A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

This piece points out some fairly staggering dollar figures for health-care fraud in the U.S. I went looking for made-in Canada stats but can't seem to find any, but I did come across this site that has some news about the kinds of things we get up to on this front in our country.

We don't want police as arbiters of public information Without question, the murder-suicide in Cadboro Bay last week was a “family tragedy,” in the words of Saanich police. But it was also a crime, and a very serious one at that.  And yet the police department has refused to release the usual details that are made public after a murder. In the case of Erich and Kathy Mueller, police are even refusing to say who was victim and who was murderer. I feel for the Mueller family. But then again, I feel for all the families who have to endure a crime, not to mention the media coverage that follows. It must be quite a terrible experience when it’s your child, your parents, your life, being blasted all over that day’s news, and at a time of immense grief. Unfortunately, that’s how it is in a free country. Someone caught committing a crime, no matter how small, could end up in the news if the media take an interest. If you kill someone, your crime is absolutely going to get coverage. That’s...

I've been contemplating information sources lately, seeing as we live in an age where the amount of information grows exponentially with each passing day even while the quality and reliability grows increasingly unpredictable. That got me thinking this morning about how much I appreciate the Globe and Mail, which really does put a lot of effort into keeping the hysteria out of its voice and presenting useful, accurate information for its readers. Today's piece on the plight of women with mental illness in our prison system is an excellent example (check out the "infographic" for some startling statistics). For the past year I've been doing some work for Demand Media, a tough little freelance gig out of the U.S. that pays almost no money and requires writers to really dig deep to get rock-solid sources for the most obscure topics you could imagine. While I avoid calculating my actual hourly pay for that work - it'd just bum me out - I have found that it has ...

Check out this ad campaign launched this week in Halifax. The community agency that launched the campaign is Stepping Stone, which has been working  with past and current sex workers in Halifax for 20 years. It's the agency's first-ever public awareness campaign, and off to a great start with some help from Extreme Group, a Canadian ad agency that created a funny, edgy and right-on series of print ads making the point that sex workers are people, too. Here's the news story about the campaign. What a great way to target the stigma that surrounds sex work. 

Bad design in the Globe's piece Saturday on mental illness and the federal prison system made it a challenging read. Here's an on-line version of Kirk Makin's piece , reprinted on the Social Policy in Ontario site (better than the Globe link for a blogger's purpose, as the link won't disappear in a week like it will on the Globe site).  Sobering stats in here -  at least 35 per cent of inmates in federal jails have mental illnesses requiring treatment. Like homelessness, the increasing criminalization of mental illness is more unmistakeable proof of Canada's failure to deal competently with treatment and care for people with mental illness. 

Here's Christy Clark on...what, exactly? I do quite a bit of work with the non-profit sector and am familiar with the initiatives she mentions here, but I still couldn't make heads or tails out of what the Liberal leadership candidate was actually saying in this news release. NEWS RELEASE For Immediate Release January 20, 2011 Clark Wants Non-Profit and Public Partnerships VANCOUVER ­ BC Liberal leadership candidate Christy Clark wants to look at strengthening the role of non-profit organizations and volunteers in delivering services to British Columbians. ³The work that non-profits, charities and volunteer groups do every day in British Columbia is inspiring and helps to form the bedrock of our communities,² says Clark. ³These groups are creative in the way they deliver services, they react to the needs of their residents with an alacrity that government can¹t match and provide tremendous value for money. Let¹s recognize the work that is being done and s...

Are we seeing more of these kinds of incidents , or are we just more likely to hear about them in this age of cellphone cameras and reporters packing video cameras? Unsettling stuff, not only because of the completely unnecessary boot to the face given this guy but the many questions around how he ended up tagged by police for being a domestic abuser when the women in his life have no idea where that came from. Whatever else is going on for police in B.C., I think they're developing a serious PR problem with all this stuff. Most police are good people risking their lives to keep us safe from harm - we all get that, I'm sure. But there's definitely more than one rotten apple spoiling things for the larger group, and I hope chiefs all over the province are doing some sober thinking about the suitability of some of the people they're hiring for the work. In the meantime, keep your cameras on hand.    

Update as of June 12, 2016 - the day after the worst mass killing yet in the U.S., at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Based on the number of mass killings noted in this story and the ones that have happened in the intervening years since I wrote this, there have now been 126 mass killings in the U.S. in the last 50 years.  It’s been a long time since I’ve written on the gun issue. I categorize it with issues like abortion, religion, war and Capital Regional District sewage. Most people's minds are made up, so columns don't have much point. But this latest mass killing in Arizona can’t go without comment. It’s just too blatant a reminder of what can happen when a country loses a grip on gun control. I know the U.S. is intense about its citizens’ right to bear arms, even when it means leaving the door wide open for deranged, violent people to lose their minds in a most damaging way.   But surely the citizens themselves must be growing horrified by the truly awfu...

If you're in Vancouver tomorrow, you might want to drop in on a public meet-and-greet featuring the six B.C. Liberals vying for the provincial leadership of the party. Here are the details , plus some other opportunities for hanging out with the leadership candidates. Tickets for tomorrow's forum are $10. NDP leadership campaign feels like it's still waiting for somebody to light a fire under it. Anyone? Soon?

The ups and (major) downs of governance by whimsy The provincial government made the very interesting choice over the Christmas season to buy a former air-force base near Prince George that’s been turned into an addiction treatment centre for men. On the one hand, it’s great news. B.C. has never had anything quite like this centre before. Men can stay for up to a year in a village-style setting at the Baldy Hughes Therapeutic Community, with government footing the bill if people qualify for income assistance. That’s terrific. On the other, it’s a striking reminder of how political and uneven the decision-making has become in B.C. Wonderful to have a new addiction resource available for British Columbians, but just a little unsettling when it happens in the same year that other addiction services are being cut across the province. Welcome to life in a province with no social policy. Funding comes and goes based on whim and political influence, as far as I can tell. Even while the Baldy...

Things are going to get better...aren't they? I'm on the final day of a three-day juice fast and it's raining, raining, raining, so maybe that explains why everything in the newspapers this morning just seemed like a complete bummer. Starving bear cubs, cheap honey imports from China destroying the honey industry, sick stories of (alleged) pedophiles rigging weird broom-handle contraptions to torment young boys, the usual array of murders, assaults, fires and mixed fatalities. And the relentless drone of B.C. leadership candidates trying to get out their messages, none of which has so far given me any hope for a bright new future (Christy Clark, please stop with the tiresome talk-radio persona). Fortunately, I did find one heartening thing to read this morning, a column in the Times Colonist by the Ottawa Citizen's Dan Gardner . I like him when he rants but I like him even better when he just lays out the cold, hard facts, as he does in this piece about our misplac...

Oh, news from the world can be very weird sometimes, like this story out of Kansas of nursing students posting a picture on Facebook of them posing with a human placenta. Not a great idea, as it turns out, although I can't for the life of me understand the comments in the story that one of these young women may now be blacklisted from nursing as a result. I guess it shows poor judgment to want to get your photo taken with a placenta and share it with the world, but it doesn't seem like the kind of act that automatically rules you out of nursing. My mom, an old nurse herself, told me that when she was a student nurse, one of the almighty-god kinds of doctors they had running the show at that time actually threw a patient's uterus at my mother after she'd had the misfortune of handing the guy the wrong instrument during a hysterectomy. Now THAT's an act that deserves a little censure, on all kinds of fronts.