A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Ideology is no way to run a country Oct. 5, 2007 The problems of ideology-based governance clearly must be more obvious from afar. Otherwise, Canadians wouldn’t be able to bear the hypocrisy of railing against oppressive and backward regimes elsewhere in the world while committing ourselves anew to the folly of a “war on drugs.” With news this week that we’re returning full-force to the same fruitless battle we’ve already lost several times over, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has once again reminded me why word of his 2006 election plunged me into a pit of despair. Here we are one more time, at least 60 years after we first heard from the experts that we were doing things all wrong, talking about “crackdowns” and the need to “get tough” with those who use illicit drugs. Posturing about all the butt-does kicking we’ll be doing at the border once our new anti-drug strategy is in place. Planning the latest version of an earnest but pointless campaign to convince teenagers not to use drugs...

Nothing beautiful about cosmetic surgery Sept. 28, 2007 We ought to be grateful for people like Krista Stryland and Micheline Charest, whose sad deaths present an opportunity for all women to reflect on the demons that send us searching for happiness through surgery. Stryland died last week in Toronto of a heart attack after undergoing liposuction, in which a thin, sharp instrument is rammed repeatedly into your body to break up pockets of fat. Charest died in Montreal in 2004 following six unconscious hours on the operating table being sliced, diced and skinned in the pursuit of “beauty.” Death is merely the worst-case scenario on a laundry list of ugly possibilities when it comes to cosmetic surgery, mind you. So I’m grateful too to celebrities like Cher, Joan Rivers, Burt Reynolds, and legions more. One glimpse of their mannequin-like faces is all it takes to remind me of the mighty price people pay for thinking they can get one over on the aging process. We can talk all we like a...

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...

Add one more homeless man to Victoria streets Sept. 14, 2007 For more than a year now, I’ve watched Roland Lapierre cobbling together at least some semblance of a normal life aboard his tidy little raft on the Gorge. Once homeless on Victoria’s streets, Lapierre had found a way out. I’d see him sitting in the sunshine on his patchwork raft –reading the paper sometimes, or having a nap – and would send good thoughts his way for having the creative mettle to come up with his own solution. I wondered how long he’d get away with it. The answer came this week. The City of Victoria has ordered Lapierre to leave the little bay where he anchors, off Banfield Park near the Selkirk Trestle. In a city that knows no end to people living homeless on its streets, add one more. The city is within its rights, of course, and I can already hear the “slippery slope” arguments taking shape in defence of rousting Lapierre. We can’t have people thinking they can just pull up a raft somewhere on the Gorge a...

No big-city jams - but now's the time to take on Victoria traffic Sept. 7, 2007 I noticed in this week’s Times-Colonist that the paper is planning a series on commuting in Greater Victoria. They’ve put out a request for commuter stories, so allow me to be among the first to weigh in. I’m one of those lucky folks who are able to pick their own start/stop times for work, at least to the extent of avoiding the worst of early-morning and late-afternoon traffic. So I won’t pretend to know what it feels like to be a frustrated commuter fighting her way through heavy stop-and-go traffic every day. But I do get caught in the crush fairly often anyway, because it’s hard not to if you’re driving anywhere near one of the region’s trouble spots at the wrong time of day. Civil engineers, physicists and flow experts have been trying for decades to figure out traffic jams, the reasons for which go well beyond the superficial explanation of too many cars crammed onto too few roads. The latest the...