A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

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...

Crazy-making cuts instantly increase government costs The funny thing about the current government is that I often agree with what they say. It’s what they do that makes me crazy. For instance, here’s the premier in an interview with the Times Colonist last week: "I think it's really important for people to understand that the costs of our health-care system are staggering, frankly.” Indeed. Health eats up 42 cents of every dollar the government spends. Premier, you’ll get no argument from me on that. But on the very day that Gordon Campbell was saying that, his government was preparing to eliminate birth-control options for women and men living in poverty, who will soon lose access to IUDs and condoms. It was taking away $50 glucometers from people on income assistance who have diabetes, needed to measure their blood sugar every day. It was cancelling funding for a little plastic adapter that makes it easier for people with asthma to use their inhalers. And I’m left to wond...

Telling details in letter to impoverished victims of identity theft Picture what would happen if 1,400 middle-class British Columbians suddenly discovered that a provincial government employee with a criminal record for fraud had all their personal information stashed at his home. We’re talking all the good stuff: social insurance numbers; birth dates; phone numbers and addresses; personal account numbers. Worse still, he’d had it for seven months by the time anyone who’d been affected even knew it had happened. The halls of the legislature would be ringing for weeks with the howls of outrage and indignation. The government would be turning itself inside out to make things right for the victims. Unfortunately, the actual story involves 1,400 welfare recipients. And the way the tale has played out in real life is so strikingly different than how things would have gone had the crime involved British Columbians with political clout, that there’s no hiding the government’s disregard for p...

If you want to fight back, make it effective I find myself thinking about protest a lot these days, mostly because of the ill-considered social cuts going on in B.C. right now. It’s really the only form of democratic action we have in between elections, and a proven tool. When the public “blowback” is intense enough, as Housing Minister Rich Coleman might say, governments tend to change their minds. But last week’s Olympic torch dustup reminds us that there’s protest, and then there’s effective protest. Those of us who want real change had best keep that in mind. I mean no disrespect to those who protested the torch relay last Friday. The majority were there for all the right reasons. I certainly share their pain over a $6 billion party being thrown next February even while growing numbers of vulnerable British Columbians lose the programs and services that help them cope. Still, little is gained when the only thing your protest accomplishes is to frustrate and sadden the people who d...

Fight back - these cuts will do lasting harm I’ve kept a rough list of the B.C. programs and services being lost as a result of government cuts this fall. Maybe there’s still nothing on the list that affects you and your family, but the odds are getting slimmer all the time. A remarkably broad swath of British Columbians will be affected by the funding cuts being carried out by the provincial government and its five health authorities right now. The cuts are coming fast and furious in all directions, with neither a plan nor an understanding at any level of what it’s all going to mean when the dust settles. Without a word of public discussion, vital social programs and supports that British Columbians have counted on for years are vanishing. Our province will end up wearing the scars of these cuts for decades to come. We need to shake ourselves out of our respective silos and make it stop. Whatever your political stripe, I’m sure we can all agree that we’re against bad decision-making. ...

Government knows how to end homelessness - and it's not arrest These are times when all ideas need to be on the table, so I’m trying to restrain my impulse to go berserko at the B.C. government for thinking that you can manage homelessness by arresting people. But really, it’s enough to break your heart. All the effort and thought that has gone into this issue in recent years, all the proven solutions and strategies pulled together by brilliant and informed minds right here in B.C. - and this is what the province has taken away from that? Say it isn’t so. Housing Minister Rich Coleman has been in the news this week talking about giving police the power to arrest people who refuse to go to shelters over the winter. His early plans turned shelter staff into jailors by forcing people to stay inside, but now he says police would just deliver people to shelters and leave it up to them whether they walked through the door. The argument will likely play well with many of us in the comfort...

