A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Deli-meat sandwiches should be no-go for elderly patients Sept. 5, 2008 So I’ve done my due diligence this week and read through several dozen news items, reports and public-health warnings about the listeriosis outbreak that’s killing Canadians. I’m afraid I have to fall back on that old cliché about being left with more questions than answers, particularly around why old, sick people are still being fed deli meats. Like most of the bacteria that cause food poisoning, listeria monocytogenes is found everywhere: In our soil and water; in almost 40 species of mammals (including humans); in fish; crustaceans; ticks; sewage waste; sickrooms. Healthy farm animals and humans alike can harbour it quite comfortably with no symptoms. For a healthy adult under age 50, a bout of listeriosis is unpleasant but generally manageable. Still, the overall fatality rate is 20 to 30 per cent. And for those whose health issues put them at greater risk, the fatality rate is 40 per cent or more. Pregnant wo...

VIHA's problems go much deeper than communications department Aug. 29, 2008 It’s a poor workman who blames his tools, so let’s hope the Vancouver Island Health Authority rethinks its decision to lay the blame for bad communications on its long-suffering public relations staff. That VIHA pays $1 million a year to communicate badly is certainly a problem. But if the health authority genuinely believes the root cause of that is due to the communication department not doing its job - well, that goes a long way to explaining why these kind of problems continue to dog VIHA. I’ve been an observer of the local health scene for many years, having started my work at the Times Colonist in 1989 as the paper’s health reporter. I’ve never lost interest in the subject, or the ongoing communication problems that have plagued whatever entity was running regional health services at a particular point in time. When I arrived here, the Greater Victoria Hospital Society was running things, under the t...

The secret "chill pill" for outrage: Grandkids Aug. 22, 2008 Outrage is an opinion writer’s stock in trade. So at one level I’m grateful for having a deep vein of wide-ranging indignation inside me to mine as needed. But just back from a holiday with the grandchildren, I’m also grateful for the things that allow me to let go for a while. Tending to the basic needs of young children is the best therapy I’ve found as a break from chronic outrage. As any parent well knows, looking after young children is a full mind-body activity. I’m a superb multi-tasker in most areas of my life, but I can barely make it all the way through a single magazine article over the course of a long summer day if also charged with the care and feeding of three engaged and energetic little boys. It’s a blessing that I didn’t appreciate the first time round, when I was a young woman fearful that my full-time life of raising children was turning me into the worst kind of bore. In those days of endless s...

Oldest profession much like any business Aug. 8, 2008 The business of sex is surprisingly unsexy when you’re getting all you want, and our little film crew has certainly had its fill this past week in New Zealand. Four of us are down here right now trolling through a few of the country’s brothels - legalized five year ago when New Zealand scrapped its Canadian-style laws against adult prostitution and started treating the industry like any other business. The most immediate result of our travels will be a documentary next spring on Global TV. But what I’m hoping will be the ultimate outcome is the beginning of change in our own country. Like Canada, New Zealand has long had an active sex industry and many, many brothels regardless of laws against them. The sale of sexual services has been legal here all along, as it is in Canada, so the 2003 changes were primarily about acknowledging the right to safe, fair workplaces for the country’s estimated 4,000 sex workers. The naysayers - and t...

  Aug. 1, 2008 As you read this, I’m somewhere in Auckland, in the midst of an intense few days immersed in the New Zealand sex industry. I want to learn, and there’s no better way to do that than to go see things for yourself. New Zealand had laws very much like ours governing the sex industry up until 2003, when the country changed course and decriminalized prostitution. I figure it’ll be a great place to look for really current information on what happens when a country stops viewing its sex workers as criminals. Thanks to a law student from the University of Victoria, Hillary Bullock, I’ve got a binder full of information on how New Zealand made the transition. She was looking for a class project and I was looking for exactly what she delivered, which was a detailed report on how that country made it happen. It was a remarkably fast transition. Introduced in 2000 by Labour MP Tim Barnett, the Prostitution Reform Bill was passed into law just three years later. Most aspect...

