A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Voting a crap shoot at municipal elections In just over a week, we’ll pick the mayors and councillors who will lead B.C. communities for the next three years. It’s an incredibly important job. We “hire” municipal councils to tend to dozens of vital tasks in our communities - from dog-catching and parking tickets to policing, planning, roadwork and economic development. A single term of bad council can turn a community on its ear for years to come. Councils also play an important role in representing our interests at the provincial and federal levels. Municipalities generate a scant eight per cent of the total tax base in the province, so we all want councils that are strategic and clued-in to ensure they’re effective at “managing up.” You’d think that the hiring process for a big job like that would be done with the utmost care. You’d think we’d be really conscious of wanting to pick the right people to lead our communities. But you’d be wrong. In truth, 70 per cent of us won’t even sh...

Silence is golden, and frighteningly rare I look at birds differently these days than I used to, ever since getting a great pair of binoculars a couple years ago that opened my eyes to the incredible variety of birds out there. But I quickly learned that if you really want to see birds, the trick is to stand still for a few minutes and listen. In the stillness, life goes back to normal in the spot you were just about to rush past, and you hear a whole lot of bird talk that you’d never have heard otherwise. That there’s meaning and purpose in silence is hardly a new philosophy. But it took birds for me to find it, and to remind me of how much of the world we no longer hear simply because we’re drowning it out with our own noise. What will the future hold for this cranked-up, hyper-communicating world of ours if we forget that? There are days at the bird marsh when the sounds of loud cell phone conversations are just about as common as those of the song sparrow. We’re living in a time wh...

Court decision on homeless 'camping' is ticket to real change So now people can sleep in our city parks, but have to be gone first thing in the morning. Hope somebody at city hall is developing a Plan B, because I sure don’t see that 7 a.m.-curfew stuff working out to anybody’s satisfaction for very long. Here’s the thing about last week’s B.C. Supreme Court judgment that brought us to this point: It’s one of the most powerful tools to emerge so far as a means of ending homelessness. Dealing with our problems requires political will, which in turn requires community outrage. The spectre of hundreds of people sleeping in our parks every night - even if rousted by 7 a.m. - will quickly generate all the outrage we need to get this ball rolling at long last. In fact, it has already wrested 85 new beds out of the province, none of which had even been hinted at until the judgment came down. B.C.’s highest court essentially ruled that because there aren’t nearly enough shelter beds fo...

With a municipal vote coming up in the Capital Region in November, here's a few questions that might help you quiz your municipal candidates as to what they plan to do about homelessness in the region if elected: CANDIDATE QUESTIONS What do you think are the reasons Victoria has such visible problems around homelessness and street issues? How do you think those problems should be handled? Where do homelessness and street issues rate in your list of priorities for the city? How would you describe your own level of knowledge on this subject? How did you come by that knowledge? Please describe an “ideal world” around homelessness in terms of which levels of government would assume most responsibility for dealing with the issue. What are the responsibilities of: the federal government? The provincial government? Municipal and regional government? The business community? Individual citizens? If elected, how would you demonstrate leadership in tackling the issues in Victoria and h...

1860s-era NYC tenement brings modern times to mind Oct. 10, 2008 Children falling sick - even dying - from milk contaminated by unscrupulous suppliers. Families struggling in substandard, overcrowded housing. Sound familiar? It could easily be a story ripped from today’s headlines. But in fact it was 1860s New York City, in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side. I heard the story last week on a visit to NYC. Tipped off by a Victoria acquaintance we ran into on the ferry to Ellis Island, we took her advice and visited the New York Tenement Museum, where I found myself in a small, dark apartment that in 1869 had been the home of an Irish immigrant family. The Moores had four children, one of whom died that year at the tender age of four months from the “swill milk” commonly sold to impoverished families. As has just happened in modern-day China, the milk was being diluted to increase profit, in this case with water, chalk and ammonia. Hard to escape a certain sense of déjà vu when...