A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

There's something strangely fascinating about the Falun Gong stories coming out of Vancouver these days. I'm sure it's damn annoying for everyone coming to the Chinese consulate to have to deal with Falun Gong protesters every day, but it's unsettling to think that the City of Vancouver is prepared to side with China on this long-standing human-rights issue and ban the protesters. Here's what the Vancouver Sun's Pete McMartin has to say . The issue has many similarities to the abortion debate: two polarized groups, both very certain that they are in the right, fighting for control over the piece of sidewalk out in front of some building that represents the issue (abortion clinics in one case, the Chinese consulate in another). But B.C. manoeuvered very carefully on that issue. T he "bubble zone" law prevents protesters from setting up within 50 metres of the entry of an abortion clinic.  The reason the law was able to sustain a free-speech challenge...

Update on HIV/sex worker issue I noted a couple weeks ago a report on HIV/AIDS that had wrongly been presented in the media as being about all Vancouver sex workers, even though the study had actually involved only street-entrenched and addicted outdoor sex workers in the Downtown Eastside. Here's a March 14 letter from the authors of the study that sets things straight on that subject: RE: Unintended results of research (14 March 2009) by Druyts, Hogg, Montaner British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS We thank Dr. Goodyear for his response to our article. We fully agree with his concerns surrounding the recent coverage of our work on HIV prevalence in British Columbia, Canada. Dr. Goodyear has expressed difficulty in seeing how this study will benefit the individuals who participated in the research. Of note, estimates of HIV prevalence among at-risk groups are vital in planning for the development and provision of appropriate policy and programmatic responses. We wish t...

Best bet for ending gang violence is to remove the profit A UVic student I met last fall when I was teaching a journalism course let me read an interview he’d done with a Vancouver gang member - a childhood friend of his. It was an extraordinary read. Everybody’s got an opinion on why gangs have become such a deadly problem in B.C. and how we’ll get a handle on things, but it was fascinating to get a take on the issue from the point of view of a former gang member. Like a lot of the young people caught up in Vancouver’s gang scene right now, this kid had grown up as a generally happy and well-cared-for child in a financially comfortable family. Boys emerging from impoverished, troubled childhoods are still the primary recruits for a lot of Canadian gangs, but the rise of a new kind of gang culture in Vancouver points to more complicated risk factors that we’ve barely begun to understand. This particular young man was drawn into gang life after meeting another teen a couple years older ...