A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

    A looming strike/lockout in B.C. schools gets my attention more these days due to living with my son and his two school-age boys, who are bracing themselves for disappointment now that their final month of school is about to be disrupted by lockouts and rotating strikes.      One of the boys is worried about losing out on his band trip to Tofino this week, which looks pretty likely. The younger one will probably have to give up a field trip to Victoria. I'm sure there are kids like them all over B.C. who - far from cheering for more days off in the event of a work shutdown - are really worried about what this latest work action at their schools is going to mean to them.     Way to go, government and teachers. Stick it to the kids just because you're completely incapable of settling a contract like grownups.     As a CBC report rightly notes, the essence of the problem between teachers and their employers is that " this is a dysfunc...

        May the hills ring with our conversations about disordered eating in the wake of Michelle Stewart’s death . I know it would please her to think that we weren't just going to let that elephant in the room pass unnoticed.     What I mostly know about the various disordered-eating illnesses is they aren't about disordered eating at all. Eat a lot, eat a little, obsess about burning it off, throw it up, fixate on it – food is ultimately just fuel for the body, but for some people it becomes a way to manage the bad feelings of your life. For me it seems almost like cutting , where the pressures of the world are all just a bit too much and so you seek a release within your control. For the "thin" disorders like anorexia and bulimia, it’s also got that complicated social aspect of netting the sick person more compliments for keeping themselves so slim.     Positive feedback for negative behaviour. Not good. Pretty soon it’s a habit. ...

    Sad news today about the death of Michelle Stewart, the long-time B.C. government communications person who came out so bravely a year ago with a blog on life with end-stage kidney failure due to a lifelong eating disorder.     A communicator to the end, Michelle kept on blogging right up until a month ago, when her deteriorating health got to be too much for her to continue. I highly recommend a read of her blog for anyone who has had or wondered about what it's like to have a persistent eating disorder, because Michelle did some of the most insightful and painfully honest writing about that torturous condition that I've ever read. She made what was surely a immensely difficult and ultimately fatal decision to let her kidney disease go largely untreated (the treatment, a transplant, would have worked only if she could have gotten control over her eating disorder), and then blogged bravely about her body's relentless deterioration as the disease took over. ...

    Underneath all the current noise around temporary foreign workers are a couple basic truths. One is that people who need money and work will always be drawn toward countries that appear to have an abundance of both. The other is that people already settled in those countries will find ways to exploit that desire.     And so we have this latest news of Israelis lured to Canada to work in mall kiosks, falsely promised wages and sales volumes the likes of which many Canadians would be happy to earn themselves. But of course, events didn't unfold like that, and now we are neck-deep in embarrassing allegations of modern-day slavery and an astounding absence of regulatory oversight.     My perspective on temporary workers has changed significantly since my time in Honduras, where I saw things from the other side of the line. Legal or illegal, a job in a land like Canada or the United States changes everything for the families who suddenly have access to...