A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Premier David Eby doesn’t give a whit about my opinion. As it turns out, I feel the same way about his. But we are stuck with each other – him with his Premier-level access to the traditional media, me with a blog and social media. And I’ve got a few things to say. Anything said about a politician seems to get interpreted as a statement of political support for or against them. That’s not what this is. I don’t care for politics. So there’s no politics in what is bothering me about David Eby. And just to be transparent, I loathe the BC Conservatives. What is actually bothering me about David Eby is the great discomfort of seeing that a man who I once believed in can be acting this way. It’s quite a different level of betrayal than the usual political stuff. David Eby is a lawyer. His dad was a lawyer too, and his mom a teacher. He once headed up the BC Civil Liberties Association, and I interviewed him a number of times in those years. He was always a sharp thinker who I had a good opin...

My latest opus for the Victoria Times Colonist is a deep dive into drug treatment in BC.  It's the fifth piece in the monthly stories I'm writing for them in 2026 relevant to the homelessness crisis, and was easily the toughest so far to write. A person's individual recovery from a substance use disorder is still a fairly mystical process, and the fact that there's no real system around any of it in BC adds to the grey. And wow, so much to learn from a whole lot of informed, frustrated people. For me, gathering the information for the piece provided such insight into the idiocy of this talk of involuntary treatment as the thing that's needed to "fix" the visible social crisis in all of our communities. People are desperately trying to get into treatment voluntarily, in fact. But there's not nearly enough supports to meet the demand, no data to demonstrate whether anything is working, and a whole lot of judgment at the locked gates to all of it that is ...

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...