A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

You know, it's really striking how often political parties that shape themselves as being about "small government" in fact spend their time in office growing the business out of all proportions. Here's the latest news on that front involving the Tories. Keep in mind that all this growth happened at a time when Stephen Harper's government was slashing public services. That's the thing that grates the most - that even while we're losing long-standing public programs due to "belt-tightening," our governments are growing larger, taking ever-bigger salaries, and even paying out bonuses to the senior managers who are most effective at cutting our services. In ancient times, they would have called this kind of governance a kleptocracy - "rule by thieves." Whatever you want to call it, it's crazy-making. But hey, we keep electing them.

Now here's an idea whose time has come - free parking at hospitals.  Maybe now that the Canadian Medical Association Journal is saying it, it will have an impact. How crazy is it to stress people out just that little bit more  when they're going through an illness or something worse than by charging them to park? And once we're offering it free, how about offering more of it, too? Can't believe they built that new parkade  at Royal Jubilee hospital at a capacity that was well below what's actually needed.

Having to make way for Santa seems an ignominious end for the Occupy movement, but that’s how things tend to go in countries that aren’t yet angry enough to get genuinely uncivil. Still, the public reaction to the Occupy protests over the last eight weeks has been surprisingly sympathetic. I take that as a hopeful sign that this movement will have legs. People tolerated the protest camps for much longer than they usually do when tents appear in public spaces. I think a lot of them quietly related to the issues the movement has raised. It’s pretty impressive that in just two short months, a mixed bag of disaffected citizens around the world took a small protest in New York City’s financial district and turned it into a global movement. Whether it can last long enough to affect change, I guess we’ll see. But the Occupy protests got a lot more positive attention than most “occupations” get - an indicator that people have a certain sympathy for the cause. The movement star...

Canada's finest health writer, Andre Picard, weighs in with his usual information-laden, clear-eyed view on the fuss about mammographies. Women are accustomed to cancer screening as a good thing from lifetimes of Pap smears. But as Picard and the larger scientific community points out, screening can have a serious downside when false positives - more common than you'd hope in both mammograms and PSA tests for prostate cancer - lead people to have serious medical procedures and treatments that they didn't need. Cancer is such an emotionally loaded word. We all know someone who has had it and we're all terrified to get it ourselves, but the truth is that the science of cancer is still something of a mystery. You'd think that highly developed screening tools that can catch the earliest signs of cancer would be a good thing. But now we're learning that some cancers never really get past the starting gate in our bodies, and that there's such a thing as "b...

Good try by the Occupiers, but it looks like things are fizzling out across the country. It's cold, for one thing, but probably the bigger problem is that unless a protest gets bigger with each passing day, everybody forgets about it very quickly and just returns to their routines. Then all you've really got is a camp pretty much like any of the other camps of impoverished people we've had in Victoria. I like the Occupy movement, but I don't know if enough people are feeling the pain yet to give the movement the critical mass it needs. Not in Canada, anyway. The States - well, that's another matter. I think they've got any number of angry-and devastated-citizen protests ahead of them as the country's problems deepen.

A good read from regret-filled former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper. He presided over the disastrous 1999 "Battle in Seattle," when an aggressive police response to World Trade Organization protesters turned the city into a tear gas-laden war zone for several days. I was there, having been sent south by the Times Colonist on Day 2 of the clash to cover the story. There were 5,000 armed police and military personnel in the city by that point, and it was a terrifying, life-changing experience for me to realize that every citizen is in danger when there's that much police aggression and weaponry around. Stamper has been talking about his mistakes for a number of years now, and I admire him immensely for it. Who better than those who have already learned the hard lessons to remind us not to repeat the missteps of history?

