A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Manitoba chief's blockade threats may be best strategy June 22, 2007 Calls for a coast-to-coast railway blockade by aboriginal leader Terrance Nelson couldn’t be more un-Canadian. We like things settled without conflict. We’re particularly loath to engage in it right out in the open, the way Nelson likes to do it. The chief of Manitoba’s Roseau River Anishinabe First Nation says some outrageous things when he gets heated up about the grim struggles of Canada’s aboriginal population. And he’s just about at the boiling point these days. The Assembly of First Nations is organizing a “day of action” next week for the nation’s aboriginals, and Nelson wants to see a blockade so big that Canada’s economy will still be reeling from the shock months from now. “There’s only one way to deal with a white man. You either pick up a gun or you stand between him and his money,” Nelson most famously said a month ago in a media interview. In a follow-up Globe and Mail profile this week, he reiterat...

Choosing death ought to be our right June 15, 2007 With any luck, I’ll live long enough to see this country do something brave around making it easier for people to choose death. I respect all sides of the issue. There are some really terrifying possibilities any time it becomes socially acceptable for one group of humans to kill another. But let’s just start with one thing, then: That an old and failing person ought to have the right to die gracefully and painlessly, at a time of their choosing. Surely we can agree on that. I don’t think a lot about death, but it crosses my mind from time to time. For instance, I’m currently reflecting on whether I still want to be cremated, or am starting to favour being planted au natural in some beautiful forest. People generally don’t have much say over how they die, so I won’t indulge in any vanities about how much control I will or won’t have over my own life when it’s my time to die. I know death comes from unexpected directions. I can live wit...

Problems at BC Lottery bigger than Poleschuk June 8, 2007 Vic Poleschuk had to go. Somebody had to take the fall at the BC Lottery Corporation over the issue of whether a few retailers are cheating lottery customers out of their winnings. The president of the corporation is an obvious choice. But we’d be naive to think that the problem ends there. If we’ve actually set up a government-run gambling industry that tolerates the cheating of customers, we’ve got a lot more to worry about than can ever be addressed by just firing the guy at the top. Poleschuk has worked in upper reaches of BC Lottery Corp virtually since its inception in 1985, first as vice-president and then as president. During his tenure, the lottery corporation presided over a 500 per cent rise in gambling revenues, to more than $2.5 billion a year. That’s pretty impressive from a business perspective. But the gambling industry isn’t just another business. Poleschuk talked on many occasions about that very thing, and th...

Tomorrow's disasters visible in report on kids in care June 1, 2007 I spoke to a Grade 10 class about homelessness a few months back, and was profoundly discouraged to realize that to them, the problems in Victoria’s downtown were just the way it was. They’d never known any different. The sleeping bags, the shopping carts, the drugs and the craziness - these kids had no way of knowing that just 10 years ago, most of that didn’t even exist. On the one hand, the problems all seem so new. But as a report released this week makes clear, creating homelessness is in fact a slow, sad process. Where did the trouble come from? People ask me that a lot. I then recite a long list of best guesses, starting with the drastic cuts to Canadian mental-health support that started in the early 1980s and carrying right on through two decades of missteps and flawed thinking. We’ve now reached a point where we not only provide less help to people who need it, but also create the conditions that lead to ...

Fraser Institute findings ought to worry us May 25, 2007 The Fraser Institute’s annual ranking of B.C. schools is one of those things that sparks controversy every time among teachers, principals and parents. A bad ranking really spoils people’s day. Critics of the annual ritual say the good of a school simply isn’t evident solely on the basis of how its students perform on assessment tests. There’s much more to doing a good job than test scores can ever measure, they argue. Those are valid points. Schools are complex places, and tests are simplistic tools. But with all due respect to the many hard-working school teachers out there, the institute’s school-by-school analysis is still worth talking about. Uncomfortable as it may be, we have much to discuss in terms of the significant gaps the institute identifies between B.C.’s schools. In its most recent report, the institute rated the province’s elementary schools. The ratings are primarily about how well a school’s young students did ...

