A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

B.C.'s homeless strategy is all talk and little action March 23, 2007 We’ll leave it to Arn Van Iersel to weigh in with the lowdown on how things are going with the province’s three-year-old homelessness initiative. The acting auditor general is going to be reviewing the initiative to see whether it has been effective. But if Victoria’s downtown in that period is any measure, I’d have to guess the news from Van Iersel won’t be good. It won’t be all bad, of course. Almost 1,300 units of subsidized and supported housing have been given the go-ahead since the launch of the 2004 strategy. And at least Port Alberni has a mental- health outreach worker, as promised to B.C. communities under the initiative but so far in place in barely a handful of towns. Virtually any kind of affordable-housing initiative is a blessing in these unsettling times, marked at one end by the grim realities of nearly 800 people living on our streets, and at the other by sky-high housing prices that squeeze the...

If only teen pregnancy was as easy as more birth control March 16, 2007 I’m rooting for Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, and for anyone else who sets out to address the way we care for the 10,000 children in government care. But the first challenge is to start thinking differently about the problem. And that means letting go of preconceived notions - like the one about how teen pregnancy will be solved with sex education and birth control. As the province’s new representative for children and youth, Turpel-Lafond has the opportunity to do some powerful work over the next five years on behalf of the tragic figures caught up in B.C.’s troubled family-care system. And she’s right that it’s a heck of an indicator when girls in care in our province are four times more likely to get pregnant than other girls. I just hope she goes deeper into that issue than her musings last week around whether children in care were getting enough sex education and birth control. If only it were that simple. Sure, g...

It all comes out in the wash March 9, 2007 On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters. With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories. I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go. But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could. The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched th...

Restaurant calorie counts a weighty subject March 2, 2007 In this time of angst over how fat we’re all getting, the only real villain to this point has been our own gluttonous selves. Nobody’s out there making us eat too much. And for the most part, that’s true. If people are putting on weight to the point that it’s having an impact on their health, then it’s up to them to do something about that. We have the right to good health care no matter what bad choices we make, but we still need to take personal responsibility for staying healthy. That said, the astounding figures in a U.S. health organization’s newsletter this month certainly underline the restaurant industry’s significant role in helping North Americans lard on the pounds. We may be eating the stuff, but it’s the industry that has cranked up the calorie count to truly obscene levels. The restaurants listed in the March newsletter of the Centre for Science in the Public Interest were all American, but I don’t imagine the resu...