A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Posts

Force 'em into treatment, they say. Yeah, right

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 ...

Homelessness in 2026: Is there even a way back?

My journalism career coincidentally tracks the rise in homelessness in BC, from the days before anyone even used the word, to modern times when virtually every community in the province is profoundly affected by it. I wrote for the Victoria Times Colonist for more than 20 years, full-time for the first 15 years and then as a weekly columnist. Homelessness was an issue I came back to over and over again. I have been part of adding to the public record for all the years starting from when that word first described maybe 10 or 15 men with alcohol problems, to the current time, when hundreds of people with immensely complex health issues are stuck on our streets. I was no longer a journalist when I sat on the mayor-appointed committee that dove into the issues for the still completely relevant 2008 report Breaking The Cycle of Mental Illness, Addictions and Homelessness , but by then was working in social services and felt a real responsibility to help open people's eyes to the...

We're on the road to nowhere

Nothing quite like talking to 140 or so people living homeless to get a clearer sense of what's really going on out there on our streets. I thought I knew a fair bit before I started into my little Instagram project five months ago to give voice to people living homeless here in Greater Victoria. But wow, the things I've learned. In no particular order, here are a few of them: People are really, really sick out there. This is a major health crisis, plain and simple. People are enduring terrible infections, raging and highly contagious bacterial illnesses, bone-destroying weirdness from toxic drugs, and completely unsupported bouts of severe mental health crisis. They're dying at an astounding rate - at least 15 people dead just since early December, and those are just the ones that the street community has been able to keep track of. Meanwhile, our community's primary response has been to crack down harder on them for the "street disorder" caused by the jury-...

Future generations will (rightly) shame us for this moment

What’s underway in Canada and the United States right now is the manufacturing of new classes of people who can be discriminated against legally. Both our countries have been here before, but I’d always thought I was in the generation that would end all of that awful business, not lay the groundwork for more. The latest target for discrimination and harassment in the US are people with first- and second-generation immigrant backgrounds from the ever-changing list that the government keeps of countries that it doesn’t like. In Canada, the target is people living homeless. I’m not going to suggest that anyone’s wearing balaclavas and shooting people dead yet on Victoria streets. But that’s not to say there aren’t some striking – and disturbing - comparisons between ICE raids in the US and what’s happening for people living on our streets. The principles are certainly the same: Identify a group of “undesirables” whose vanquishing can be politicized, and make life hell for them...

Sometimes using drugs makes sense

One of my long-time friends has Dissociative Identity Disorder – what they once called multiple personality. Getting to know her and her people over many years has helped me to see that it’s not a mental illness at all, it’s a coping mechanism. I see so many parallels with this thing we call addiction. For my friend, dissociating was a sane response to an insane situation, which in her case was a long childhood of non-stop physical, sexual and emotional abuse. When her little-girl self couldn’t handle what was happening to her, she found a way to check out. Some other “person” that her amazing brain had created would emerge to take the pain and heartbreak, and then retreat deep inside with the memory to protect my friend from having to know it ever happened. Being able to dissociate so completely as a child was a brilliant strategy for her at the time. She thinks it probably saved her life, allowing her to take repeated abuse that any fully present child could never bear. The cop...

Half a millenium is long enough to know that what you're doing isn't working

I went looking for the origins of that phrase "the deserving poor" today. It turns out to be a 426-year-old term dating back to the Elizabethan Poor Laws, which aimed to reduce the devastating impact of a famine by providing alms to the deserving poor and a hard stint in the workhouse for the undeserving. Modern anti-poverty policies would never word things like that, of course. But strip away the dressed-up language and that’s still what we’ve got. We’ve even lost the plot on “the deserving poor” at this point, with people now stranded out on our streets who actually would have been eligible for alms back in Elizabethan times. Back in 1601, the Poor Laws divided impoverished people into three categories for the purpose of deciding how much help they qualified for. “The vagrant” was undeserving and destined for the workhouse, where he would be punished daily doing work that was deliberately designed to be more unpleasant than even the worst of jobs outside the workhouse...