A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

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...

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...