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-...

I went looking for the origins of that phrase "the deserving poor" today. It turns out to be a 426-year-old term dating back to the Elizabethan Poor Laws, which aimed to reduce the devastating impact of a famine by providing alms to the deserving poor and a hard stint in the workhouse for the undeserving. Modern anti-poverty policies would never word things like that, of course. But strip away the dressed-up language and that’s still what we’ve got. We’ve even lost the plot on “the deserving poor” at this point, with people now stranded out on our streets who actually would have been eligible for alms back in Elizabethan times. Back in 1601, the Poor Laws divided impoverished people into three categories for the purpose of deciding how much help they qualified for. “The vagrant” was undeserving and destined for the workhouse, where he would be punished daily doing work that was deliberately designed to be more unpleasant than even the worst of jobs outside the workhouse...

Scrambling to pack up as bylaw gets ready to close in In days gone by, I'd be out talking to people living homeless and hearing mostly about police. These days, it's all about City of Victoria bylaw enforcement. The city's bylaw department and many new bylaw hires have been given expansive new powers to seize people's stuff. The Streets and Traffic Bylaw lays out all the places where impoverished people aren't allowed to sit, stand or lie down, but it's the 2023 Property in Custody Bylaw that really gives the muscle. I'd like to share some sections from these bylaws, in hopes that someone who understands civic law might have ideas on how to push back against them. It's hard to believe that they could possibly be legal given the grand misery they are causing to people, none of whom have the capacity or the knowledge to stand up against them. As noted by one young fellow out there I spoke with, Michael, "maybe one per cent of the people out here kno...

The concept of “passing” has presumably been around since whenever the first person on the outside of the dominant social group of the day figured out they could hide in plain sight because they had the good fortune of looking like they belonged. You’re a black person in the pre-Civil Rights era, but your genetics gave you light skin and straight hair. You’re Jewish in Hitler’s Germany, but with an acceptably Aryan bone structure as to draw no negative attention. You’re a trans woman using a women’s washroom, but your physical appearance is sufficiently “feminine” that nobody has a thought about that. You’re a sex worker in a hostile room of those mean kind of feminists who hate sex work, but everybody treats you respectfully because you look like them and they have no idea what you do for a living. You’re LGBTQ in a land that will have none of it, living out your secrets from inside a heterosexual marriage. You’re a daily user of street drugs, but you’ve got a job, a nice house and a ...

I spent a bit of time on “the block” this past weekend, that stretch of Pandora Avenue that is currently one of the city’s most visible hot spots of social crisis. I hope the city’s big plan works out well for all concerned, and sign me up for helping. But after three decades of watching so many variations of Victoria councils trying to get a handle on this issue, it's obvious that we'll just be moving street problems into someone else's neighbourhood unless we grasp what really creates these hot spots.  There's a tough little core of maybe 70-100 people at any given point in time in our region who are youngish, hardy, and deep in a late-stage struggle with whatever substance has got them, generally with mental and physical illnesses taking an additional toll. Their chaotic and unpredictable lives place them far outside the many rules, online forms, waiting periods, and service restrictions they face when trying to get help. Like anyone, they need to get their needs met...

Bridge too fast scares up thousands of resisters OK, I get Victoria councillor Lynn Hunter’s concern about deciding things by referendum. Direct democracy can be an unpredictable and potentially harmful form of governance, as the state of California can attest. But when it comes to the Johnson Street bridge, I understand completely why more than 9,000 Victoria citizens have signed petitions demanding that city council’s decision to replace the bridge be put to referendum. For one thing, the idea of replacing the bridge came out of nowhere nine months ago. City council (with the exception of Geoff Young) was such an enthusiastic booster from the start that no one with a wrong word to say about the project was given any chance to air their concerns. And it was council who created the “alternate approval process” that brought us to this point. Usually the city lets its citizens participate in the decision-making process, but this time council took the position that the answer was “yes” ...