Aside from an unpleasant period of paranoia brought on by seeing the documentary Food Inc ., I’ve never put much thought into food safety. But when the food police come for my Red River cereal - well, that certainly gets my attention. At first I thought there’d just been a run on Red River when I saw the empty shelf. But after several forays to different stores in an effort to find my breakfast of choice, I spotted the little recall notices. It’s unsettling to learn that something you eat every day has been recalled. So I went looking for answers this week and discovered how little I knew about the whole complicated business of food safety in Canada, let alone the dense regulatory regime that aims to protect Canadians from harmful foods. In the case of the Red River recall, it’s a labelling issue. Soy is in the cereal but isn’t declared on the label. Food allergies have become a major focus for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency after national labelling laws were tightene...

Yesterday, the news was about PEERS Vancouver closing in the spring . Today, the other primary Vancouver organization supporting street-level sex workers has also announced it's done . PACE Vancouver will run out of money to pay its staff in just three weeks. I'm doing some contract work with PEERS Victoria and can tell you that even though that organization is also going through difficult times, it has a more diverse funding base and is hanging in under a great new executive director, Marion Little. But it will still be facing one of the biggest funding challenges in its 16-year history in the spring, when the same revamped employment contract that is wiping out PEERS Vancouver comes into effect across B.C. Finding money to help sex workers is an extremely difficult undertaking, as I learned the hard way during my three years leading PEERS Victoria. The reason these groups are struggling is because the citizenry simply doesn't care enough about what happens to the i...

I'm a bit puzzled by this story, on the province's big new initiative to reduce the court fights when people split up. A good idea to do that, of course, but isn't that the case already? Mediation has been the option of preference for divorcing couples for many years now, at least from the court system's point of view. The big sticking point is getting them to take that option. As for the example of the Lee family and how we need to view violence against a spouse as threatening to a child - well, that's not a new thing either. In fact, for poor families caught up with the Children and Family Development Ministry, parents risk losing their kids into government care if there's any threat of spousal violence. So even when Dad's violent and Mom's not, she can lose her children just for not being able to figure out how to get away from Dad. The problem in the Lee case is that the family was well-off. We all have a hard time believing that well-off familie...

A timely open letter to the powers that be from a B.C. blogger and activist very worried about what's going to happen at  the Occupy protest in Vancouver in the wake of a death at the encampment this past week. He's been a participant up until now, but is urging people to wrap things up before more tragedy occurs. 

Say it ain't so! After all the heat and problems at CLBC, all the lost services to vulnerable people, we find out that fired (an important distinction - fired, not laid off or downsized or anything softer like that) CLBC chief Rick Mowles got a $345,000 severance package from the Crown corporation when he was axed last month . Yup, 18 months' severance after being on the job just six years. Wow. Kudos to TC reporter Lindsay Kines for digging up this important story - he's been an ace on the CLBC issues since the start, and was the only reporter in B.C. even doing any meaningful writing about this stuff until things got so noisy that Global TV and now the Vancouver Sun finally took a look.

It makes me nervous to read the news stories about plans the Canadian government has for reshaping the non-profit sector. Sure, the sector needs some work. What sector doesn’t? But it’s hardly the unaccountable, inefficient system that the federal government made it sound like this week in the media coverage about the new Canada Not-For-Profit Corporations Act. “Right now, we ask [the non-profit sector] to take on these jobs,” federal Human Resources Minister Diane Finlay said while announcing new efforts to ensure more accountability from Canada’s 161,000 registered non-profits and charities. “We give them money to do it. They receive the money whether they achieve their objectives or not. Now all we’re saying is all right, we still want you to do this, but you get more money if you actually achieve your objectives.” Unless you’ve been involved with a non-profit having to jump through the many - and often meaningless - accountability requirements of federal funding, you m...

You catching all this fast talking coming out of BC Hydro? Takes me back to my old corporate days, with all those interesting interpretations the Big Guys had in order to create the impression of a good bottom line even when there wasn't one. Times Colonist editorial staff did a good analysis of the situation today - it's hard to imagine that any person taking a common-sense look at this thing wouldn't see that we're really just pushing today's problems onto tomorrow's Hydro users. Also loved the opening to today's TC story on the same issue.   BC Hydro can't lose money because the government expects a stable profit for its budget each year, said Hydro's chief financial officer, Charles Reid. Oh, if only that was the way life worked.