A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Look left, look right - you still end up with child poverty If we devoted even a fraction of the time to ending poverty that we spend on debating whose statistics are right, we’d have been a nation of thriving citizens from coast to coast a long time ago. Instead, we divide into ideological camps and bicker over the differences between “relative” and “absolute” poverty, and that’s as far as things ever go. It’s a good explanation for why we’re 20 years into a national commitment to end child poverty in Canada with no real end in sight. The latest figures, released this week in First Call’s annual report card on child poverty in B.C., use relative poverty as the gauge. That measurement, also known as the low-income cutoff (LICO), is based on what an “average” Canadian needs to spend for food, clothing and shelter and presumes relative poverty among those who have to spend significantly more. LICO is the favoured standard for those who want government to do more to support Canadians at t...

P roject Connect 2009 stats Here's an interesting document I did up for the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness as part of my work co-ordinating the Project Connect service fair last month at Our Place for the local street community. Sorry for the weird formatting in the "comments" part, but that's what Excel tables do when you paste them in Blogger, I guess. Analysis of surveys done at Project Connect 2009 Nov. 18, 2009 The following is a summary of surveys done with participants at Project Connect 2009, held Oct. 14 at Our Place Drop-In Centre. This is the second year of PC and the second year of doing surveys, so there is some ability to compare the data from year to year (the actual survey had to be shortened from last year due to it taking too long, so some questions asked last year were gone from this year’s survey). We managed to survey about a third of the 700+ people who attended Project Connect, and completed considerably more surveys than last ye...

Federal government fumbles again. And again. And again... Never mind the federal inquiry into B.C.’s vanishing sockeye salmon that will soon be underway. How about an inquiry into the federal government itself? I’m sure the feds must be good at something. But they’re routinely quite hopeless, in ways that would almost be funny if it weren’t for the harm being done to Canadians and the country. How have they hurt us? Let me count the ways: H1N1 - If this had really been “the big one,” we’d have been as hooped as a New Orleans hurricane victim waiting for rescue after Katrina. As luck would have it, we’ve been allowed to test our national pandemic strategy with a virus that wasn’t as terrifying as expected, but picture the shape we’d be in right now had the new flu strain remained as lethal as it was in its early days in Mexico. Canada has a 550-page pandemic preparedness plan, developed by the Public Health Agency four years ago after a botched national response to the SARS crisis. But ...

If you want to fight back, make it effective I find myself thinking about protest a lot these days, mostly because of the ill-considered social cuts going on in B.C. right now. It’s really the only form of democratic action we have in between elections, and a proven tool. When the public “blowback” is intense enough, as Housing Minister Rich Coleman might say, governments tend to change their minds. But last week’s Olympic torch dustup reminds us that there’s protest, and then there’s effective protest. Those of us who want real change had best keep that in mind. I mean no disrespect to those who protested the torch relay last Friday. The majority were there for all the right reasons. I certainly share their pain over a $6 billion party being thrown next February even while growing numbers of vulnerable British Columbians lose the programs and services that help them cope. Still, little is gained when the only thing your protest accomplishes is to frustrate and sadden the people who d...