A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

We've shopped 'til we dropped - then shopped some more I’m not certain when it was that shopping became a question of patriotic duty, but I’m guessing it was when U.S. President George Bush made it an imperative in the days after 9/11. “Get on board,” he urged a devastated American public struggling to come to grips with the bombing of the World Trade Centre. “Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America's great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” Fast-forward seven years and the bombs are more metaphorical, this time tearing apart the world’s financial markets instead of New York City’s twin towers. But shopping is still the “cure,” apparently, as evidenced by our own federal government’s recent fit of pique with the country’s big banks over whether they’re doing enough to provide Canadians with easy credit. I get the theory of it - that everything depends on everything ...

It's good news week Even a doomsayer like me has to let up once in a while, and the Christmas season generally feels like the time to do it. Maybe it’s all those songs about peace and goodwill. At any rate, I’ve dug up some nuggets of good news to share with you this festive season. I admit, my initial instinct was to add a “but” to every one of them, because it seems that every upside has a downside in these problematic times. But for the sake of a holly, jolly column, I’m going to try to keep my gloomy inner voice in check for a change and tell you about what’s working. The B.C. government is awakening to the problems of homelessness. Four of the six news releases on the Ministry of Housing and Social Development Web site this week detail actions being taken to house or shelter people living on B.C. streets. Better still, work is underway on 19 old hotels in the Vancouver area to turn them into better housing for the impoverished people who already live there, plus add new units...

Sheer madness and massive waste of money to release BC prisoners to homelessness What I’d planned for today’s column was a look at what happens when somebody without housing is released from a provincial jail in B.C. I’d run into an interesting fellow named Reg in my downtown travels, who’d wanted to talk about the practise of releasing prisoners straight onto the streets after they’ve served their time at the jail on Wilkinson Road. He told me it had happened to him more times than he could count. But sometimes a column ends up becoming the story of what happened on the way to the story, and this is one of those. First, a few statistics to give you a sense of the issue at hand. B.C. has nine jails, which at any given point in time are housing close to 2,800 prisoners serving sentences of less than two years. The average stay is 55 days, so that means as many as 18,500 people moving in and out of B.C. jails in any given year, at a cost of almost $160 million. That’s just the cost to lo...

Stigma one of the worst 'symptoms' of HIV It’s a rainy Tuesday, and the group of women who put on this year’s Viral Monologues are debriefing over bowls of moose-meat stew about their performance the previous weekend. There were some challenging moments. One of the six performers backed out at the last minute, unable to bear the thought of putting her HIV status out there for all the world to see. That left an empty chair on stage. But the group decided to leave the chair there anyway, as a reminder of the stigma that still lingers when it comes to HIV. The effect was powerful. The Viral Monologues models itself after Eve Ensler’s popular Vagina Monologues. The “viral” version of the play was launched in 2002 by the Voice Collective, the AIDS Vancouver Island women’s group who is meeting on this day to dissect its sixth and most recent production. The “monologue” premise a la Ensler is simple enough: Women sit on stage and tell personal stories from their lives - from the poin...

Local police officer takes a stand against drug prohibition David Bratzer and I share at least one opinion in common: That it costs us a pointless fortune to maintain the charade of having effective drug laws in Canada. Me holding that opinion: No big deal. Anyone who knows the kind of things I write about wouldn’t be too surprised to discover I’m of the belief that Canada and the U.S. have made a complete hash of things by treating a health and social issue like a criminal matter. But Bratzer holding that opinion: That’s just a little different. He’s a Victoria police officer - the one tasked with enforcing those laws. I suspect there are many more who think like Const. Bratzer inside the department, as you’d expect would happen to anyone tasked with patrolling Victoria’s ridiculous streets for any length of time. But it’s still not a view that’s expressed publicly by police very often. In fact, Bratzer is one of only two active police officers in Canada who does public speaking on b...

