A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

    Last week when I commented on Facebook and then reworked the comment into a blog post that I could tweet, I felt like I was one with the social-media universe. I know a lot of people who have mixed feelings about social media and how it's changing the cultural landscape and way we interact. But personally, I love it.     The big surprise for me has been Twitter, which I avoided for the longest time. The idea of being restricted to 140 measly characters just didn't do it for me, and I really didn't want a whole new "thing" to have to tend on-line.     But I finally caved a couple of months ago and signed on, only to discover that a well-planned Twitter feed is like having an army of story-hunters around the world connecting me to the most interesting and diverse angles on what's going on out there. I've never had so many interesting news stories put in front of me.    I like Facebook, too, although it tends to be used more as a gentle and...

     I wrote this response to a couple of my Facebook friends just now on a great comment thread that has developed on my Facebook site . The comments came after I posted a rather pleading message to people to get past the knee-jerk stuff around the Canadian sex industry and get informed before Bill C-36 becomes law. Figured I'd put it out to my blogger audience, too, because damn it, all of us who feel this way need to be shouting from the rooftops right now before this country goes and does something that is shameful, regressive, poorly considered, potentially harmful, discriminatory and mean.      For Lisa and Darlene, you are both my friends and I have MUCH time for both of you, and I do understand that this is a divisive subject. But this is a time for getting together to understand why each of us feels the way we do. I know that both your viewpoints come from your own life experiences. But we can't just stay here like this, in a standoff where...

    It appears that I may have developed an idealistic sense of Canada while I was off living in Honduras these last two years. I was thinking of it as a great country with a few problems it needed to pay attention to at the time I left Canada in early 2012, but perhaps the distance - and the contrast with super-troubled Honduras - led me to forget about the "pay attention" part and just remember it as a country that largely had its act together.     At any rate, coming home and learning about some of the messed-up stuff that's actually going on in my homeland has been pretty discouraging..       The stuff around sex work has been particularly unsettling, given my affinity for the people who the rest of us leave without rights, dignity or safe workplaces just because we wrinkle our noses at what they do for a living. It is so, so sad that we're preparing to go backwards with a law that will only make things worse for sex workers.   ...

  So many untruths are being bandied about as the Tories try to railroad uncertain Canadians into accepting new prostitution laws that will criminalize even more of the industry.     I know from my own circle of friends - at least the ones who aren't sex workers themselves - that it's almost like people are frightened to rethink what they think they know about the sex industry. Yet there is so much exceptional research out there that challenges this fuzzy belief that to be a sex worker is to be a helpless, trafficked victim dragged into the business by a man who will beat you if you don't comply.     But surely the public's instinct to want to avoid thinking about an industry they find unpleasant hardly outweighs the rights of tens of thousands of other Canadians to a safer workplace and some respect and dignity. In other words, get informed, people.     And here are some excellent research papers and relevant info to help get you started: Lo...

     I am haunted by the 2013 police shooting death of Sammy Yatim , and the words of Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair this month that the recommendations that came out of the investigation of the 18-year-old's death won't be "left to gather dust." If only we could believe that.      Blair has said versions of that before, in past years when Toronto police killed some other person with mental illness. The case of Sammy Yatim was particularly tragic, what with him being a young man alone on an empty streetcar when he was first shot nine times by the police and then tasered as he lay dying on the floor.  (See the enhanced YouTube video of his death taken by a passerby  here. )     But he's hardly the only sad story.      One night last week I went looking for every archived news story I could find on fatal police shootings of people with mental illness, and found at least 36 such shootings in Canada since 1988.   ...