A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Woe is us if a “marriage of convenience” ever started to define other important matters in a person’s life beyond whether you get to become a Canadian. Immigration is a hot issue these days, as it’s mostly been since the birth of Canada. B ut this week’s story about an Afghan woman rejected for permanent residency after Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada deemed her eight-year marriage to be a front to help her get citizenship – well, that’s just a whole other fascinating issue to get thinking about. What exactly IS the definition of a loving marriage that government turns to in making decisions like this? What signs and tells in our daily relationships might be quietly signalling to government eyes whether there’s love or just mutual benefit underpinning our marriages? I have heard stories of marriages of convenience, of course, and of the level of subterfuge necessary when the people involved still expect to have completely independent lives apart from each other but ...

  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...

Update Nov. 10: My Facebook post has now been shared 9,879 times and garnered 13,577 likes. My son's original post was shared 285 times, and a separate post of my post on the wall of Meanwhile in Canada got 7,331 shares and 7,751. Wow. I have a Facebook post that is in the midst of going viral. You know, like that '70s commercial for Breck shampoo, where one woman tells two friends, and they tell two friends, and next thing you know the TV screen is full-up with people telling each other about shampoo. I have often fantasized of going viral for some of my posts around sex work, but this wasn't one of them. This was a post in which I shared my son's post about his feelings as a federal fisheries biologist at the news from his supervisors on Thursday that he was now free to talk to the media or anyone else, because the muzzle order silencing Canada's scientists that the Harper government had imposed had just been lifted. His post made me feel warm and fuzz...

     I’m still shaking my head after two and a half enlightening hours yesterday talking with the local sex workers’ organization here in Managua, RedTraSex (Red de Trabajadores Sexuales). I’m not sure whether to be delighted or shattered by how completely identical the issues are for sex workers in Nicaragua as they are back home in Canada.      Had it not been for us talking in Spanish, I could have easily been back in Victoria talking to my pals at Peers Victoria . I fear my new friends at RedTraSex were a little discouraged to hear that everything they identified as problems were also problems for sex workers in Canada – stigma, judgment and misunderstanding at the top of that list. The swag from my RedTraSex visit, including a key chain  designed to fit a condom.  Can't wait to  wear my  "I always use a condom" t-shirt.      Up until we met, the group believed that a country as developed as Canada w...

 On this day of mourning marking the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, another reason to mourn: Bill C36, Canada's flawed and tragic anti-sex work law, takes effect on this very day.     It will be struck down eventually. It's so clearly unconstitutional, not to mention poorly informed and misguided, and in direct contravention of the research around what actually makes life better and safer for those in the sex industry.     But in the meantime, people will suffer. Women will suffer. The Harper government took bad law and made it worse, criminalizing the purchase of sex for the first time in Canadian history and virtually guaranteeing that vulnerable sex workers will now be that much more vulnerable, and never mind the platitudes about how this law decriminalizes workers while criminalizing purchasers and thus makes everything better.        What it actually does is push sex work even deeper into the shadows. And we all know that ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O4noARYayM     And as the UK legislature moves to reject the criminalizing of sex buyers, Canada steps forward into its regressive law that does the opposite, which the Senate has now passed. For the first time in our history, the customers of adult, consensual sex workers are now going to be criminals.      I guess we all knew how this was ultimately going to go from the minute that Justice Minister Peter MacKay started making noises about further criminalization of the industry earlier this year. But still, the news is so discouraging. Far from abolishing the industry or saving victims, the new law simply pushes sex workers that much deeper into the shadows, where they will now have to take even more care to avoid police and shield their customers from arrest.      As one might have thought from what we learned after the Pickton multiple-murder case, it's in the shadows where bad things happen, which m...