Early-morning street tour speaks volumes for what hasn't changed Giant box of day-old doughnuts: Check. Three big jugs of coffee and a whole lot of sugar and cream: Check. Final essential item: Two packs of cigarettes, enough for one smoke each for the first 40 people Rev. Al Tysick sees on his regular morning rounds. He goes out every weekday morning at 5:45 a.m. to wake up people sleeping on Victoria’s streets. He started doing it seven months ago, after funding changes at the rebuilt Our Place street drop-in resulted in shorter opening hours. He buys the cigarettes with his own money, because getting a free smoke in the morning means a lot to people. “It’s like taking a bottle of wine to a friend’s house,” says Tysick as he parks the Our Place van at our first top on 800-block Fort Street. “That’s what we’re doing this morning: We’re going to their house.” Tysick’ wake-up call is a kinder, gentler version of the one that people will get an hour later, when police do their own m...

Media wrong to conspire in hiding kidnapping news Best wishes to Mellisa Fung, the intrepid CBC reporter who was released last week from what must have been a horrific and traumatic month imprisoned in a cave in Afghanistan. She’s safe, and I’m very glad to hear that. But what are we to make of recent word that the world’s media reached a private agreement to keep her kidnapping a secret until now? With no disrespect to Fung or those who wanted to keep her safe, I’m stunned by the news. As happy as we are to have Fung back, the truth is that most of us didn’t even know she was missing. That’s because in a most unusual development, the global media agreed from the outset not to report on her high-profile kidnapping. It’s easy to get caught up in the spirit of the moment and see the media’s decision as evidence of the industry finally thinking about whether it’s helping or hurting with the way it covers the news. “We must put the safety of the victim ahead of our normal instinct for full...

Voting a crap shoot at municipal elections In just over a week, we’ll pick the mayors and councillors who will lead B.C. communities for the next three years. It’s an incredibly important job. We “hire” municipal councils to tend to dozens of vital tasks in our communities - from dog-catching and parking tickets to policing, planning, roadwork and economic development. A single term of bad council can turn a community on its ear for years to come. Councils also play an important role in representing our interests at the provincial and federal levels. Municipalities generate a scant eight per cent of the total tax base in the province, so we all want councils that are strategic and clued-in to ensure they’re effective at “managing up.” You’d think that the hiring process for a big job like that would be done with the utmost care. You’d think we’d be really conscious of wanting to pick the right people to lead our communities. But you’d be wrong. In truth, 70 per cent of us won’t even sh...

Silence is golden, and frighteningly rare I look at birds differently these days than I used to, ever since getting a great pair of binoculars a couple years ago that opened my eyes to the incredible variety of birds out there. But I quickly learned that if you really want to see birds, the trick is to stand still for a few minutes and listen. In the stillness, life goes back to normal in the spot you were just about to rush past, and you hear a whole lot of bird talk that you’d never have heard otherwise. That there’s meaning and purpose in silence is hardly a new philosophy. But it took birds for me to find it, and to remind me of how much of the world we no longer hear simply because we’re drowning it out with our own noise. What will the future hold for this cranked-up, hyper-communicating world of ours if we forget that? There are days at the bird marsh when the sounds of loud cell phone conversations are just about as common as those of the song sparrow. We’re living in a time wh...

Court decision on homeless 'camping' is ticket to real change So now people can sleep in our city parks, but have to be gone first thing in the morning. Hope somebody at city hall is developing a Plan B, because I sure don’t see that 7 a.m.-curfew stuff working out to anybody’s satisfaction for very long. Here’s the thing about last week’s B.C. Supreme Court judgment that brought us to this point: It’s one of the most powerful tools to emerge so far as a means of ending homelessness. Dealing with our problems requires political will, which in turn requires community outrage. The spectre of hundreds of people sleeping in our parks every night - even if rousted by 7 a.m. - will quickly generate all the outrage we need to get this ball rolling at long last. In fact, it has already wrested 85 new beds out of the province, none of which had even been hinted at until the judgment came down. B.C.’s highest court essentially ruled that because there aren’t nearly enough shelter beds fo...

With a municipal vote coming up in the Capital Region in November, here's a few questions that might help you quiz your municipal candidates as to what they plan to do about homelessness in the region if elected: CANDIDATE QUESTIONS What do you think are the reasons Victoria has such visible problems around homelessness and street issues? How do you think those problems should be handled? Where do homelessness and street issues rate in your list of priorities for the city? How would you describe your own level of knowledge on this subject? How did you come by that knowledge? Please describe an “ideal world” around homelessness in terms of which levels of government would assume most responsibility for dealing with the issue. What are the responsibilities of: the federal government? The provincial government? Municipal and regional government? The business community? Individual citizens? If elected, how would you demonstrate leadership in tackling the issues in Victoria and h...