Peace in a kayak May 18, 2007 Being a woman of many enthusiasms, I was bound to stumble upon kayaking sooner or later. I’d been curious about it for years. How can you grow up on an island without feeling the pull of being out on the water? Boats had figured more prominently in my life in my younger years - the benefit of growing up in an era when Vancouver Island’s then-thriving logging and fishing industries put real money in people’s pockets. But except for a canoe or two, it had never been me who’d owned those boats. Eventually there came a time when the only boating I was regularly experiencing was aboard a BC ferry, on a routine journey so familiar to me that it barely felt like being on the water at all. Kayakers caught my eye throughout the Ferry Years, but I tended to write the sport off as something that would require more skill, knowledge and money than I was prepared to invest. I guess they just looked so sleek and expert out there in their beautiful boats that I assumed I ...

Beware the spin May 11, 2007 News flash: Vancouver’s safe-injection site causes more harm than good. So says the Drug Prevention Network of Canada, which last week reported “serious problems in the interpretation of findings” in a review of 10 studies about the site. Research on the three-year-old site has to this point mostly been positive. Among other things, there’s been a drop in social disorder in Vancouver’s downtown eastside, an increase in the number of drug users wanting treatment, and successful interventions in 400-plus potentially fatal overdoses. But prevention-network research director Colin Mangham contends the real picture is not nearly so rosy. He reviewed some of the studies and found that while they “give the impression the facility is successful. . . the research clearly shows a lack of progress, impact and success.” Mangham’s findings were reported straight up by Canadian Press last week. They also made their way unchallenged into the on-line edition of Maclean’s m...

Don't tear down the Kinsol Trestle May 5, 2007 People have been debating the future of the Kinsol Trestle for a year now. I admit to barely paying attention to a word of it. I guess it just didn’t seem like something I needed to care about. But then my partner and I went to see the trestle for ourselves last Sunday. It’s spectacular. Tearing it down would be a terrible thing. Count me an instant convert to the “save the Kinsol” movement. Perhaps it’s a recent trip to Europe that has me thinking about the importance of preserving history. Had our global ancestors been even a fraction as hasty as us in tearing down history, I’d have missed out on the amazing feeling of stepping into the past. Deep thanks to several millennia’s worth of taxpayers who have willingly borne the cost of history’s upkeep. The pyramids of Mexico and Egypt. Greek ruins. Ancient churches. England’s Roman baths. Nothing you can read about them, or watch on television, can ever come close to experiencing them ...

Change the system to get more women into politics Apr. 27, 2007 So the debate around how to get more women into politics is back in the news again. I have to admit, it’s much harder to feel enthusiasm for the fight this time around, having already seen how the story ended last time. I note that we’re currently at the point in the discussion where we’re trying to decide whether it’s worth it to infringe on the democratic election process in order to jump-start the number of women elected to government. I remember the previous discussion well - what was it, 10 or 15 years ago now? Oh, we had a good go at it, to the point that the federal Liberals did eventually bypass the nomination process to hand-pick female candidates in a few ridings. Don’t get me wrong - it’s a vital discussion to have. After all, what could be more vital to fair and democratic governance than political representation that mirrored the mix of the Canadian population? I’d love it if our politicians looked more like ...

Canadian sex workers deserve better April 20, 2007 It’s no surprise that federal Justice minister Rob Nicholson is against decriminalizing prostitution. A party with Alliance roots just isn’t going to see its way clear to taking action on the issues of the sex trade. But it’s still pretty galling to have to read Nicholson’s comments on the matter. Decriminalizing prostitution would lead to the exploitation of women, says Nicholson, and therefore can’t be tolerated. Nice theory. But what he’s actually saying is that he upholds the status quo. In other words, the tens of thousands of Canadian women and men who work in the sex trade will just have to figure a way out of it, because the government isn’t prepared to do a damn thing about their working conditions. The killings and disappearances of hundreds of sex workers will continue unabated, because nothing is going to change. I just don’t get it. The sex trade exists because the men of our communities buy sex. There’s a demand, therefor...