     I wrote this response to a couple of my Facebook friends just now on a great comment thread that has developed on my Facebook site . The comments came after I posted a rather pleading message to people to get past the knee-jerk stuff around the Canadian sex industry and get informed before Bill C-36 becomes law. Figured I'd put it out to my blogger audience, too, because damn it, all of us who feel this way need to be shouting from the rooftops right now before this country goes and does something that is shameful, regressive, poorly considered, potentially harmful, discriminatory and mean.      For Lisa and Darlene, you are both my friends and I have MUCH time for both of you, and I do understand that this is a divisive subject. But this is a time for getting together to understand why each of us feels the way we do. I know that both your viewpoints come from your own life experiences. But we can't just stay here like this, in a standoff where...

    It appears that I may have developed an idealistic sense of Canada while I was off living in Honduras these last two years. I was thinking of it as a great country with a few problems it needed to pay attention to at the time I left Canada in early 2012, but perhaps the distance - and the contrast with super-troubled Honduras - led me to forget about the "pay attention" part and just remember it as a country that largely had its act together.     At any rate, coming home and learning about some of the messed-up stuff that's actually going on in my homeland has been pretty discouraging..       The stuff around sex work has been particularly unsettling, given my affinity for the people who the rest of us leave without rights, dignity or safe workplaces just because we wrinkle our noses at what they do for a living. It is so, so sad that we're preparing to go backwards with a law that will only make things worse for sex workers.   ...

    Underneath all the current noise around temporary foreign workers are a couple basic truths. One is that people who need money and work will always be drawn toward countries that appear to have an abundance of both. The other is that people already settled in those countries will find ways to exploit that desire.     And so we have this latest news of Israelis lured to Canada to work in mall kiosks, falsely promised wages and sales volumes the likes of which many Canadians would be happy to earn themselves. But of course, events didn't unfold like that, and now we are neck-deep in embarrassing allegations of modern-day slavery and an astounding absence of regulatory oversight.     My perspective on temporary workers has changed significantly since my time in Honduras, where I saw things from the other side of the line. Legal or illegal, a job in a land like Canada or the United States changes everything for the families who suddenly have access to...

    The Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform has just put out an excellent guide for sex workers and allies looking to be more effective in driving legislative change. It's well-written, thorough and well-organized, and while it's focus is decriminalization, the information in the guide would be useful for prompting a change in thinking around any number of issues under federal jurisdiction. It's really a how-to for the engaged citizen.     This is a big year for sex work law reform in Canada, what with the three key laws around adult, consensual sex work having been struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada in December. Those of us who support decriminalization as a step toward increasing safety, respect and dignity for adult sex workers will need to be out there pushing on this issue, because it's not a subject that rests easy with any political party.      Download the guide here and put it to use in all your advocacy...

Thetis Lake   I've found myself using the phrase, “And the infrastructure here!” a lot since arriving back on the Island from Honduras, so I guess that must be one of the things that has struck me most now that I am back to the life of a Canadian.     But in truth, there are so many points of comparison, good and bad. I do like sewage pipes big enough to embrace toilet paper, and water that comes straight out of the tap ready to drink. And the green spaces – well, I’m ecstatic about the green spaces. Honduras has the right climate for amazing public boulevards but at the moment there are hardly any, so just walking along the Gorge appreciating Saanich’s free flower and plant display is a rush for me these days.     On the downside, people are much less friendly here as they pass each other on the street. I’m really struck by how many people go out of their way to not make eye contact with the passing stranger, or even drop their gaze just at the point...

    Maybe one day you’re going to find yourself somewhere in Honduras thinking, hey, here I am in a country with way too many sick, underfed dogs, and I’d like to find at least one of them a great new home in Canada.     And with that one little thought, the grand and costly adventure will have begun.     I must admit, bringing White Dog home seemed destined. We've been feeding a variety of dogs during our two-plus years in Copan Ruinas, but White Dog appeared out of nowhere for the first time a couple of days before one of my daughters and her husband arrived for a visit in January, and the three of them instantly hit it off. Unlike a lot of the other street dogs here, who really love their wandering lives, White Dog seemed done with the entire business and eager to shift into a more domesticated life. Why not, we all said.    So I went on-line and started looking for information on airline web sites. United is the airline we’ve used t...