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-...

  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...

One of my long-time friends has Dissociative Identity Disorder – what they once called multiple personality. Getting to know her and her people over many years has helped me to see that it’s not a mental illness at all, it’s a coping mechanism. I see so many parallels with this thing we call addiction. For my friend, dissociating was a sane response to an insane situation, which in her case was a long childhood of non-stop physical, sexual and emotional abuse. When her little-girl self couldn’t handle what was happening to her, she found a way to check out. Some other “person” that her amazing brain had created would emerge to take the pain and heartbreak, and then retreat deep inside with the memory to protect my friend from having to know it ever happened. Being able to dissociate so completely as a child was a brilliant strategy for her at the time. She thinks it probably saved her life, allowing her to take repeated abuse that any fully present child could never bear. The cop...

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...

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...

  Bylaw sweep is on in Victoria and this man has to run to get to his stuff before it's gone A communications strategist living through a social crisis of unprecedented magnitude right here in her own province spends a lot of time mulling how to shift the conversation to the advantage of all the people living the crisis.  So I'm testing something new on Instagram, @streetstoriesvictoria . If you're familiar with Humans of New York, my little test is taking the lead from that fine feature. My aim is to be a pair of eyes out there and tell some small stories - no opinions, no casting blame, just seeing.  I've only just begun so currently have a mere seven posts, but stick with me and I'll get those numbers up fast. After 40 years of observing all the factors that have gotten us to this tragic place, I am seeing people - the public, policy makers, most definitely the politicians - getting things so wrong on so many fronts, and I think much of that is because people hav...

I wrote a letter to the editor to the Victoria Times Colonist that they ran Sept 27 as an opinion piece , which I then posted on Facebook, where it got major traction primarily among people who aren't my "followers."  I'm saying all of that because it has led me to conclude that those of us who think like this about the social crisis burning on all of our communities' streets need to be way more out there in public spheres with our thoughts. There is more support than we might think, and governments that only ever hear from the highly active lock-em-up types need to know that.  Let's take a leaf from the populist playbook and get loud at every opportunity. (Ideally by pointing out the reality rather than just shouting angrily at the "other side" that they're idiots, though I admit I came pretty close to doing that in this particular rant, didn't I?) I fear that some of us in this fight have concluded that it's hopeless to openly push back...

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...

Anyone else like a radio opportunity that gives free range to say whatever you want to sound off about,  but then you listen to it and think good grief, couldn't I have been more eloquent and organized in my thinking? Ah, but then I wouldn't be me, right? Or that's what I like to tell myself.  Here I am, blathering on People First Radio this month about the street scene in Victoria. For some reason, I'm listening to it for the first time today, 10 days after it aired. I think that might relate to my reluctance to not want to hear myself talking in random, wandering, no-key-messages fashion. That's my dealio, but that's not to say that I love that I do it that way.  But all that said, thank you, Joe Pugh, for letting me sound off in my usual stream-of-conscious style, and for including some clips from the speaker series on the toxic drug crisis that I organized in partnership with Peers Victoria earlier this year.  On the upside, illicit drug deaths in BC fell t...

And just like that, institutionalization is back.  My head is in a whirl. After untold hours of my early journalism career spent documenting the hard-won battle to banish BC's bad old institutions rife with abuse and civil-liberties violations, the former executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association is now the premier of the province and pitching involuntary care like it's a fresh new idea whose time has come.  “This announcement is the beginning of a new phase of our response to the addiction crisis," said Premier David Eby  in a statement released yesterday  in which government outlined how British Columbians could now be held against their will for mental illness, drug use or brain injury if they are making their communities feel "unsafe." "We’re going to respond to people struggling like any family member would. We are taking action to get them the care they need to keep them safe, and in doing so, keep our communities safe, too," said E...

I haven't worked as a full-time journalist for almost 20 years now, but people still pay me to go find things out. I have a habit of finding way more information than the person who hired me wanted, the curse of a curious nature.  Here's some of the surplus I've accumulated recently from some of that work, all of it related to the multiple layers of social crises we're seeing emerging in virtually every BC community. I drive along 900-block Pandora Street sometimes and am at a loss to grasp just what the hell is happening to us, but when I consider all the snippets of social tragedy below, it makes a very, very sad kind of sense.  For instance: We shut down institutions and never really replaced them with much Riverview Hospital used to be BC’s largest mental institution, housing 4,300 people at its peak in the 1950s. But by the early 1990s, locking up people deemed "mentally disordered" for indefinite periods of time, with or without their consent, had fall...