A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Nothing quite like talking to 140 or so people living homeless to get a clearer sense of what's really going on out there on our streets. I thought I knew a fair bit before I started into my little Instagram project five months ago to give voice to people living homeless here in Greater Victoria. But wow, the things I've learned. In no particular order, here are a few of them:  People are really, really sick out there. This is a major health crisis, plain and simple. People are enduring terrible infections, raging and highly contagious bacterial illnesses, bone-destroying weirdness from toxic drugs, and completely unsupported bouts of severe mental health crisis. They're dying at an astounding rate - at least 15 people dead just since early December, and those are just the ones that the street community has been able to keep track of. Meanwhile, our community's primary response has been to crack down harder on them for the "street disorder" caused by the jury-...

  What’s underway in Canada and the United States right now is the manufacturing of new classes of people who can be discriminated against legally. Both our countries have been here before, but I’d always thought I was in the generation that would end all of that awful business, not lay the groundwork for more. The latest target for discrimination and harassment in the US are people with first- and second-generation immigrant backgrounds from the ever-changing list that the government keeps of countries that it doesn’t like. In Canada, the target is people living homeless. I’m not going to suggest that anyone’s wearing balaclavas and shooting people dead yet on Victoria streets. But that’s not to say there aren’t some striking – and disturbing - comparisons between ICE raids in the US and what’s happening for people living on our streets. The principles are certainly the same: Identify a group of “undesirables” whose vanquishing can be politicized, and make life hell for them...

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. We are a long way from done.  The line on the graph looks like a dip in the road – downhill for a few years after 2009, then slowly climbing back up over a decade starting in 2014. It tracks the number of police reports in Canada related to intimate partner violence. For a while, things were improving. But that’s over now, with violence rates (54 per 1,000 for Canadian women) now back to the levels of 15 years ago. Similar trends are evident in the US, where aggravated domestic assaults have risen to heights not seen in more than 20 years. What were we doing right for those good years? What did we start doing wrong? When the issue is something as deeply in the shadows as intimate partner violence, a clear answer is hard to come by. With 80 per cent of people experiencing IPV not even reporting the crime to police, any trend line is only ever scraping the surface. But the rising stress of daily life on P...

If words in a newspaper could solve the social crisis on our streets, we'd be on our way with the back-and-forths that have been happening in the Victoria Times Colonist since a Sept. 24 column by Les Leyne kicked things off.  But things have gotten confusing on Facebook what with the ridiculous fight between Meta and the Canadian government that has left us unable to share newspaper links in Canada. So here's all four parts of the back-and-forth laid out in order - Les's piece, then my response, then a comment piece by retired nurse Barbara Wiggins, then my response to that. Hope this helps for those trying to follow all of this. And while there are some differences in opinion throughout, it's really heartening to see the TC devoting all these column inches to this issue. Les Leyne column in the Sept. 24 Times Colonist that started things off: B.C. has slid into an attitude of “endless accommodation” of antisocial behaviour by desperately ill people on downtown street...

Nobody knows the challenges of getting out from under harmful substance use like someone who has actually done it. The third event in the Peers Victoria speaker series on the toxic drug crisis brought together a powerful panel of six past and present substance users to talk about their journeys with frankness, wisdom and so much insight. (I was the lead organizer of the series.) But while we've got a complete video of the event , it's a rare devotee of the subject who would watch the whole thing, clocking in at over two hours. So I made a "greatest hits" compilation, if you will - 40 minutes all in, with clips reordered and with a bit of categorization that helps bring more focus to the panelists' comments.  Here it is for your viewing pleasure . If you have people in your circle who are still saying stupid nonsense about substance users not wanting recovery sufficiently or being content to exist in a state of oblivion, please share it with them.  What kind of sys...

I generally stay out of the fray when it comes to commentary on politicking, so much of which is about as reliable as a snake-oil pitch. But having caught Pierre Poilievre’s promise of addiction treatment for 50,000 Canadians , paid out of the money that will be saved when safe-supply programs are cut, I just can’t let that blatantly misleading statement stand unchallenged. First, let’s start with safe supply. That’s the term used for when people are able to swap out their completely unregulated opioid-based street drugs for a prescription opioid from a health professional. It’s the most obvious immediate strategy to stop a toxic drug crisis that has killed 50,000+ Canadians – more than a quarter of them in BC - in the decade since the anesthetic fentanyl began dominating the street drug market. That Poilievre actually thinks there’s enough money in the country’s teeny-weeny safe-supply response to pay for a major expansion of treatment beds and the cost of putting people into th...

Thank you to long-time community organizer Ann Livingston for pointing me to this 17-year-old blog post that takes us back to 1950s Vancouver to remind us that there's nothing new about the strategies being talked about now to improve health care for people who use substances - or the political tactics used to block those efforts. The Community Chest and Council, the forerunner to the United Way, struck a Narcotics Committee in 1952 to examine the problem. The Committee recommended a comprehensive drug strategy that included rehab centres, educational campaigns, and stiffer penalties for traffickers. But what really stirred debate was its proposal for clinics that would provide maintenance-level doses of heroin to addicts. The drug clinic scheme was intended to “maintain a constant check on the number of addicts in any community. It would also protect the life of the addict and support him as a useful member of society. This existence would hasten his rehabilitation, or at least r...

