studied health outcomes for children in permanent care between April 1997 and November 2005. Some 37,000 kids were taken into care in that period, with 24,800 eventually making their way out of the system. The report focuses on the 12,200 who didn’t. Not unexpectedly, the study found that kids raised solely by the government fare far worse than other kids, sometimes in ways that underlined for me the essence of family. Having a series of people being paid to care for you just isn’t the same as being raised by your family, a truth the study reveals in telling ways. For instance, kids in ...

Cops for Cancer Sept. 22, 2006 In homes scattered around the Island, 21 amateur cyclists will be spending tonight preparing for what just may be the most significant athletic event of their lives. They will ride more miles, cry more tears and raise more money over the next two weeks than any of them would have thought possible mere months ago. My own Tour de Rock ride for the Canadian Cancer Society is five years past now, and I doubt that I’ll ever grow so nostalgic as to forget how much hard work it was to get ready for that ride. But the power of the 1,000-kilometre journey has also stayed with me, as it no doubt has for every team of riders since the debut of the Cops for Cancer fundraiser nine years ago. This year’s riders leave Victoria tomorrow for the van ride to Port Hardy, where the long and hilly ride south will begin first thing Sunday morning. For two intense weeks, they’ll ride several hours a day with no mind to the weather, and climb any number of daunting hills. They’l...

Philippe Rushton and the "glass ceiling" Sept. 14, 2006 If it wasn’t Philippe Rushton’s study, I probably could have worked up more of a head of steam over the latest “finding” that it’s lower IQs holding women back from those big corporate jobs. But Rushton is just that wacky University of Western Ontario professor who’s always coming up with some one-off, offensive explanation for why things are the way they are. Getting riled up by one of his theories is barely worth the effort. He’s something of a dream academic for people looking to justify discrimination. The psychology prof is known for his past work ranking Asian and European intelligence above that of the black races. His most recent study on the differences between men and women concluded that it’s “very likely” that the reason women aren’t advancing as rapidly in their careers is because they’re less intelligent than men. Being called intellectually inferior by a guy like Rushton is practically a badge of honour....

Dying on your own terms Sept. 8, 2006 Neither John nor Lorna McCadden are alive to tell us their version of events from that particularly awful day last week at Penticton Regional Hospital. The two of them alone know the truth of what happened. Judge the shootings by the facts of that day, and it’s a murder-suicide. John shot his wife in the head while visiting her at the hospital on Aug. 30, then killed himself. There’s no way to know whether Lorna wanted to be killed. Initial news stories focused on the level of hospital security and recalled other murders in B.C. hospitals. But step back from the moment, and the facts tell a different story. In that version, John was a tired old man growing sicker all the time, and his beloved Lorna was about to be dispatched permanently to a nursing home. In his mind, at that moment, dying just seemed like the cleanest way to wrap things up. That two old, failing lovers might choose to die together rather than see their lives slip beyond their cont...

Tofino runs out of water Sept. 1, 2006 Any number of painful lessons can be learned from Tofino’s current water crisis. Accidents happen, but this was no accident. Everyone in town should have seen this coming. The extreme nature of the crisis is undeniable. Tofino’s economy is almost fully dependent on tourism. Shutting down the town’s accommodation and restaurant services mere days before one of the biggest tourist weekends of the summer is a truly drastic, desperate thing to do. But while the summer has indeed been hot and dry for much of the Island, Tofino’s crisis was in the works long before now. This is the third summer in a row that Tofino has fretted about its dwinding water supply. That nothing has changed serves as yet another sobering reminder of what happens when communities fail to act. Tofino acted in its own way, mind you. Two years ago, its citizens voted against improvements that would have brought more water into the town. Reports in the Tofino media from that time s...

So now the head of the region’s new psychiatric emergency service has quit. In a funny sort of way, that’s almost good news. Dr. Anthony Barale’s passion and rare candour around the crappy way we’re managing addiction and mental illness will be missed. I don’t like to think of people like him getting squeezed out of the Vancouver Island Health Authority, because we desperately need them to guide change. And boy, do we need change. All will not be lost along with Barale, however, if his high-profile resignation this week finally wakes people up. Finally, it’s not just the social groups sounding the alarm about dwindling community services and support, but the clinical director of a barely two-year-old VIHA service intended as a leading-edge response to people with mental illness. Archie Courtnall Centre, at Royal Jubilee Hospital, has instead become the “default processing centre for addicted individuals seeking treatment,” complains Barale. Apparently, nobody at the centre contempl...

Addiction misread Aug. 18, 2006 The trouble with drugs is that most of us can use them just fine. The majority of people who try drugs - even street drugs - can quit using them fairly easily if they need to. I’ve come to suspect that fact is why we’re still so damn hopeless at dealing with addiction. We just don’t get it. We’re a nation of enthusiastic users that really struggles with the concept that not everybody has such an easy relationship with drugs and alcohol. Most of us will drink, drop, smoke or swallow various drugs over our lifetimes with little incident. We’ll go hard as teenagers and less hard as adults, and we’ll quit when the time seems right, for reasons ranging from the kids getting old enough to notice, the mornings getting harder to bear, or just the embarrassment of being 40 and having to buy marijuana from the kid on the corner. For those of us so blessed, our drug use remains within our control. When we want to stop using, we do. We understand addiction exists on...

Here's a thoughtful piece from today's Vancouver Sun opinion pages that sums up so much of what's wrong with the federal and provincial governments' approach to health.

Development in B.C. parks Aug. 11, 2006 Parks are important places. They’re gifts from the taxpayers of today to every generation that follows, in perpetuity. Any change to the way we use our parks is potential cause for alarm, because one bad policy shift is all it takes to betray the public trust that our parks represent. With that in mind, here’s hoping that British Columbians think long and hard about what it will mean in the long-term to open up more development in B.C. parks. A call for proposals went out this week for construction in six provincial parks, and six more will be put on the list at the end of August. We have mere months to decide if this is what we want for our parks. The wonderfully isolated Cape Scott Provincial Park was on this week’s list, and thus could be the future site of a small lodge, cabins or yurts. As Parks Minister Barry Penner noted, that would make things much nicer for Cape Scott visitors who didn’t like to tent. But is it true to the park legacy en...

RCMP and crime in the media Aug. 4, 2006 Having experienced the challenge many times of trying to squeeze information out of the RCMP in the course of chasing a news story, I can’t imagine how much tougher the task will get if B.C.’s Mounties take the advice of their communications department and clam up further. People in B.C. are much more fearful of being a victim of crime than they need to be, the department found in an internal report last year, made public this week after the Vancouver Sun got hold of a copy. The report speculates that the problem might be the volume of crime stories in the media. If RCMP media officers weren’t quite so open and prompt in their dealings with the media, the report wonders, is it possible the media would fixate less on crime and people would calm down a little? Two-thirds of the British Columbians surveyed as part of the report said they were fearful of being a crime victim sometime in the next year. Not even close to that many actually will be. Th...