Letter from Prague April 13, 2007 His name is Alin. I’ll likely never know much more than that about him. I had come to Prague on holiday, initially without much thought of seeing how the other side lives in that beautiful city. But having heard news of a refitted barge Prague was testing as a shelter for homeless people, I grew curious to see it for myself during my visit to the city last week. My partner and I first spotted the barge while on a boat tour along the Vltava River, which winds through the centre of Prague. It matched the photo from an on-line Czech story about the project that I’d asked our bemused hotel clerk to print out for me, and bore the same name: Hermes. Docked in the river below a massive metronome the city had installed to replace a statue of Stalin, I figured the barge wouldn’t be too hard to find again on foot. The big ship had something of a foreboding look to it when I made my way there a couple days later, as did the man on deck who gestured at me to lea...

Waiting (and waiting) won't bring about change April 6, 2007 The thing with government reports is that I very often agree with them, sometimes even wholeheartedly. I’ve seen my share of reports in 25 years of journalism, a lot of them bang on. Royal commission reports are particularly insightful, their authors having put serious time into studying every facet of the problem at hand. But the unfortunate truth of reports and royal commissions is that we tend to ignore them. We send our best fact-finders out on noble missions of getting to the root of what ails us, then leave their recommendations to gather dust. Sure, there’s a flurry of interest when a report first comes out, and a genuine intent to follow through. Within a year, however, we’re already losing interest; at the two-year mark, most of us will have forgotten that there ever was a report, at least until some other report comes to the identical conclusions a decade or so later. Aboriginals failing in school. Children in g...

True tolerance much deeper than word choice March 30, 2007 While there’s something charming about New York City’s new ban on the use of the “n-word,” the problem is that those who want to say ugly things will just find a new word. Most recently it’s been former Seinfeld star Michael Richards wearing it for using the word, which he hurled with considerable racist invective at some poor black guy who heckled him during one of his comedy performances a few months ago. In the ensuing fallout, New York City decided to ban the n-word altogether. A nice show of brotherhood. But if a community really wants to fix the problem that Richards’ rant brought to light, it takes getting at the underlying reasons for why people are so quickly given to judgment and hatred. The words being used? They come and go, barely mattering in the grand scheme of things. The hurtful words my mother once endured due to being half-Chinese were endlessly variable, and were valued by those who used them for their abili...

B.C.'s homeless strategy is all talk and little action March 23, 2007 We’ll leave it to Arn Van Iersel to weigh in with the lowdown on how things are going with the province’s three-year-old homelessness initiative. The acting auditor general is going to be reviewing the initiative to see whether it has been effective. But if Victoria’s downtown in that period is any measure, I’d have to guess the news from Van Iersel won’t be good. It won’t be all bad, of course. Almost 1,300 units of subsidized and supported housing have been given the go-ahead since the launch of the 2004 strategy. And at least Port Alberni has a mental- health outreach worker, as promised to B.C. communities under the initiative but so far in place in barely a handful of towns. Virtually any kind of affordable-housing initiative is a blessing in these unsettling times, marked at one end by the grim realities of nearly 800 people living on our streets, and at the other by sky-high housing prices that squeeze the...

If only teen pregnancy was as easy as more birth control March 16, 2007 I’m rooting for Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, and for anyone else who sets out to address the way we care for the 10,000 children in government care. But the first challenge is to start thinking differently about the problem. And that means letting go of preconceived notions - like the one about how teen pregnancy will be solved with sex education and birth control. As the province’s new representative for children and youth, Turpel-Lafond has the opportunity to do some powerful work over the next five years on behalf of the tragic figures caught up in B.C.’s troubled family-care system. And she’s right that it’s a heck of an indicator when girls in care in our province are four times more likely to get pregnant than other girls. I just hope she goes deeper into that issue than her musings last week around whether children in care were getting enough sex education and birth control. If only it were that simple. Sure, g...

It all comes out in the wash March 9, 2007 On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters. With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories. I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go. But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could. The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched th...