1860s-era NYC tenement brings modern times to mind Oct. 10, 2008 Children falling sick - even dying - from milk contaminated by unscrupulous suppliers. Families struggling in substandard, overcrowded housing. Sound familiar? It could easily be a story ripped from today’s headlines. But in fact it was 1860s New York City, in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side. I heard the story last week on a visit to NYC. Tipped off by a Victoria acquaintance we ran into on the ferry to Ellis Island, we took her advice and visited the New York Tenement Museum, where I found myself in a small, dark apartment that in 1869 had been the home of an Irish immigrant family. The Moores had four children, one of whom died that year at the tender age of four months from the “swill milk” commonly sold to impoverished families. As has just happened in modern-day China, the milk was being diluted to increase profit, in this case with water, chalk and ammonia. Hard to escape a certain sense of déjà vu when...

Text of a speech I gave at the University of Victoria Oct. 7 as the Harvey Stevenson Southam lecturer: Thank you so much for coming tonight, and I’d especially like to thank the Southam family, both for giving me the opportunity to speak this evening and to teach a journalism course this fall at the University of Victoria. Both are pleasures I never expected to have, and that I’m enjoying very much. What I’ll be talking about this evening is this thing we call “media, ” and the role I think it needs to play in leading change in our communities. Seeing as some of what I’m going to be talking about will be about understanding the difference between being passionate versus being biased, I guess I’ll identify myself right off as being biased in terms of believing that change DOES need to come in our communities, on many front, but at the same time I work very hard to keep myself completely open-minded around the ways that we might go about achieving that change. Of course, I want to use ...

Donations most welcome for Oct. 16 event for street community Oct. 3, 2008 Winter approaches, and my friends on the street are still mostly out in the cold. Our region is trying much harder than it was a year ago to do something about homelessness, but little has changed in the short term for the majority of people living out there. The good news: Our community now knows what needs to be done, and has the right people in place to do it. As one of the volunteers who sits on the co-ordinating committee of the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness - the group that grew out of last year’s Mayor’s Task Force - I can assure you that some of the best-connected people with the biggest hearts are getting together regularly to try to work this crisis out. But all that effort doesn’t mean much in the here and now to the 1,200 or so people heading into another long, wet winter. For them, it’s bundle up and wait, because another year has come and gone and they’re still stuck out there. I’...

Bad thinking all round in Battershill story Sept. 26, 2008 What’s done is done, so there’s little point in getting too worked up over the many missteps in the Paul Battershill saga. But boy, there was some flawed thinking going on there at a whole lot of levels. And what’s most disturbing is that if it weren’t for a Victoria businessman inadvertently bringing the messy business to light in the first place, we might never have heard a word about any of it. If you haven’t yet read Times Colonist reporter Rob Shaw’s excellent piece this past Sunday on Battershill’s hard, fast fall from grace as Victoria’s police chief, add it to your must-read list. It chronicles an alarming amount of seriously bad decision-making leading up to Battershill’s forced resignation last month - on the part of Battershill, Mayor Alan Lowe and Victoria’s civilian police board. That the story took almost a full year to come out also tells you how badly those at the centre of the tale didn’t want you to know any o...

published Sept. 19, 2008 I’ve recently been reunited with my “hope chest” from a long-past marriage, and cracked open the lid this summer for the first time in nearly 30 years. Tucked in between the baby clothes and the wedding memorabilia were four years of my ex-husband’s tax returns. I find those returns coming to mind a lot these days amid the torrent of grim news about the economic meltdown in the U.S. For those too young to know, a hope chest is a relic from a time when teenage girls were given cedar chests for accumulating the household goods and treasures that they’d need to set up their house once they became somebody’s wife. After marriage, the wife was free to fill the chest with whatever she chose, which in my case turned out to be a random collection of keepsakes, photo albums, greeting cards, and my ex’s 1976-80 income tax returns. We were a typical young Courtenay couple of our day. My ex worked at the Campbell River mill. I taught piano for a few hours a week, bu...