A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Francesco Villi was an angry man who settled his differences violently . The fights he got into with his Toronto strata council were obviously like fire to the powder keg for a man like him.  And then last Sunday he just knocked on their condo doors and shot three of them dead, along with two of their spouses. What an awful, crazy thing.  Whenever these kinds of unthinkable events happen, it seems a natural instinct to question what could have been done differently.  Why wasn't something done about Villi back when he was an abusive husband and father? Shouldn't somebody have done something about his mental health? Shouldn't somebody have stopped him from getting a gun? Could anything have been done to divert the rage he felt toward the strata council? Valid questions. Unfortunately, the shoulda/woulda/coulda questions don't mean much once the horrible deed is done and five innocent people are dead.  Short of a government initiative to attach a good Samaritan to watch...

The perfect is the enemy of the good, as Voltaire noted back in the 18th century. His wise words came to mind when I saw the Vancouver Sun's piece last week on the province's plan to fast-track 90 more modular homes in Vancouver for people living homeless. The article quotes Danya Fast, a research scientist at the B.C. Centre on Substance Use, cautioning that while it's urgent to act fast to create more housing, modular housing complexes can “actually deepen a sense of uncertainty in young people’s lives, especially when they’re temporary.” Point taken, as are Liberal housing critic Karin Kirkpatrick's comments that the construction of temporary and permanent housing have to go hand in hand or you're really just warehousing people. But for anyone toughing it out at a packed and noisy Downtown Eastside shelter or trying to survive in a tent on the street, a little warehousing through the worst of winter and beyond might sound pretty good right now. I still remember...

If Pierre Poilievre was just some random dude with a Twitter account and an uninformed opinion, we could just leave him to it and shrug off his ridiculous view that providing safe consumption sites and non-poisoned drugs for people "will only lead to their ultimate deaths." Alas, he's not some random dude, he's a man who could actually end up being Canada's prime minister someday.  So even when he tweets something stupid and wrong, the media pick it up and send it across the country. And the fact of that pickup gives his foolish musings weight among those who already hate any sensible conversation around drugs. That particular group of people have controlled the illicit drug conversation for almost 70 years, if we want to start the clock at BC's landmark 1956 study of heroin use that largely concluded that harm reduction made a lot more sense than criminalizing users. At what point do the rest of us get to say hey, shuddup already? BC's poisoned drug supp...