A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Welfare outreach puts workers where the homeless are May 23, 2008 Wendy Sinke remembers wishing the cameras were there one rainy afternoon a few months into her new job. She was on a downtown sidewalk, balancing an umbrella over her homeless client’s scooter so he and her laptop wouldn’t get wet while he filled out the income-assistance forms she’d brought him. Sinke figures a photo would have been worth a thousand words at that moment as a symbol of changing times. An outreach worker with the Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance (MEIA), Sinke is part of a new government strategy that ends years of trying to get everyone off income assistance, and instead aims to get a few more on it. The program was launched on the Island last fall after highly successful pilots on the streets of a few small B.C. towns two years ago. Sinke works with Victoria’s new multi-disciplinary outreach team, which grew out of the 2007 Mayor’s Task Force report on homelessness. Her role on the team is ...

Do you know where your laws are? May 16, 2008 By the end of May, hundreds of new and amended laws will take effect in B.C., almost none of which have been given any public scrutiny. In a scant three months, the provincial government has hustled 18 bills into law. At least another six are expected to be passed by the time the legislature recesses for the summer at the end of this month. The bills affect hundreds of regulations from dozens of acts. The proposed Wills, Estates and Succession Act, for instance, has 276 regulations. The Public Health Act has 161. The Miscellaneous Amendments Act incorporates changes to 29 other acts. Unless you’ve got considerably more time than me for a self-directed, regulation-by-regulation comparison of the changes, you and I remain equally in the dark as to what they are, the impact they’ll have or the rationale behind them. Many are little more than housekeeping, of course, and others are welcome news. It’s great to hear of new laws protecting milita...

Homeless needle exchange hits road for better or worse May 9, 2008 We’re about to become the first major city in Canada to pull the plug on its needle exchange, without a clue what will happen as a result. As of the end of May, the region’s largest needle exchange will close its doors on Cormorant Street and begin a mobile service. The business of exchanging as many as 2,000 needles a day will be done on the street from that point on. What’s the rationale? There isn’t one. It’s just what happens when the chips are left to fall where they may. The needle exchange is going mobile not because it’s an effective strategy on any front, but simply because no place can be found for it. Greater Victoria has had a needle exchange for almost 20 years, operated by AIDS Vancouver Island. You’d never know it from the hand-wringing and hysteria that has accompanied any mention of the exchange this past year or two, but once upon a time the exchange had neighbours who actually wrote letters supporting...

We shine at solving non-problems May 2, 2008 Our water bottles are safe once more, thanks to a federal response so speedy and decisive that you could almost believe a new day was dawning in Canada. In less than a year, bisphenol A went from a chemical that few Canadians had heard of to one of the most talked about and roundly condemned toxins in the country. Were it not for my ongoing frustration at our penchant to rally around obscure concerns, I’d take last month’s BPA ban as a heartening sign that our federal government can still rally to a cause if it needs to. Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure the world will be a better place without bisphenol A. It’s OK with me that we’ve banned the stuff. But in terms of tackling the issues that really ail us in this country and around the world, a ban on BPA gets us exactly nowhere. North American scientists have actually known about the more unsettling aspects of the man-made chemical for more than 70 years. The media didn’t have much to say on th...

Pick a project to move us off the "stuckness" April 25, 2008 We’ve got the motivation. We’ve got the ideas. We’ve certainly got the money, and all the knowledge we need to fix the problems taking root on B.C. streets. So why don’t we? That’s the million-dollar question - or the $852-million question to be more precise, which is roughly what it costs British Columbians every year to ride herd on the 15,500 people living on our streets. With the Olympics a mere two years away at this point, I would have expected urgency tinged with panic to have reached the highest levels by now, and yet it never seems to. Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness.” He should know, given the challenges he has faced trying to set up a therapeutic community on the old Woodwynn farm in Central Saanich (http://www.createhomefulness.com/home). “There’s a grand stuckness in Victoria,” says LeBlanc, who I first got to know several years ago through his highly successful Youth Employment Program. “We need to...