Too-efficient parking enforcement no way to lure people downtown As a general rule, I try to avoid being self-serving in my column. I try not to use my public platform to write about issues that I’ve got a personal stake in. But - and there’s always a but, isn’t there? - I do have one personal issue that drives me absolutely mad, to the point that on rare occasions I ignore all that stuff about separating the personal and the public and have a little rant anyway. The subject is parking tickets. I’ve had a few in my day - probably 10 a year since I moved here in 1989. I generally pay up within the two-week discount period, primarily because I refuse to let the city take any more money from me. Every one of the tickets has angered me. That’s neither here nor there as a public issue except if you consider that the City of Victoria has given me at least 200 easy opportunities to feel resentful toward it. I suspect the same goes for virtually anyone who gets a ticket, unless there really a...

Bad thinking all round in Battershill story Sept. 26, 2008 What’s done is done, so there’s little point in getting too worked up over the many missteps in the Paul Battershill saga. But boy, there was some flawed thinking going on there at a whole lot of levels. And what’s most disturbing is that if it weren’t for a Victoria businessman inadvertently bringing the messy business to light in the first place, we might never have heard a word about any of it. If you haven’t yet read Times Colonist reporter Rob Shaw’s excellent piece this past Sunday on Battershill’s hard, fast fall from grace as Victoria’s police chief, add it to your must-read list. It chronicles an alarming amount of seriously bad decision-making leading up to Battershill’s forced resignation last month - on the part of Battershill, Mayor Alan Lowe and Victoria’s civilian police board. That the story took almost a full year to come out also tells you how badly those at the centre of the tale didn’t want you to know any o...

Victoria street issues are everybody's problem to deal with July 13, 2007 Being part of the mayor’s task force that’s trying to figure out the street problems in Victoria’s downtown has given me the opportunity to hear about the issues from every viewpoint. I’ve been heartened to learn that virtually everybody is worried. We need to be. But it’s also been discouraging to realize how many of us feel powerless to do anything about it. My most recent conversation as a member of the task force steering committee was with a group of downtown landlords. They gave me one disturbing anecdote after another when asked about the problems they were experiencing. One had recently seen a woman raped in an alley off Johnson Street, on a bright and sunny Saturday afternoon. The woman was screaming as her attacker beat her with a hammer. Police were called. The woman, who lived on the streets, refused to press charges, fearing “street justice” if word got out she’d brought charges against her att...

Nothing appealing about Victoria's Centennial Square Feb. 9, 2007 What is it about a space that makes you want to stay in it? You and I might have differing theories on that, but I bet we could agree on at least one point: Centennial Square doesn’t have it. I cut through the square on occasion, and find myself wondering each and every time what it is that makes the place so completely uninviting. I don’t think I’m alone on this one, either, because the square is disturbingly empty most of the time. People just don’t seem to go there. No disrespect to the square’s original planner, Rod Clack. I’m sure Centennial Square was a heck of an improvement over what was there 45 years ago when it was built. Victoria’s downtown was still very much in transition from its rough-and-tumble past in those years, and creating public space next to a renovated city hall was a terrific move. But whatever it was about the square that worked in 1962, it stopped working quite some time ago. To walk thro...

The hazards of parking-ticket policy Nov. 17, 2006 I’ve seen at least six cycles of the Victoria parking-ticket debate since moving here 17 years ago. They all basically unfold the same way. It usually starts with the City of Victoria musing about collecting more money by increasing the parking fines. Pretty soon, downtown merchants join the debate, questioning the impact on their customers of whatever new parking policy is being discussed at the time. Eleven years ago, for instance, downtown businesses sounded the alarm about a plan to give commissionaires handheld computers that instantly identified drivers with 10 or more unpaid parking tickets. Such cars caught at expired meters were to be towed. Businesses feared the vigilance was going to be a problem for some of their customers. But as the habit has been in the past decade or so, the city went ahead anyway. Back then, the city brought in $2 million a year in ticket revenue. It’s now almost $4 million. The changes have been part...