A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Change the system to get more women into politics Apr. 27, 2007 So the debate around how to get more women into politics is back in the news again. I have to admit, it’s much harder to feel enthusiasm for the fight this time around, having already seen how the story ended last time. I note that we’re currently at the point in the discussion where we’re trying to decide whether it’s worth it to infringe on the democratic election process in order to jump-start the number of women elected to government. I remember the previous discussion well - what was it, 10 or 15 years ago now? Oh, we had a good go at it, to the point that the federal Liberals did eventually bypass the nomination process to hand-pick female candidates in a few ridings. Don’t get me wrong - it’s a vital discussion to have. After all, what could be more vital to fair and democratic governance than political representation that mirrored the mix of the Canadian population? I’d love it if our politicians looked more like ...

Canadian sex workers deserve better April 20, 2007 It’s no surprise that federal Justice minister Rob Nicholson is against decriminalizing prostitution. A party with Alliance roots just isn’t going to see its way clear to taking action on the issues of the sex trade. But it’s still pretty galling to have to read Nicholson’s comments on the matter. Decriminalizing prostitution would lead to the exploitation of women, says Nicholson, and therefore can’t be tolerated. Nice theory. But what he’s actually saying is that he upholds the status quo. In other words, the tens of thousands of Canadian women and men who work in the sex trade will just have to figure a way out of it, because the government isn’t prepared to do a damn thing about their working conditions. The killings and disappearances of hundreds of sex workers will continue unabated, because nothing is going to change. I just don’t get it. The sex trade exists because the men of our communities buy sex. There’s a demand, therefor...

Letter from Prague April 13, 2007 His name is Alin. I’ll likely never know much more than that about him. I had come to Prague on holiday, initially without much thought of seeing how the other side lives in that beautiful city. But having heard news of a refitted barge Prague was testing as a shelter for homeless people, I grew curious to see it for myself during my visit to the city last week. My partner and I first spotted the barge while on a boat tour along the Vltava River, which winds through the centre of Prague. It matched the photo from an on-line Czech story about the project that I’d asked our bemused hotel clerk to print out for me, and bore the same name: Hermes. Docked in the river below a massive metronome the city had installed to replace a statue of Stalin, I figured the barge wouldn’t be too hard to find again on foot. The big ship had something of a foreboding look to it when I made my way there a couple days later, as did the man on deck who gestured at me to lea...

Waiting (and waiting) won't bring about change April 6, 2007 The thing with government reports is that I very often agree with them, sometimes even wholeheartedly. I’ve seen my share of reports in 25 years of journalism, a lot of them bang on. Royal commission reports are particularly insightful, their authors having put serious time into studying every facet of the problem at hand. But the unfortunate truth of reports and royal commissions is that we tend to ignore them. We send our best fact-finders out on noble missions of getting to the root of what ails us, then leave their recommendations to gather dust. Sure, there’s a flurry of interest when a report first comes out, and a genuine intent to follow through. Within a year, however, we’re already losing interest; at the two-year mark, most of us will have forgotten that there ever was a report, at least until some other report comes to the identical conclusions a decade or so later. Aboriginals failing in school. Children in g...

True tolerance much deeper than word choice March 30, 2007 While there’s something charming about New York City’s new ban on the use of the “n-word,” the problem is that those who want to say ugly things will just find a new word. Most recently it’s been former Seinfeld star Michael Richards wearing it for using the word, which he hurled with considerable racist invective at some poor black guy who heckled him during one of his comedy performances a few months ago. In the ensuing fallout, New York City decided to ban the n-word altogether. A nice show of brotherhood. But if a community really wants to fix the problem that Richards’ rant brought to light, it takes getting at the underlying reasons for why people are so quickly given to judgment and hatred. The words being used? They come and go, barely mattering in the grand scheme of things. The hurtful words my mother once endured due to being half-Chinese were endlessly variable, and were valued by those who used them for their abili...

B.C.'s homeless strategy is all talk and little action March 23, 2007 We’ll leave it to Arn Van Iersel to weigh in with the lowdown on how things are going with the province’s three-year-old homelessness initiative. The acting auditor general is going to be reviewing the initiative to see whether it has been effective. But if Victoria’s downtown in that period is any measure, I’d have to guess the news from Van Iersel won’t be good. It won’t be all bad, of course. Almost 1,300 units of subsidized and supported housing have been given the go-ahead since the launch of the 2004 strategy. And at least Port Alberni has a mental- health outreach worker, as promised to B.C. communities under the initiative but so far in place in barely a handful of towns. Virtually any kind of affordable-housing initiative is a blessing in these unsettling times, marked at one end by the grim realities of nearly 800 people living on our streets, and at the other by sky-high housing prices that squeeze the...

If only teen pregnancy was as easy as more birth control March 16, 2007 I’m rooting for Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, and for anyone else who sets out to address the way we care for the 10,000 children in government care. But the first challenge is to start thinking differently about the problem. And that means letting go of preconceived notions - like the one about how teen pregnancy will be solved with sex education and birth control. As the province’s new representative for children and youth, Turpel-Lafond has the opportunity to do some powerful work over the next five years on behalf of the tragic figures caught up in B.C.’s troubled family-care system. And she’s right that it’s a heck of an indicator when girls in care in our province are four times more likely to get pregnant than other girls. I just hope she goes deeper into that issue than her musings last week around whether children in care were getting enough sex education and birth control. If only it were that simple. Sure, g...