A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Manitoba chief's blockade threats may be best strategy June 22, 2007 Calls for a coast-to-coast railway blockade by aboriginal leader Terrance Nelson couldn’t be more un-Canadian. We like things settled without conflict. We’re particularly loath to engage in it right out in the open, the way Nelson likes to do it. The chief of Manitoba’s Roseau River Anishinabe First Nation says some outrageous things when he gets heated up about the grim struggles of Canada’s aboriginal population. And he’s just about at the boiling point these days. The Assembly of First Nations is organizing a “day of action” next week for the nation’s aboriginals, and Nelson wants to see a blockade so big that Canada’s economy will still be reeling from the shock months from now. “There’s only one way to deal with a white man. You either pick up a gun or you stand between him and his money,” Nelson most famously said a month ago in a media interview. In a follow-up Globe and Mail profile this week, he reiterat...

Choosing death ought to be our right June 15, 2007 With any luck, I’ll live long enough to see this country do something brave around making it easier for people to choose death. I respect all sides of the issue. There are some really terrifying possibilities any time it becomes socially acceptable for one group of humans to kill another. But let’s just start with one thing, then: That an old and failing person ought to have the right to die gracefully and painlessly, at a time of their choosing. Surely we can agree on that. I don’t think a lot about death, but it crosses my mind from time to time. For instance, I’m currently reflecting on whether I still want to be cremated, or am starting to favour being planted au natural in some beautiful forest. People generally don’t have much say over how they die, so I won’t indulge in any vanities about how much control I will or won’t have over my own life when it’s my time to die. I know death comes from unexpected directions. I can live wit...

Problems at BC Lottery bigger than Poleschuk June 8, 2007 Vic Poleschuk had to go. Somebody had to take the fall at the BC Lottery Corporation over the issue of whether a few retailers are cheating lottery customers out of their winnings. The president of the corporation is an obvious choice. But we’d be naive to think that the problem ends there. If we’ve actually set up a government-run gambling industry that tolerates the cheating of customers, we’ve got a lot more to worry about than can ever be addressed by just firing the guy at the top. Poleschuk has worked in upper reaches of BC Lottery Corp virtually since its inception in 1985, first as vice-president and then as president. During his tenure, the lottery corporation presided over a 500 per cent rise in gambling revenues, to more than $2.5 billion a year. That’s pretty impressive from a business perspective. But the gambling industry isn’t just another business. Poleschuk talked on many occasions about that very thing, and th...

Tomorrow's disasters visible in report on kids in care June 1, 2007 I spoke to a Grade 10 class about homelessness a few months back, and was profoundly discouraged to realize that to them, the problems in Victoria’s downtown were just the way it was. They’d never known any different. The sleeping bags, the shopping carts, the drugs and the craziness - these kids had no way of knowing that just 10 years ago, most of that didn’t even exist. On the one hand, the problems all seem so new. But as a report released this week makes clear, creating homelessness is in fact a slow, sad process. Where did the trouble come from? People ask me that a lot. I then recite a long list of best guesses, starting with the drastic cuts to Canadian mental-health support that started in the early 1980s and carrying right on through two decades of missteps and flawed thinking. We’ve now reached a point where we not only provide less help to people who need it, but also create the conditions that lead to ...