A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Reading this piece  on rising greenhouse gas emissions in today's Guardian reminded me of those old movie scenes where some character gives another one a good slap to snap them out of whatever foolish thinking they're engaging in. In this case, the crazy thinking would involve anything to do with believing that the world is actually jumping on the problem of greenhouse gas emissions. Nope. Energy use last year grew at its fastest pace of the decade. It was a "golden year" for gas, with consumption up 10 per cent in the US alone. That increase alone is equivalent to the UK's entire consumption of gas in a year. I hate to be Nelly Negative, but this does more or less reaffirm my belief in humanity's ability to respond to a life-threatening - all life, everywhere - crisis. Unlike those apocalyptic Hollywood movies where citizens dig deep into untapped reserves of strength, ingenuity and hope to save the planet, I have long suspected that in fact we'd a...

Find me here in the Vancouver Sun writing on the scintillating issue of open procurement, and other strange happenings bombarding the community-based social services sector. While you may think that whole sentence is unbelievably dull and referring to things you have zero interest in, I urge you to read my piece anyway. People, this stuff really matters. For those who can't or won't click, I'm just going to paste the article right here as well. That's how easy I want it to be for you to read it. Also, I wrote this as the executive director for the Board Voice Society of BC, work I do two days a week, but I am such a believer in this issue that I would have written it even if it wasn't my job. *** Editorial pages of Vancouver Sun March 22, 2019 By Jody Paterson Open procurement policies put community social-services groups at risk I work in the non-profit community social-services sector. If your eyes glazed over when you read that, that nicely demo...

Howard the Gnome needs a new home , not to mention $15,000 to fix his rotting base . The recent news out of Nanoose Bay, where Howard has lived for more than two decades as one of the last of Vancouver Island's classic roadside attractions, prompts me to dig out my 1999 story on the gnome, who had yet to be named Howard at that time and was in the news for a whole other reason. When I first wrote about the big guy, Howard had yet to be moved to his current location at a Nanoose gas station, which didn't exist back then. He was a young thing then, and had been built in Ron Hale's garage out of dryer lint from the Alberni pulp mill among other odds and sods. Herewith, my Oct. 25, 1999 article from the Times Colonist archives on the gnome, who was a fresh fella barely two years old back in those days but already raising eyebrows in the Nanaimo Regional District, where critics thought his roadside presence was distracting to drivers and breaching sign bylaws. This art...

I'm seeing a pattern in my social media spaces right now, where I post some article or opinion piece on climate change and a climate-change denier emerges to comment in that way that the deniers always comment - which is to say, via distraction. It's a technique that people used regularly to try to shut me down back when I was writing newspaper columns and they didn't like what I was saying.  Men and women tend to use the strategy differently in my experience - a man typically diverts by repeatedly asking questions that have nothing to do with the matter at hand, while women will go to an emotional argument that is hot-potato-personal, like the weeping women who called me up after I questioned soaring Caesarean-section rates in Greater Victoria demanding to know if I was suggesting that their babies should have died. It can be surprisingly effective as a tool to completely divert an issue into an irrelevant and useless direction that ultimately ends with the respectiv...