Autism cuts add one more burden to families Cuts to government-funded programs are raining down in all directions. Alicia Ulysses gets that the end of free karate lessons for her 16-year-old autistic son is pretty small potatoes given all that. But sometimes a mother just has to stand up and say: Hey, you guys, have you ever considered what you’re really taking away from the child at the other end of a decision like that? In B.C., families can qualify for up to $20,000 a year in government funding to help pay for special services for a child with autism who is under age six. That amount will be increased to $22,000 next April. Nicholas Ulysses is 16, so the maximum his family qualifies for is $6,000 a year. It’s a needed program, and here’s hoping nothing bad happens next year when the government makes changes to the way parents access the money. But the problem for families of older children is that the kinds of activities that would benefit their child often don’t qualify for funding...

Muddy waters hide true level of cuts in BC budget The devil’s in the details, as the saying goes. But good luck trying to find them in the revamped provincial budget if you’re looking to understand where the cuts to provincially funded services are going to hurt the most. What is clear is that somebody’s definitely going to be feeling pain. The revised 2009-10 budget reflects a major downturn in provincial revenue. Government has earmarked almost $2 billion in cuts over the next three years that will come from “administrative efficiencies” inside government, and an additional $1.5 billion in cuts to various community services receiving year-to-year grants. The government calls such grants “discretionary.” What they mean by that is that government is under no obligation to provide the money in the first place, or to keep it coming. Discretionary grants have become a very common but extremely unstable way of funding many kinds of community services. The $159 million or so the government...

Throne Speech foreshadows cuts to come Maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones and barely feel a blip when the provincial government reveals its retooled budget next week. But in the capital city, in a region dependent on government jobs and provincial funding on all kinds of fronts, there can’t be many of those kind of people out there. My sense is that a lot more are awaiting Tuesday’s budget announcement with trepidation and fear, and this week’s throne speech certainly brought no comfort. Throne speeches are typically pretty vague with the details. They give the flavour of the budget to come, and set the tone. But they don’t actually say what’s going to happen, leaving those who desperately want to know more to read between the lines. The gist of the Aug. 25 throne speech is roughly this: “B.C. is in the grips of something so awful that we couldn’t have imagined it, and we’ve really had to make some tough decisions around spending. But you can trust us to look after what’s important...

We're NOT going to take it - are we? Ever been to one of those meetings where you’re thinking damn, if I have to take another five minutes of this, I’m going to run screaming from the room? BC Ferries has found an easy solution. They just pay their directors to go - $1,500 a pop if you’re there in person, $750 if you phone in. And that’s on top of the $48,000-$58,000 a year the directors are already getting just to be on the board - an amount that’s quite a bit more than the full-year working wage of an average Canadian. What the heck is going on? So much is weird in this world around the things we give value to that I sometimes fantasize about becoming one of those crazed tax resisters holed up in a (sunny) hideaway in some distant land. I mean, really, when IS the revolution? Something dehumanizing must happen to people when they reach the top of the food chain. Otherwise, how could it be that just sitting on a board of directors ends up being worth more than, say, a full year o...

Old West-style justice system strands binner in Oak Bay Hear the one about the homeless guy stranded in Oak Bay? It’d make a pretty good opening line for a joke. But there’s nothing funny about it in reality, seeing as the man who it happened to had no access to food or shelter for 10 days because of a court order banishing him from the City of Victoria. The courts routinely use “red zone” orders for drug charges to keep people away from certain areas where drugs are bought and sold. The red zone in our region is typically downtown Victoria - roughly the area bounded by Cook, Store, Belleville and Discovery streets. But binner Ron Beland got hit with the red-zone order of all time last month. Charged with assault after a fight with another homeless man, Beland found himself ordered out of the entire City of Victoria until his next court appearance 10 days later. Seeing as the region’s only services and supports for homeless people are in the City of Victoria, that left Beland to dig t...

Not enough just to measure 'school satisfaction' Our public schools are in the news right now, for issues ranging from funding problems to whether principals are "dumbing down" the education process by letting students rewrite tests. But I've yet to see much discussion about findings that flag much deeper problems in B.C.'s public schools, as identified by the students and parents using the system. Satisfaction surveys have their limitations, but they still reveal a great deal about how the "customer" perceives a service. Done regularly, they're also valuable for tracking whether customer satisfaction improves as problems are identified and dealt with. Take a look at the 2007-08 surveys of B.C. public schools, however, and what you'll find are a whole lot of dissatisfied students and parents who have been identifying the same problems in our schools for more than five years now, with virtually no sign of improvement in the areas they identify...

