A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Families First - sloganeering or something real? As the pundits have already noted, the new premier’s “Families First” platform is wide open to interpretation at this point. So we’ll see where things go in the months ahead. But let’s at least take a moment to celebrate that a B.C. premier even thought families were important enough to be the focus of her leadership. It’s a cliché that it has to be a woman premier making the point, and a shame that we don't yet know whether she could win an election on the same platform. But it’s still a good sign when the most prominent message coming out of the new premier’s office is about putting families first. Families were never something Gordon Campbell talked about much. Search the Hansard debates and you’ll see that. I always got the feeling that they just didn’t cross his mind; he loves his own family, of course, but it never seemed to me that he saw any role for the province in building stronger families overall. That’s a cliché in it...

I've been wanting to read more about what life is like for people in northern Japan now that we're a week and a half into the post-earthquake period. I managed to find a half-decent blog that at least has some current news, but it's striking how quickly the world news has turned into stories either solely about the nuclear facilities, or country-centric stories about "what this means to us" (radiation drifting across the sea, food shipments from Japan, are our own nuclear plants safe, etc.) We earthquake-zone dwellers should take a particular interest in the daily lives of people who are 12 days into being homeless, out in the cold, probably hungry and thirsty, possibly quite injured, and still unable to connect with family members lost in the chaos. As this story notes , things will not be normal for people for a very long time post-quake even if the actual quake and tsunami didn't affect them.   What can we learn from this paucity of meaningful news about...

A scarier world, or just more connected? These are apocalyptic times. My youngest daughter and I were talking the other day about whether this nightmare series of international disasters is a harbinger of the end of days, or if it just feels that way now that everybody has a video camera. She's 26, and asked me if the world felt like this -like it was coming apart at the seams -when I was her age. If it was, I wasn't aware of it. Then again, there was no Internet pouring out a steady stream of horrifying images from around the world back then. Not many citizens had video capability, unlike today when almost anyone with a cellphone can capture catastrophes as they happen. Nor were there global platforms like YouTube, or the video appetites of 24hour TV news channels. I'm as captivated by it as anyone, and grateful for the truths that unedited, amateur video can bring to the human conversation. Would Robert Dziekanski's death in the Vancouver airport even be public...

Great event coming up April 30 - Family Connect, a version of the Project Connect event I've done for the street community these past three years, but this time with a focus on the region's poorest families.   Family Connect co-ordinator Mary Gidney could really use some help collecting donations of family items to be handed out to participants that day (they're expecting to see 700 people there, and kids of all ages).  So if you and your co-workers, book-club friends, running group or whoever would like to take on a little side-project, how about a little collection drive for some of the following items? If you can help out in any way, contact Mary at mgidney@shaw.ca. The event is sponsored by the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness in conjunction with Burnside Gorge Community Association and the Victoria Native Friendship Centre. 400 packages of diapers, all sizes   100 packages of baby wipes    100 diaper cream   600 tubes of toothpaste ...

Just in case you haven't had enough of the Japanese quake/tsunami images yet, here's an amazing video clip from  the moment the tsunami hit . Grim reminder of the power of the ocean. 

Who will you trust in the wild-west information age? I’ve been doing bits of some work over the last year for a tough little on-line taskmaster called Demand Media. It’s kind of like working at a digital factory, with writers labouring for a few bucks per piece doing what Demand calls “service journalism.” The work has been enlightening. The role of a Demand writer is to find answers on-line for the many strange questions people ask in Internet searches.  I figured I’d be a natural fit for the work after all these years in journalism. But it’s been much more challenging than I anticipated. In particular, I’ve come to see how difficult it is to assess your sources of information when the only place you can look is on-line. I suspect that’s something we all need to think about more. Traditional media are no longer the dominant source for news. A 2010 survey on the CNN Tech site found 61 per cent of Americans report getting at least some of their news on-line, compared to just 54 per...

Big Society, or small government? *I'm gone after this for a couple of weeks - back blogging March 12   Britain’s “Big Society” initiative has been showing up as a story line in Canadian media in recent weeks. Not surprising, really. Our federal and provincial governments are promoting the same principles that British Prime Minister David Cameron is putting forward in his Big Society vision.   He calls it a Big Society and we call it social entrepreneurship, but the goals are the same: More social enterprise; more collective responsibility for societal ills; more use of the tools of capitalism to fund social care. Canada is suddenly awash in task forces, strategies and policy debate related to social innovation, including a new high-profile advisory committee in B.C. I like much of what’s being talked about. I’m all for innovation, and for a better way of funding community services if it gets us out of the uncertain, short-term, destructive and inefficient process we’ve got...

