A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

U.S. road trip an eyeopener into true impact of recession I’m newly back this week from a road trip through California, and had been curious before we left whether we’d see evidence of the economic downturn during our travels. In fact, the signs of trouble were hard to miss. We were travelling routes that primarily took us through small towns, and it took but a glance at the lineup of grim legal notices in virtually every community’s local newspaper to grasp the impact the recession is having in the U.S. The April 8 edition of the Pahrump Valley Times, for instance, featured close to five pages of legal notices, almost all of them involving trustee sales of houses in foreclosure. The legal language of the ads made things sound very dry and orderly, but it didn’t take much to imagine the distress of the overwhelmed, indebted homeowner at the heart of every one of them. One California auction company handling foreclosures lists almost 1,400 homes for sale - and that’s just one company,...

I wrote a while ago about a media report that really got it wrong about rates of HIV infection among Vancouver sex workers. I alerted University of Victoria professor Cecilia Benoit to the error, as she has done considerable competent research work around sex workers, and she in turn wrote a great piece for Harm Reduction magazine (where the original piece appeared) that sets things straight. Follow this link to find her response, which serves as a fine reminder that we can't be too careful when reading any research document, not to mention the media's interpretation of it.

I'm just back from a terrific road trip to Yosemite and Death Valley in California - if you're interested in such things, I'll be posting photos in a day or two to my Facebook page (link is on the left), so feel free to check 'em out. However, I couldn't wait to share this crazy photo of a huge flock of snow geese - 4000-5000 as best I could estimate - we stumbled across near Mount Vernon, Wash. this week as we made our way home. Apparently they show up in the farm fields around Mt. Vernon/LaConner every year on their way to summer nesting grounds in the Arctic. As usual, travelling in the U.S. reminded me that while I don't always like American policy, I sure do like Americans. But the country is clearly feeling the pains of the economic recession in a much more obvious way than I'd expected. One glance through any town's community newspaper was enough to make that clear - most poignantly, in the jam-packed legal notices in the classified section detai...

Downtown community finds its stride in running club It's a grey but dry afternoon, and our little group is on the run -- down to the bottom of Pandora, a sharp left past the "whale wall," onward to the Inner Harbour and beyond. In a city full of runners, we blend in nicely. But this is no ordinary running club. Based on an innovative program that got its start in Philadelphia two years ago, Victoria's newest running group is for people living in tough circumstance and poverty in the downtown. They run for half an hour twice a week, starting out in borrowed running shoes and working their way toward brand-new ones once they've stuck it out for 15 runs. "This is my 10th time out, and I'm loving it," says Desi, a middle-aged participant who's new to running. "I hadn't run before other than for the bus, but it's been really good." The concept for Every Step Counts is deliberately simple: A brief warm-up and a little conversation at...

Not enough just to measure 'school satisfaction' Our public schools are in the news right now, for issues ranging from funding problems to whether principals are "dumbing down" the education process by letting students rewrite tests. But I've yet to see much discussion about findings that flag much deeper problems in B.C.'s public schools, as identified by the students and parents using the system. Satisfaction surveys have their limitations, but they still reveal a great deal about how the "customer" perceives a service. Done regularly, they're also valuable for tracking whether customer satisfaction improves as problems are identified and dealt with. Take a look at the 2007-08 surveys of B.C. public schools, however, and what you'll find are a whole lot of dissatisfied students and parents who have been identifying the same problems in our schools for more than five years now, with virtually no sign of improvement in the areas they identify...