A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

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...

Some guy's comments on one of my Facebook posts this week really brought home this twisted thinking that people who use illicit drugs don't deserve support because it was their choice to use drugs in the first place. (The "made your bed now lie in it" school of thought.) I've learned that mostly when people say stuff like that, they're just shooting their mouth off, parroting the thing they've heard over and over again from childhood on. But how about we take a moment to dive into that thought - the idea that our social compact, as this guy put it, should not extend to carrying the burden for someone's "bad" choices. Let's call it the Your Fault Social Compact. It'll be modeled on that health insurance company in the States where the CEO ended up murdered because he symbolized ruthless and predatory capitalism destroying human lives. Or ICBC. Right now, our health care system says if you're sick, we'll care for you, even if th...

Pixabay:  Md Habibur Please do read this latest piece of mine in this morning's Times Colonist , where you can see the photos and a nicer layout, and appreciate the sheer remarkableness of the TC generously giving me all this space to talk about this big, big issue. But I'm finding the workarounds for Facebook's news article bans are getting blown up faster than new ones emerge, so posting this piece in full on my blog seems to be the only option for broader sharing. Here it is: A school on fire. A multi-vehicle pileup on the Malahat. A high-impact earthquake. First responders call these kinds of major disasters “mass casualty incidents” – MCIs.That’s the perfect term for 900-block Pandora, says a local B.C. Ambulance Service paramedic speaking on condition of anonymity. “Pandora is a slow-motion MCI,” he says. “We’re in a state of system failure, and it’s devastating to so many people. I don’t even see a light at the end of the tunnel, just a big black pit and people falli...

Premier David Eby doesn’t give a whit about my opinion. As it turns out, I feel the same way about his. But we are stuck with each other – him with his Premier-level access to the traditional media, me with a blog and social media. And I’ve got a few things to say. Anything said about a politician seems to get interpreted as a statement of political support for or against them. That’s not what this is. I don’t care for politics. So there’s no politics in what is bothering me about David Eby. And just to be transparent, I loathe the BC Conservatives. What is actually bothering me about David Eby is the great discomfort of seeing that a man who I once believed in can be acting this way. It’s quite a different level of betrayal than the usual political stuff. David Eby is a lawyer. His dad was a lawyer too, and his mom a teacher. He once headed up the BC Civil Liberties Association, and I interviewed him a number of times in those years. He was always a sharp thinker who I had a good opin...

My journalism career coincidentally tracks the rise in homelessness in BC, from the days before anyone even used the word, to modern times when virtually every community in the province is profoundly affected by it.  I wrote for the Victoria Times Colonist for more than 20 years, full-time for the first 15 years and then as a weekly columnist. Homelessness was an issue I came back to over and over again. I have been part of adding to the public record for all the years starting from when that word first described maybe 10 or 15 men with alcohol problems, to the current time, when hundreds of people with immensely complex health issues are stuck on our streets. I was no longer a journalist when I sat on the mayor-appointed committee that dove into the issues for the still completely relevant 2008 report Breaking The Cycle of Mental Illness, Addictions and Homelessness , but by then was working in social services and   felt a real responsibility to help open people's eyes to the...

  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...