Andre Picard is easily the best health reporter in Canada in my opinion, not only because he writes great stuff and takes the serious measure of issues, but because he gives a public platform to important issues that we need to know about. Today's column in the Globe and Mail is a good example of that - he's highlighting a study that pokes big holes in the prescription drug industry's assertion that the reason drugs are so expensive is because the industry is spending vast sums on creating them.

OK, I don't usually go in for the flavour-of-the-day studies that have us scrambling this way and that trying to follow whatever new wisdom has popped up to help us guide our lives into better health. But I'm a long-time devotee of regular exercise, and t his latest study on lab mice underlines that exercise really does seem to be the magic bullet. While it would be hard to test the same theories using weight-training (although I'm enjoying the image of mice doing tiny little bench presses and squats, I can tell you from my own life that weights are definitely part of the magic-bullet equation as well. And never mind that every now and then you end up with a bit of an injury from too much enthusiastic gym time (like at this very moment, in my case). Weight-training helps restore the muscle we start losing in our 30s as part of the aging process. For every pound of muscle on your body, you're burning at least 10 times the calories just maintaining it as a pound of fa...

Good read from my partner Paul Willcocks , who dug up some enlightening information by taking a look at the B.C. Progress Board reports assessing the record of Gordon Campbell's Liberals in the last few years. Campbell's government created the Progress Board to measure performance, so you have to give him credit for that - up until that point, it was pretty much impossible to gauge how effective a government had been. But as the reports reveal, the Liberals haven't quite been the saviours of the economy that they position themselves as. 

A grim but fascinating reminder from Salon magazine about our seemingly overpowering need to blame the victim when a woman is sexually assaulted - in this case, CBS reporter Lara Logan. 

Our countries talk a good game about treasuring the war veterans who serve on behalf of all of us. But as with anything, what really counts is what we DO once the heart-warming media images of returning vets fade from view and the soldier returns to "normal" life. And as this study out of the U.S. shows , the love doesn't appear to last long south of the border, where military veterans are more likely than any other group to end up homeless.

Stigma blinds us The dictionary defines stigma as “a distinguishing mark of social disgrace.”   Once upon a time, it was the common term for the permanent mark burned into the skin of criminals and slaves. We like to think of ourselves as too civilized for such things nowadays. But in fact, the practice continues for all kinds of people singled out for scorn and judgment.   That we even sort people that way is probably the most interesting aspect of this thing we call stigma. Scorn and judgment are not attitudes a “nice” society generally wants to cultivate in its citizens, and for the most part I think we’re fairly kind to each other. We’re respectful of each other’s differences. But not always. Some categories of people still end up singled out for social disgrace, their lives marked as surely by stigma as if we’d burned it into them.   This is Anti-Stigma Week in Greater Victoria, and I love the theme: “Nice People Take Drugs.” People with addictions experience treme...

I guess it's no surprise that the Conservative-heavy Senate is bound to crush the bill that would create human-rights protection for transgender and transsexual people, as this story notes. For reasons that I've never been clear on, we're supposed to presume that Conservatives - at least the kind we have in Canada right now - are the type of people who just don't like transgender people. But really, why would anyone be in favour of allowing discrimination of transgender people? I mean, it's not like providing them with human-rights protection is going to encourage more people to become transgendered, or send a bad message to Canadian children. It ought to be unacceptable for anyone to face discrimination solely because of who they are. Let's hope the Senate just gets out of the way on this one and lets it happen. 

Helpful piece in the Globe and Mail this morning for people like me, struggling to understand what all this fuss about a metered Internet means to them. Count me among the large number of Canadians who, up until all of this became big news, never even knew I had a limited plan. (The "explainer" link at the bottom of the story is also very useful.) It's been barely a month since I figured out how to stream Netflix onto my TV and I'm totally enthralled, having been completely frustrated and furious over the consistently lousy programming that my pricey cable subscription gets me. So I'm deeply interested in this story line. The issue looks like it's about Internet providers' right to charge heavy users more, but it's actually about Canada's non-competitive environment. Unlimited internet plans are standard in the U.S.  Man, this country has some strange ideas around where we'll draw the line on competition. We eat foreign-grown food, work fo...