Lessons learned from the brothel project July 25, 2008 It’s been close to a year since I started talking publicly about wanting to open a brothel. And let me tell you, it’s been one of the most fascinating and surprising years of my life. Brothels and escort agencies flourish in our region and right across the country, so I and my good pal Lauren Casey weren’t breaking new ground on that front with our little plan to start an escort agency with a difference. Our aim was to develop a fair and benevolent workplace for adult sex workers that also donated a share of profits to services and supports for disadvantaged workers. As you might expect of a volunteer project taken on by two very busy women, our plans poked along at a snail’s pace for months. But in the spring we quite accidentally connected with a human dynamo of a sex worker here in Victoria, who in turn connected us with a human dynamo of an entrepreneur with experience running a Vancouver escort agency noted for being a fair an...

Drunkenness at Music Fest puts teens at major risk July 18, 2008 As always, I had a wonderful time at Courtenay’s Island Music Fest this past weekend, and I don’t want what I’m about to say to be taken as criticism of what is truly a summer highlight for my family. But holy moly, there was some out-of-control drinking going on up there. There were kids drinking so hard that I suspect some of them were putting their lives at risk. They were falling-down, glassy-eyed, fumble-footed drunks. I can’t imagine the drunken coupling that went on in the teens’ sprawling, bottle-strewn campsites that wouldn’t have met the legal test of consent. I like young people, and saw a whole lot of them at Music Fest who were there for all the right reasons and not just to drink themselves blotto in the campground. So I definitely wouldn’t want anyone thinking that I’m pointing the finger at young people in general - or even underage drinking. What actually disturbed me was not that some teens were drinki...

Traumatic brain injury a common and life-altering experience July 11, 2008 One hard fall is all it takes. One punch. One smashup. One bolt out of the blue - a stroke, a case of meningitis. The official name for what results is “traumatic brain injury,” but that little label barely touches on what it means to have to live with one. Life will never be the same for those whose brains sustain a severe injury. People sometimes feel so dramatically altered that they come to consider the date of their injury as their new birthday. For Victoria man Des Christie, the injury was from a car accident at the age of 14. For the other 10,000 to 14,000 British Columbians who incur a traumatic brain injury in any given year, it might be a workplace accident, fall around the home, sports injury, medical problem, or any number of weird and unpredictable twists of fate. “In this organization alone, we’ve got a staff member, my younger brother, another staff member’s daughter and another staff member’s hu...

Little things mean a lot in halting a fall July 4, 2008 Everybody stumbles in their life. Most of us will bounce through any number of ups and downs over the course of a lifetime, some of it the result of bad choices and a lot of it for no obvious explanation other than bad luck and lousy circumstance. I suspect that’s why I’ve got a thing for issues like homelessness. I’ve seen my share of bad luck and lousy circumstance - nothing on a grand scale, but enough to help me see from an early age that life can hold some rough surprises. As the late John Lennon so eloquently penned, “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” Fortunately, every object nudged over the brink of the abyss is not destined to plunge non-stop to the bottom. Any number of things along the way can break the fall. The researchers call them “protective factors,” but what they ultimately come down to is having people in your life to catch you before you fall any farther. It’s a role that family ...

Coleman's autocratic style could be problem in new ministry June 27, 2008 Dare we hope that a new day is dawning with news this week that B.C.’s most pressing social issues are now the responsibility of a single provincial ministry? The new Housing and Social Development Ministry is an amalgam of various challenging bits pulled from other ministries, and on that front reminds me of the old “Ministry of Lost Causes” - the wink-wink nudge-nudge name for the now-defunct Community, Aboriginal and Women’s Ministry, which seemed more than anything to be a place where unpopular issues went to die. The rebundled housing ministry has responsibility for virtually everything that relates to poverty: welfare; subsidized housing and homelessness; addiction and mental health strategy; landlord-tenant disputes; transition houses. It’s also got responsibility for anyone with a disability, including those with mental handicaps. Every impoverished and disadvantaged person in the province will be a c...