A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

You know, it's really striking how often political parties that shape themselves as being about "small government" in fact spend their time in office growing the business out of all proportions. Here's the latest news on that front involving the Tories. Keep in mind that all this growth happened at a time when Stephen Harper's government was slashing public services. That's the thing that grates the most - that even while we're losing long-standing public programs due to "belt-tightening," our governments are growing larger, taking ever-bigger salaries, and even paying out bonuses to the senior managers who are most effective at cutting our services. In ancient times, they would have called this kind of governance a kleptocracy - "rule by thieves." Whatever you want to call it, it's crazy-making. But hey, we keep electing them.

Now here's an idea whose time has come - free parking at hospitals.  Maybe now that the Canadian Medical Association Journal is saying it, it will have an impact. How crazy is it to stress people out just that little bit more  when they're going through an illness or something worse than by charging them to park? And once we're offering it free, how about offering more of it, too? Can't believe they built that new parkade  at Royal Jubilee hospital at a capacity that was well below what's actually needed.

Having to make way for Santa seems an ignominious end for the Occupy movement, but that’s how things tend to go in countries that aren’t yet angry enough to get genuinely uncivil. Still, the public reaction to the Occupy protests over the last eight weeks has been surprisingly sympathetic. I take that as a hopeful sign that this movement will have legs. People tolerated the protest camps for much longer than they usually do when tents appear in public spaces. I think a lot of them quietly related to the issues the movement has raised. It’s pretty impressive that in just two short months, a mixed bag of disaffected citizens around the world took a small protest in New York City’s financial district and turned it into a global movement. Whether it can last long enough to affect change, I guess we’ll see. But the Occupy protests got a lot more positive attention than most “occupations” get - an indicator that people have a certain sympathy for the cause. The movement star...

Canada's finest health writer, Andre Picard, weighs in with his usual information-laden, clear-eyed view on the fuss about mammographies. Women are accustomed to cancer screening as a good thing from lifetimes of Pap smears. But as Picard and the larger scientific community points out, screening can have a serious downside when false positives - more common than you'd hope in both mammograms and PSA tests for prostate cancer - lead people to have serious medical procedures and treatments that they didn't need. Cancer is such an emotionally loaded word. We all know someone who has had it and we're all terrified to get it ourselves, but the truth is that the science of cancer is still something of a mystery. You'd think that highly developed screening tools that can catch the earliest signs of cancer would be a good thing. But now we're learning that some cancers never really get past the starting gate in our bodies, and that there's such a thing as "b...

Good try by the Occupiers, but it looks like things are fizzling out across the country. It's cold, for one thing, but probably the bigger problem is that unless a protest gets bigger with each passing day, everybody forgets about it very quickly and just returns to their routines. Then all you've really got is a camp pretty much like any of the other camps of impoverished people we've had in Victoria. I like the Occupy movement, but I don't know if enough people are feeling the pain yet to give the movement the critical mass it needs. Not in Canada, anyway. The States - well, that's another matter. I think they've got any number of angry-and devastated-citizen protests ahead of them as the country's problems deepen.

A good read from regret-filled former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper. He presided over the disastrous 1999 "Battle in Seattle," when an aggressive police response to World Trade Organization protesters turned the city into a tear gas-laden war zone for several days. I was there, having been sent south by the Times Colonist on Day 2 of the clash to cover the story. There were 5,000 armed police and military personnel in the city by that point, and it was a terrifying, life-changing experience for me to realize that every citizen is in danger when there's that much police aggression and weaponry around. Stamper has been talking about his mistakes for a number of years now, and I admire him immensely for it. Who better than those who have already learned the hard lessons to remind us not to repeat the missteps of history?

Aside from an unpleasant period of paranoia brought on by seeing the documentary Food Inc ., I’ve never put much thought into food safety. But when the food police come for my Red River cereal - well, that certainly gets my attention. At first I thought there’d just been a run on Red River when I saw the empty shelf. But after several forays to different stores in an effort to find my breakfast of choice, I spotted the little recall notices. It’s unsettling to learn that something you eat every day has been recalled. So I went looking for answers this week and discovered how little I knew about the whole complicated business of food safety in Canada, let alone the dense regulatory regime that aims to protect Canadians from harmful foods. In the case of the Red River recall, it’s a labelling issue. Soy is in the cereal but isn’t declared on the label. Food allergies have become a major focus for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency after national labelling laws were tightene...