A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

A couple of the fabulous moms out there holding onto their kids - Lisa and Correne I'm a big fan of the Facebook group started by Mar (who lives on 800-block Pandora), called Homeless Victoria Bylaw Experiences . Today's post is from Jimmy , who I've known since back in the Holiday Court days, as bylaw officers seize a brand-new tent on Pandora and toss it in their dumpster. If the inhumanity and sheer pointless doesn't get to people, surely the waste issues ought to. Why hasn't there been a single report out of City of Victoria detailing the results of these 32 months of extra-rough enforcement since the Property in Custody bylaw took effect? How much of the "up to 10 tonnes" of people's personal property that the city takes away every week goes to the dump? How much gets reclaimed? What's the chain of custody process? Is there any appeal process? (Spoiler alert: No.) Are they really trashing that brand-new tent - and if they're not, then what...

This was one of my favourite pieces that I've done so far among the seven I've now done for the Times Colonist this year, as I top 22,000 words on homelessness since January. This piece ran today, July 26. It was just so nice to spend all those hours out talking to people who so rarely get talked to, if you don't count being yelled at.  Link is here , where you can enjoy a nice layout. Words and a few photos of mine are below: One city block. So many heated opinions. Mayor Marianne Alto called it “a hive of misery.” A pastor at a downtown church told media that while it troubled him to go against the gospel by shutting out the people who live there, he’d rather do that than let them in. A place of “rampant public disorder, open drug use and filth,” filled with “violent addicts” needing to be locked up. A place so bad that the “chaos spiraling outward” from it would soon destroy Victoria’s entire ­downtown, as the Globe and Mail phrased it last year in a ­particularly inflam...

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...