A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

  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...

Image: Pixabay, johnhain Letter to a friend today as we talked about how to get our heads around what has to come next in the toxic drug crisis: I have been thinking so very long and hard about the toxic drug crisis lately, and have come to that point where the conclusion I've arrived at is challenging yet necessary. I hit that in my Peers Victoria years when I realized that the real way to support sex workers was to end stigma, and the only way you could end stigma was to normalize the activity. So here we are on this one, and we all know the most obvious strategy with the quickest results: make sure everybody gets a safe supply of the drug they use. Normalize drug use. It's a strange one because in SO many ways and overwhelmingly, drug use is normalized. But this ridiculous "street drug" business - the drugs we don't want people to have, for no particular reason other than because we said so - is seen as an aberrant use. In fact, as the demographics of the peopl...

John Horgan, David Eby and Justin Trudeau are responsible for the unnecessary deaths of 21,000 people in BC in the last eight years. John Rustad and Pierre Poilievre will continue the trend if given the chance. So there you go, a rare all-party agreement. If I were a conspiracy type, I’d be looking for drug cartel money dressed up as some fancy campaign for a fentanyl czar, because you couldn’t make life much better for a cartel than to be handling the issue of street drugs the way our political leaders do. A person could spend a long time trying to find anything that makes sense about how we are managing a drug supply grown toxic from a complete absence of regulatory oversight. Believe me, I have. But then I was on a dog walk today in the sunshine and my mind was clear, and I saw the obvious – that our governments are protectionists for the drug cartels. Oh, they do a good job of hiding it. They shake their fist at “evil predators,” and they definitely throw a ton of money at police ...

I was in Philadelphia visiting family last month when UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead on a Manhattan street in a carefully planned execution. The instant roar of approval that united an otherwise starkly divided America in the days and weeks that followed has been a notable reminder that people are feeling a little done these days. Like everyone who has written about Thompson’s murder, I want to stress that in no way do I condone street executions. I’m sorry that he got killed, and that a young man whose own path seemed quite promising felt compelled to take such drastic action. At the same time, I’m awed by the powerful rage that the shooting brought out in people, and the major conversations it is sparking. (I, too, burn with fury at what the CEO class has gotten away with, though I’d like to think I’d never settle it with a gun.) The killing lit a fire under the issue of health-care claim denials in a way that a thousand of the most heart-breaking tales of life s...

VIHA's problems go much deeper than communications department Aug. 29, 2008 It’s a poor workman who blames his tools, so let’s hope the Vancouver Island Health Authority rethinks its decision to lay the blame for bad communications on its long-suffering public relations staff. That VIHA pays $1 million a year to communicate badly is certainly a problem. But if the health authority genuinely believes the root cause of that is due to the communication department not doing its job - well, that goes a long way to explaining why these kind of problems continue to dog VIHA. I’ve been an observer of the local health scene for many years, having started my work at the Times Colonist in 1989 as the paper’s health reporter. I’ve never lost interest in the subject, or the ongoing communication problems that have plagued whatever entity was running regional health services at a particular point in time. When I arrived here, the Greater Victoria Hospital Society was running things, under the t...

Hard to stay positive when faced with our inability to act Feb. 23, 2007 Life on the front lines of a load of social issues these past three years has underlined for me the problems of a community that can’t come to grips with what’s going on in its streets. It’s been something of a grim awakening. Not the issues so much - 23 years in journalism had already introduced me to things like drug addiction, the sex trade and people living on the streets before I started working in the not-for-profit sector in 2004. No, it’s my newfound knowledge - that we’re paralyzed with indecision about what to do about any of it - that has proved the most unsettling. I sometimes fear I’m drifting into cynicism, which was certainly a risk even in my previous job as a journalist. On that front, I remain haunted by the ghost of the Victoria Health Project of the late 1980s. I was a relatively new reporter in those days, and loved the strategy for its common sense. Tasked with finding a way to keep aging peo...

If exotic dancers' money not good enough, don't count on mine Feb . 17, 2007 When I first heard about a national breast cancer charity turning down a donation from exotic dancers in Vancouver, I got mad. I fired off a furious e-mail to the Breast Cancer Society of Canada, and suspect a lot of other people did too. Being an exotic dancer is, after all, a legal profession. Up until 2004, Canada even had a special fast-track immigration category for exotic dancers to ensure the country never ran short of them. Do we want our charities getting sniffy about taking donations from hard-working, fully legal dancers just because somebody disapproves of how they make a living? That’s what happened in this instance, when the cancer society rejected the proceeds of a fundraiser being put on by Vancouver’s Exotic Dancers For Canada next month. But while I was poking around on the Web in search of insight into what could have possibly possessed the society to refuse the donation, what became...

Going nowhere fast, and spending a fortune to do it Jan. 19, 2007 If you’re the type to worry about where we’re headed in this world, these are bleak times. We’re at one of those points in history where things on any number of fronts are either going to get much better or a whole lot worse based on whatever we do next. Unfortunately, we’re showing few signs of being up for the challenge. I’ve often wondered at what point a community ignites. How did the small, brave acts of people in the U.S. finally explode into the civil rights movement? What finally elevated gay rights to being a legitimate issue that mattered? To know that would perhaps be the secret to unlocking this national stupor of ours, one that seems to render us incapable of addressing an array of really serious problems unfolding around us. We would not for a moment be so cavalier in our personal lives. We wouldn’t continue to do things that clearly weren’t working, or spend vast sums of money without ever questioning the ...