This is a callout to people who know someone who has died in the toxic drug crisis in the last decade. I've got an idea. I'll need your help.  Nobody can look at the faces in this Moms Stop the Harm video of lost loved ones without questioning what's going on, with more than 17,000 people dead in BC since 2016 and us seemingly powerless to act. (We aren't, but I've already written about that , so more on that later.) That emotional connection is exactly what's needed to shake off this ennui around a four-alarm public health crisis. We seem to have parceled the toxic drug crisis into the part of our brains where we hold faint understanding of something that we don't think affects us. But it does affect us, in so many ways.  Normally I'm all about the stats and evidence, but as the fantastic panel on moral panic pointed out at the Feb. 26 event in Peers Victoria's speaker series, we've got stacks of evidence on this issue and quite a lot of stats...

A hundred years from now, our descendants will feel sick to their stomachs when they read about how we treated people who used drugs in ways we didn't approve of. It will be like the revelations of priest-pedophiles and residential schools were for my own generation – one of those things that an evolved person struggles to come to terms with. ”Our governments did that?” they will ask. “And the people just put up with it?” Yes, Grasshopper, because even though almost everyone used drugs in that era, governments could get elected by singling out and causing to suffer anyone no longer able to hide the signs of their drug use, most especially if they were poor and sick. In any logical world, offering prescribed drugs as a substitute for toxic street drugs would be a good thing. Now that dying of an overdose is the No. 1 cause of death in BC for anyone ages 10 to 59, substituting non-toxic drugs is pretty much the best strategy we’ve got to stop the deaths. But today’s announcement from...

And just like that, institutionalization is back.  My head is in a whirl. After untold hours of my early journalism career spent documenting the hard-won battle to banish BC's bad old institutions rife with abuse and civil-liberties violations, the former executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association is now the premier of the province and pitching involuntary care like it's a fresh new idea whose time has come.  “This announcement is the beginning of a new phase of our response to the addiction crisis," said Premier David Eby  in a statement released yesterday  in which government outlined how British Columbians could now be held against their will for mental illness, drug use or brain injury if they are making their communities feel "unsafe." "We’re going to respond to people struggling like any family member would. We are taking action to get them the care they need to keep them safe, and in doing so, keep our communities safe, too," said E...

  My news feeds have been bringing me so many reports of missing persons in BC recently that I finally went looking for stats this month to clarify what was going on. Was there actually more people going missing, or was I merely trapped in a bad Google algorithm? The truth turned out to be astonishing. Not only has BC been leading by a long shot the missing-person stats in Canada for adults age 18 and up every year since 2015, when the Missing Persons Act took effect, but the number of adults reported missing in BC has grown by more than 48 per cent since then. (Our population has increased by 10.2 per cent in the same period.) In 2022, BC police filed 14,751 missing-person reports involving adults to the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC). The province with the next-highest number of reports was Ontario, at 7,298. While various provinces have been No. 2 over the years—all with roughly the same notable gulf between BC’s numbers and theirs—BC has always come in at No. 1...

The BC government doubtlessly had to work very hard to get the OK from the federal government for a three-year test of illicit drug decriminalization.  It's a good thing to have fought for, even if the pilot is so hamstrung with exceptions and rules that it can't help but be of minimal impact. We are so lamentably, tragically overdue to move on this problem of poisoned street drugs killing thousands of British Columbians every year that virtually any glimpse of a different future must be welcomed with enthusiasm.  But just to be clear, the vast majority of people who use illegal drugs will not benefit from this pilot. Nor will it stop the endless tide of deaths. That's not to say that any move toward decriminalization isn't to be treasured. But we do need to go into this teeny, temporary change in our senseless and destructive drug policies with the understanding that it's a flea on a fly compared to the complex issues that are actually driving BC's illicit-dru...

Extinction Rebellion UK says it will prioritize "relationships over roadblocks" this year and move away from public disruptions as a prime strategy for getting the world's attention on climate change.  That's a warm and fuzzy statement for a new year. But hopefully they aren't going to get too nice. Nobody's going to solve the climate crisis with niceness.  Of course, one does want to be strategic when in the business of disrupting. Throwing cans of soup at famous works of art - not the work of Extinction Rebellion;  that was Just Stop Oil  - and other poorly considered attention-grabbing antics may get your unknown organization headlines, but simply being offensive in a public space is not a strategic protest. (Put away the soup cans, go disrupt a fracking operation.)  That said, we sure as hell won't move this crisis with niceness. Co-operative behaviour is one component of an effective change strategy, just like acts of protest, but systemic change at ...