Big picture essential when deciding on run-of-river projects Once upon a time, a previous generation of British Columbians made tough, costly choices on behalf of future citizens. Now it’s our turn, with no certainty that we’re ready for it. B.C. has enjoyed a seemingly limitless supply of cheap “green” electricity for 40 years thanks to the giant dams built on the Peace and Columbia rivers back when mega-projects and environmental sensitivities weren’t quite so at odds with each other. But in recent years the population has grown to the point that we’re using more electricity than we generate. The painful process of figuring out what to do about that is underway, but with all-new challenges and complexities that render much of our previous hydro history moot as a guide for what needs to be done. Is the provincial government up to the task? That’s a big question, as revealed in this week’s headlines about the feverish interest building in the private sector over “run of river” projects...

Sheer madness and massive waste of money to release BC prisoners to homelessness What I’d planned for today’s column was a look at what happens when somebody without housing is released from a provincial jail in B.C. I’d run into an interesting fellow named Reg in my downtown travels, who’d wanted to talk about the practise of releasing prisoners straight onto the streets after they’ve served their time at the jail on Wilkinson Road. He told me it had happened to him more times than he could count. But sometimes a column ends up becoming the story of what happened on the way to the story, and this is one of those. First, a few statistics to give you a sense of the issue at hand. B.C. has nine jails, which at any given point in time are housing close to 2,800 prisoners serving sentences of less than two years. The average stay is 55 days, so that means as many as 18,500 people moving in and out of B.C. jails in any given year, at a cost of almost $160 million. That’s just the cost to lo...

Do you know where your laws are? May 16, 2008 By the end of May, hundreds of new and amended laws will take effect in B.C., almost none of which have been given any public scrutiny. In a scant three months, the provincial government has hustled 18 bills into law. At least another six are expected to be passed by the time the legislature recesses for the summer at the end of this month. The bills affect hundreds of regulations from dozens of acts. The proposed Wills, Estates and Succession Act, for instance, has 276 regulations. The Public Health Act has 161. The Miscellaneous Amendments Act incorporates changes to 29 other acts. Unless you’ve got considerably more time than me for a self-directed, regulation-by-regulation comparison of the changes, you and I remain equally in the dark as to what they are, the impact they’ll have or the rationale behind them. Many are little more than housekeeping, of course, and others are welcome news. It’s great to hear of new laws protecting milita...

U.S. corporation takes another piece of B.C.'s human service work Sept. 21, 2007 For better or worse, the bulk of B.C.’s back-to-work programs for people with disabilities are now under the control of a large, aggressive American corporation. The ink is barely dry on the Aug. 3 agreement that saw the sale of the local company that has run the programs up until now - WCG International - to Arizona’s Providence Service Corp. So it’s much too soon to speculate whether clients will notice any difference, or to assume that it’s automatically a bad thing when one more big U.S. company takes over yet another aspect of B.C.’s human services. But man, I get cold shivers down my spine when I think about how easily British Columbians are giving this stuff up, all of it without a whisper of public debate. Providence in particular is a heavy-duty acquisitor of government social-service contracts, and delighted to be gaining its first foothold in Canada. Providence bought WCG less than a month a...

Caution essential to revamp of BC Wildlife Act Aug. 3, 2007 Hunting isn’t my thing, but I recognize it as a genuine B.C. activity beloved by tens of thousands. So I’ve worked hard at staving off any kneejerk reaction to recent news that the Environment Ministry hopes to get another 20,000 hunters out into the woods over the next few years. Six per cent of British Columbians hunted 25 years ago. Nowadays, just two per cent of us do. In real numbers, that’s a 50 per cent drop - from 168,000 active B.C. hunters in 1981, to 84,000 today. I can see why hunters might want to bolster their ranks. I can also see why the government is on side, given the potential boost to the economy of B.C.’s struggling rural communities that could result from increased hunting activity. But look beyond the headlines about the push for more hunters, and you’ll find more substantial things to worry about. While a few more hunters likely won’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, other proposed changes to...