A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

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...

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 ...

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 ...

Opportunistic Canadian training institutes that over-promise and under-deliver are no doubt a problem for international students in Canada. The BC government's pledge this week to get to the bottom of that could be helpful. But if we're thinking it's just Bob's Shady Career College for Suckers that's the problem, take a look at the tuition fees that mainstream universities are charging for international students.  It helps explain why so many people seem to be freaking out at a shift in the political winds around international students. It's not because anyone's got a big heart for shielding international students from a shoddy education, or keeping more spaces open for Canadian students. It's about post-secondaries and employers that have been dining out on foreign students for many years, and can't bear to give that up. The Tyee had a great read on that earlier this month, appropriately headlined "Cash Cows and Cheap Labour."  Not only ...

    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...

Federal government fumbles again. And again. And again... Never mind the federal inquiry into B.C.’s vanishing sockeye salmon that will soon be underway. How about an inquiry into the federal government itself? I’m sure the feds must be good at something. But they’re routinely quite hopeless, in ways that would almost be funny if it weren’t for the harm being done to Canadians and the country. How have they hurt us? Let me count the ways: H1N1 - If this had really been “the big one,” we’d have been as hooped as a New Orleans hurricane victim waiting for rescue after Katrina. As luck would have it, we’ve been allowed to test our national pandemic strategy with a virus that wasn’t as terrifying as expected, but picture the shape we’d be in right now had the new flu strain remained as lethal as it was in its early days in Mexico. Canada has a 550-page pandemic preparedness plan, developed by the Public Health Agency four years ago after a botched national response to the SARS crisis. But ...

Are we sure we're still on the way up? I suppose every generation wants to believe it’s improving on the past. That’s how it always seemed in my history lessons at school, too - that we were intent on working our way up, from “primitive” to medieval to Renaissance and right on through to the enlightened human beings of modern times. We’ve made some remarkable progress. We’re healthier than we’ve ever been, and easily surviving diseases that once used to kill us off in vast numbers. We don’t just talk about human rights, we enshrine them in our laws. We wear our seatbelts, bicycle helmets, sunscreen and in-car sobriety with pride, and are better for it. I used to ponder ugly moments in history and feel grateful for not having been alive in those years. The destructive and stupid behaviours of human beings through the ages baffled me, but I was happy that my generation dwelt in kinder, gentler times and was in turn leaving a better world for their own children. But is that what’s act...

Nothing equal about treatment of men, women in 2009 federal budget In theory, we’re all equals in Canada. But just follow the money in the 2009 federal budget for proof of the flaws in that argument, notes an Ontario academic. Equality looks great on paper, which is why Canada has a Charter of Rights, wide-reaching human rights law, and its signature on just about every feel-good global declaration of oneness that’s out there. We’ve been particularly passionate in our calls for equality between men and women. But there are the warm and fuzzy things that we tell each other, and then there’s reality. A gender analysis out of Queen’s University of the most recent federal budget is a sobering reminder of just how far Canadian women continue to lag behind men economically. The analysis was done by Prof. Kathleen Lahey, a law professor with a speciality in tax. Twenty years ago when she took her first look at whether tax laws affect men and women differently, she was stunned to discover t...