Depending on who you talk to, psychiatric care in the region for people with chronic and debilitating mental illness is either in frightening disarray or just experiencing a few bumps on the way to a better day. A number of the doctors who preside over hospital psychiatric care in the region say the cuts of the last two years have had a disastrous impact on people with serious mental illness. Two of the doctors have already resigned in protest from the health authority’s Department of Psychiatry, and more have threatened to.  Last month, department members in the South Island passed a motion of no confidence in Dr. Robert Miller, medical director of mental health services for the Vancouver Island Health Authority. But a spokesman for the health authority says the vote against Miller was “completely inappropriate,” and that the issue is really about a small number of psychiatrists resistant to change. The health authority has complete confidence in Miller, says Dr. Bob Bu...

This is the kind of reporting I think is really valuable - Robert Matas takes a press release from the B.C. government and digs into what it really means, putting in the context for readers so that they can better understand the significance (or lack thereof) of the announcement on more childcare subsidies.

Unbelievable story about the culling of sled dogs in Pemberton.   People are going to go crazy over this one, all over the world. And what a nasty taint to give the B.C. Olympics - the image of all these happy huskies touring Olympic visitors around for their little sled rides, then killed at the end of the season because nobody could be bothered to figure out a better solution. Nice try with the "we tried to get these dogs adopted" bit, but did you hear a word about this up until now? Had the company come out with a press release saying 100 dogs were going to die unless people stepped forward to adopt them, there'd have been homes found. If we can send hundreds of rabbits to rescue projects in the U.S., surely we could have found placements for retiring sled dogs. H ere's a link to the blogosphere heating up over this one.  A measure of just how big this story is going to be: I did a Google search on "sled dogs killed" and quickly pulled up search page af...

This piece points out some fairly staggering dollar figures for health-care fraud in the U.S. I went looking for made-in Canada stats but can't seem to find any, but I did come across this site that has some news about the kinds of things we get up to on this front in our country.

We don't want police as arbiters of public information Without question, the murder-suicide in Cadboro Bay last week was a “family tragedy,” in the words of Saanich police. But it was also a crime, and a very serious one at that.  And yet the police department has refused to release the usual details that are made public after a murder. In the case of Erich and Kathy Mueller, police are even refusing to say who was victim and who was murderer. I feel for the Mueller family. But then again, I feel for all the families who have to endure a crime, not to mention the media coverage that follows. It must be quite a terrible experience when it’s your child, your parents, your life, being blasted all over that day’s news, and at a time of immense grief. Unfortunately, that’s how it is in a free country. Someone caught committing a crime, no matter how small, could end up in the news if the media take an interest. If you kill someone, your crime is absolutely going to get coverage. That’s...

I've been contemplating information sources lately, seeing as we live in an age where the amount of information grows exponentially with each passing day even while the quality and reliability grows increasingly unpredictable. That got me thinking this morning about how much I appreciate the Globe and Mail, which really does put a lot of effort into keeping the hysteria out of its voice and presenting useful, accurate information for its readers. Today's piece on the plight of women with mental illness in our prison system is an excellent example (check out the "infographic" for some startling statistics). For the past year I've been doing some work for Demand Media, a tough little freelance gig out of the U.S. that pays almost no money and requires writers to really dig deep to get rock-solid sources for the most obscure topics you could imagine. While I avoid calculating my actual hourly pay for that work - it'd just bum me out - I have found that it has ...

Check out this ad campaign launched this week in Halifax. The community agency that launched the campaign is Stepping Stone, which has been working  with past and current sex workers in Halifax for 20 years. It's the agency's first-ever public awareness campaign, and off to a great start with some help from Extreme Group, a Canadian ad agency that created a funny, edgy and right-on series of print ads making the point that sex workers are people, too. Here's the news story about the campaign. What a great way to target the stigma that surrounds sex work. 

Bad design in the Globe's piece Saturday on mental illness and the federal prison system made it a challenging read. Here's an on-line version of Kirk Makin's piece , reprinted on the Social Policy in Ontario site (better than the Globe link for a blogger's purpose, as the link won't disappear in a week like it will on the Globe site).  Sobering stats in here -  at least 35 per cent of inmates in federal jails have mental illnesses requiring treatment. Like homelessness, the increasing criminalization of mental illness is more unmistakeable proof of Canada's failure to deal competently with treatment and care for people with mental illness. 

