A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Opportunistic Canadian training institutes that over-promise and under-deliver are no doubt a problem for international students in Canada. The BC government's pledge this week to get to the bottom of that could be helpful. But if we're thinking it's just Bob's Shady Career College for Suckers that's the problem, take a look at the tuition fees that mainstream universities are charging for international students.  It helps explain why so many people seem to be freaking out at a shift in the political winds around international students. It's not because anyone's got a big heart for shielding international students from a shoddy education, or keeping more spaces open for Canadian students. It's about post-secondaries and employers that have been dining out on foreign students for many years, and can't bear to give that up. The Tyee had a great read on that earlier this month, appropriately headlined "Cash Cows and Cheap Labour."  Not only ...

I’ve been chasing my three grandmothers through history of late, awed by their resiliency. Their early adulthoods were in the 1910s. Then and now, it was a hard life for anyone without money. Young women in Canada in my grandmothers’ era had little choice but to attach themselves to a man for economic survival. I see that truth in my 17-year-old Romanian grandmother’s sad eyes in her wedding-day photo, married off rather scandalously to a Chinese man in Moose Jaw, Sask. while the rest of her family hived off to Alberta with one less mouth to feed. I feel it in my heart for my 27-year-old grandmother, leaving children and home country behind to travel to Canada for a better future with a man married to her sister just months before, only to be abruptly paired with her after sister and babe died in childbirth.  I’m overwhelmed by it as I learn the tragic story of my third grandmother, whose intellectual disability left her like a lamb to the wolves. It’s still tough to be a woman, bu...

On this night 50 years ago, I was preparing for my wedding the next day. I was barely two weeks past my 17th birthday. What was on my mind that evening? No recollection. I know I wasn’t scared or sad – then and now, I’ve always been up for an adventure, and I’d been eager to get out of my parents’ house for at least a couple of years by that point. (They were good people, but I so desperately wanted independence.) My memories of the weeks around the wedding are like snapshots more than anything. I remember a glimpse of this, a few seconds of that. It’s never big stuff I recall, just these quirky little bits that linger. Me enjoying the fuss of all the big community bridal showers that a girl got when she married a Cumberland boy in those years. Cakes shaped and iced like a Barbie doll's ball gown. Me in the mirror for the first time in my wedding dress, appreciating its low cut. The purple everything in the honeymoon suite of the Port Augusta Motel. Us splurging for two nights in t...