A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

This was one of my favourite pieces that I've done so far among the seven I've now done for the Times Colonist this year, as I top 22,000 words on homelessness since January. This piece ran today, July 26. It was just so nice to spend all those hours out talking to people who so rarely get talked to, if you don't count being yelled at.  Link is here , where you can enjoy a nice layout. Words and a few photos of mine are below: One city block. So many heated opinions. Mayor Marianne Alto called it “a hive of misery.” A pastor at a downtown church told media that while it troubled him to go against the gospel by shutting out the people who live there, he’d rather do that than let them in. A place of “rampant public disorder, open drug use and filth,” filled with “violent addicts” needing to be locked up. A place so bad that the “chaos spiraling outward” from it would soon destroy Victoria’s entire ­downtown, as the Globe and Mail phrased it last year in a ­particularly inflam...

Some guy's comments on one of my Facebook posts this week really brought home this twisted thinking that people who use illicit drugs don't deserve support because it was their choice to use drugs in the first place. (The "made your bed now lie in it" school of thought.) I've learned that mostly when people say stuff like that, they're just shooting their mouth off, parroting the thing they've heard over and over again from childhood on. But how about we take a moment to dive into that thought - the idea that our social compact, as this guy put it, should not extend to carrying the burden for someone's "bad" choices. Let's call it the Your Fault Social Compact. It'll be modeled on that health insurance company in the States where the CEO ended up murdered because he symbolized ruthless and predatory capitalism destroying human lives. Or ICBC. Right now, our health care system says if you're sick, we'll care for you, even if th...

Pixabay:  Md Habibur Please do read this latest piece of mine in this morning's Times Colonist , where you can see the photos and a nicer layout, and appreciate the sheer remarkableness of the TC generously giving me all this space to talk about this big, big issue. But I'm finding the workarounds for Facebook's news article bans are getting blown up faster than new ones emerge, so posting this piece in full on my blog seems to be the only option for broader sharing. Here it is: A school on fire. A multi-vehicle pileup on the Malahat. A high-impact earthquake. First responders call these kinds of major disasters “mass casualty incidents” – MCIs.That’s the perfect term for 900-block Pandora, says a local B.C. Ambulance Service paramedic speaking on condition of anonymity. “Pandora is a slow-motion MCI,” he says. “We’re in a state of system failure, and it’s devastating to so many people. I don’t even see a light at the end of the tunnel, just a big black pit and people falli...

Premier David Eby doesn’t give a whit about my opinion. As it turns out, I feel the same way about his. But we are stuck with each other – him with his Premier-level access to the traditional media, me with a blog and social media. And I’ve got a few things to say. Anything said about a politician seems to get interpreted as a statement of political support for or against them. That’s not what this is. I don’t care for politics. So there’s no politics in what is bothering me about David Eby. And just to be transparent, I loathe the BC Conservatives. What is actually bothering me about David Eby is the great discomfort of seeing that a man who I once believed in can be acting this way. It’s quite a different level of betrayal than the usual political stuff. David Eby is a lawyer. His dad was a lawyer too, and his mom a teacher. He once headed up the BC Civil Liberties Association, and I interviewed him a number of times in those years. He was always a sharp thinker who I had a good opin...

My latest opus for the Victoria Times Colonist is a deep dive into drug treatment in BC.  It's the fifth piece in the monthly stories I'm writing for them in 2026 relevant to the homelessness crisis, and was easily the toughest so far to write. A person's individual recovery from a substance use disorder is still a fairly mystical process, and the fact that there's no real system around any of it in BC adds to the grey. And wow, so much to learn from a whole lot of informed, frustrated people. For me, gathering the information for the piece provided such insight into the idiocy of this talk of involuntary treatment as the thing that's needed to "fix" the visible social crisis in all of our communities. People are desperately trying to get into treatment voluntarily, in fact. But there's not nearly enough supports to meet the demand, no data to demonstrate whether anything is working, and a whole lot of judgment at the locked gates to all of it that is ...