Here's Christy Clark on...what, exactly? I do quite a bit of work with the non-profit sector and am familiar with the initiatives she mentions here, but I still couldn't make heads or tails out of what the Liberal leadership candidate was actually saying in this news release. NEWS RELEASE For Immediate Release January 20, 2011 Clark Wants Non-Profit and Public Partnerships VANCOUVER ­ BC Liberal leadership candidate Christy Clark wants to look at strengthening the role of non-profit organizations and volunteers in delivering services to British Columbians. ³The work that non-profits, charities and volunteer groups do every day in British Columbia is inspiring and helps to form the bedrock of our communities,² says Clark. ³These groups are creative in the way they deliver services, they react to the needs of their residents with an alacrity that government can¹t match and provide tremendous value for money. Let¹s recognize the work that is being done and s...

Are we seeing more of these kinds of incidents , or are we just more likely to hear about them in this age of cellphone cameras and reporters packing video cameras? Unsettling stuff, not only because of the completely unnecessary boot to the face given this guy but the many questions around how he ended up tagged by police for being a domestic abuser when the women in his life have no idea where that came from. Whatever else is going on for police in B.C., I think they're developing a serious PR problem with all this stuff. Most police are good people risking their lives to keep us safe from harm - we all get that, I'm sure. But there's definitely more than one rotten apple spoiling things for the larger group, and I hope chiefs all over the province are doing some sober thinking about the suitability of some of the people they're hiring for the work. In the meantime, keep your cameras on hand.    

Update as of June 12, 2016 - the day after the worst mass killing yet in the U.S., at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Based on the number of mass killings noted in this story and the ones that have happened in the intervening years since I wrote this, there have now been 126 mass killings in the U.S. in the last 50 years.  It’s been a long time since I’ve written on the gun issue. I categorize it with issues like abortion, religion, war and Capital Regional District sewage. Most people's minds are made up, so columns don't have much point. But this latest mass killing in Arizona can’t go without comment. It’s just too blatant a reminder of what can happen when a country loses a grip on gun control. I know the U.S. is intense about its citizens’ right to bear arms, even when it means leaving the door wide open for deranged, violent people to lose their minds in a most damaging way.   But surely the citizens themselves must be growing horrified by the truly awfu...

If you're in Vancouver tomorrow, you might want to drop in on a public meet-and-greet featuring the six B.C. Liberals vying for the provincial leadership of the party. Here are the details , plus some other opportunities for hanging out with the leadership candidates. Tickets for tomorrow's forum are $10. NDP leadership campaign feels like it's still waiting for somebody to light a fire under it. Anyone? Soon?

The ups and (major) downs of governance by whimsy The provincial government made the very interesting choice over the Christmas season to buy a former air-force base near Prince George that’s been turned into an addiction treatment centre for men. On the one hand, it’s great news. B.C. has never had anything quite like this centre before. Men can stay for up to a year in a village-style setting at the Baldy Hughes Therapeutic Community, with government footing the bill if people qualify for income assistance. That’s terrific. On the other, it’s a striking reminder of how political and uneven the decision-making has become in B.C. Wonderful to have a new addiction resource available for British Columbians, but just a little unsettling when it happens in the same year that other addiction services are being cut across the province. Welcome to life in a province with no social policy. Funding comes and goes based on whim and political influence, as far as I can tell. Even while the Baldy...

Things are going to get better...aren't they? I'm on the final day of a three-day juice fast and it's raining, raining, raining, so maybe that explains why everything in the newspapers this morning just seemed like a complete bummer. Starving bear cubs, cheap honey imports from China destroying the honey industry, sick stories of (alleged) pedophiles rigging weird broom-handle contraptions to torment young boys, the usual array of murders, assaults, fires and mixed fatalities. And the relentless drone of B.C. leadership candidates trying to get out their messages, none of which has so far given me any hope for a bright new future (Christy Clark, please stop with the tiresome talk-radio persona). Fortunately, I did find one heartening thing to read this morning, a column in the Times Colonist by the Ottawa Citizen's Dan Gardner . I like him when he rants but I like him even better when he just lays out the cold, hard facts, as he does in this piece about our misplac...

Oh, news from the world can be very weird sometimes, like this story out of Kansas of nursing students posting a picture on Facebook of them posing with a human placenta. Not a great idea, as it turns out, although I can't for the life of me understand the comments in the story that one of these young women may now be blacklisted from nursing as a result. I guess it shows poor judgment to want to get your photo taken with a placenta and share it with the world, but it doesn't seem like the kind of act that automatically rules you out of nursing. My mom, an old nurse herself, told me that when she was a student nurse, one of the almighty-god kinds of doctors they had running the show at that time actually threw a patient's uterus at my mother after she'd had the misfortune of handing the guy the wrong instrument during a hysterectomy. Now THAT's an act that deserves a little censure, on all kinds of fronts.