A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Public forum coming up with Victoria Police Chief Jamie Graham, Sept. 7, from 7-9 p.m.  at Canada West University, 950 Kings Rd. The topic: "Families, Mental Illness and Police Involvement." Sounds like required viewing if you've ever wondered how police deal with people in an acute phase of their mental illness when they get a complaint.  If you follow the news, you'll know that a significant number of people in Canada and elsewhere end up killed by police in conflicts that occur due to somebody's mental illness. Often the person's family has even phoned in the initial complaint as a way of getting help for their loved one. Too often, it goes very badly - witness the tragic story unfolding in Pickering, Ont. right now . We all know police have a tough job to do, but there has to be a better way. Sadly, I can't make this Sept. 7 forum, but I hope to send somebody in my stead to report back. Register at  250-384-4225 or admin.bcss@shaw.ca. The forum is ...

I'm going to be writing about the "camping" problems on Pandora boulevard this Friday - did a quick search on Google News around homelessness and discovered this story out of Australia , which now puts its homeless population at 105,000. Can't imagine what Canada's figure would be if we ever added everything up, seeing as B.C. has at least 15,000 people living homeless even by conservative estimates. The one thing that seems to unite all the western, democratic countries these days is a staggering rise in homelessness over the last couple orf decades.

I always wondered how funerals for poor people got paid for, and now we know, at least in Toronto. Haven't been able to find B.C.'s rules yet, but here's a related story from 2008 about the same issue in Quebec. Looks like prices have risen significantly in less than two years if you compare the figures from these two stories.

Our sex-work laws kill people. We had a reminder of that just last week, when Willie Pickton’s murderous ways were news again. Only the streets can provide so many potential victims to a predator like him, and it’s our ineffective and dangerous laws around sex work that create those streets. Then last Friday, the Vancouver Police Department released the report that we all knew had to come - one that detailed the tragic inability of B.C.’s police forces to act on years of tips that women were being killed at Pickton’s farm. I’ve watched our conflicted attitude around the sex industry for too long to be surprised by the public’s muted response to that damning report. We talk a good game about how much concern we have for the women who Pickton and his ilk prey on. But our actions tell a different story every time. It’s beyond ironic that even as the shameful story of B.C.’s missing women returns to the headlines, the federal government is introducing much tougher penalties that ...

Very worrying stuff going on around the changes to Canada's bawdyhouse laws. By lumping bawdyhouses in with other "signature activities" of organized crime, the federal government will dramatically increase jail term for people convicted of operating a bawdyhouse - from a maximum two years to a mandatory minimum sentence of at least five years.  Seeing as the law has already defined a bawdyhouse as anywhere that a sex worker routinely does business with her clients, that sets the stage for a crackdown on indoor sex work. And as we learned in the last crackdown in the 1970s, that in turn sets the stage for an increase in street prostitution and a rise in violent crimes against sex workers. Here's the press release and the backgrounder on the issue released by the Department of Justice in early August. I'll be writing about this in my Friday column.