A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Victoria street issues are everybody's problem to deal with July 13, 2007 Being part of the mayor’s task force that’s trying to figure out the street problems in Victoria’s downtown has given me the opportunity to hear about the issues from every viewpoint. I’ve been heartened to learn that virtually everybody is worried. We need to be. But it’s also been discouraging to realize how many of us feel powerless to do anything about it. My most recent conversation as a member of the task force steering committee was with a group of downtown landlords. They gave me one disturbing anecdote after another when asked about the problems they were experiencing. One had recently seen a woman raped in an alley off Johnson Street, on a bright and sunny Saturday afternoon. The woman was screaming as her attacker beat her with a hammer. Police were called. The woman, who lived on the streets, refused to press charges, fearing “street justice” if word got out she’d brought charges against her att...

Love the work. Hate the money-grubbing July 6, 2007 Three years ago, I stepped into the unknown on the work front. I went from being a full-time newspaper columnist to the executive director of a grassroots social agency that helps sex workers. It’s been hard, good work. But the time has come to pass the torch. PEERS Victoria will soon be in the hands of a new executive director, Chris Leischner, and I’m glad to feel in her the heart, energy and experience for the challenges ahead. When I tell people I’m leaving PEERS, they generally assume it’s the problems of the people we help that has worn me out. Yes, it’s fairly stressful to work with people struggling to keep it together. Their problems are ultimately the problems of PEERS if we’re the ones trying to help them figure things out. But on all but the worst days, I didn’t mind any of that. The far more stressful aspect of the job was the constant need to look for money to do the work. I hadn’t thought much about the nature of non-pr...

Kieran King: My Kind of Canadian June 29, 2007 Presumably there are people out there who agree that Saskatchewan teen Kieran King deserved a school suspension for daring to talk about marijuana. I’m not one of them. In fact, I’m hoping the kid sues somebody over the whole misadventure, and wins. What happened to the 15-year-old boy was a flagrant abuse of power. The news in brief: A Grade 10 student at Wawota Parkland School feels unconvinced after an anti-drug presentation at his school. He decides to do some research of his own before making up his mind. He goes deep. His mom says King loves a good research project. The boy eventually reaches the conclusion that compared to both alcohol and tobacco, marijuana is less harmful. He’s right, but let’s leave that debate for a moment. For now, let’s just focus on the actual series of events that then unfolded for Kieran King. Having finished up his research, the teen tells a few friends what he’s learned. One complains to the principal tha...

Manitoba chief's blockade threats may be best strategy June 22, 2007 Calls for a coast-to-coast railway blockade by aboriginal leader Terrance Nelson couldn’t be more un-Canadian. We like things settled without conflict. We’re particularly loath to engage in it right out in the open, the way Nelson likes to do it. The chief of Manitoba’s Roseau River Anishinabe First Nation says some outrageous things when he gets heated up about the grim struggles of Canada’s aboriginal population. And he’s just about at the boiling point these days. The Assembly of First Nations is organizing a “day of action” next week for the nation’s aboriginals, and Nelson wants to see a blockade so big that Canada’s economy will still be reeling from the shock months from now. “There’s only one way to deal with a white man. You either pick up a gun or you stand between him and his money,” Nelson most famously said a month ago in a media interview. In a follow-up Globe and Mail profile this week, he reiterat...

Choosing death ought to be our right June 15, 2007 With any luck, I’ll live long enough to see this country do something brave around making it easier for people to choose death. I respect all sides of the issue. There are some really terrifying possibilities any time it becomes socially acceptable for one group of humans to kill another. But let’s just start with one thing, then: That an old and failing person ought to have the right to die gracefully and painlessly, at a time of their choosing. Surely we can agree on that. I don’t think a lot about death, but it crosses my mind from time to time. For instance, I’m currently reflecting on whether I still want to be cremated, or am starting to favour being planted au natural in some beautiful forest. People generally don’t have much say over how they die, so I won’t indulge in any vanities about how much control I will or won’t have over my own life when it’s my time to die. I know death comes from unexpected directions. I can live wit...

Problems at BC Lottery bigger than Poleschuk June 8, 2007 Vic Poleschuk had to go. Somebody had to take the fall at the BC Lottery Corporation over the issue of whether a few retailers are cheating lottery customers out of their winnings. The president of the corporation is an obvious choice. But we’d be naive to think that the problem ends there. If we’ve actually set up a government-run gambling industry that tolerates the cheating of customers, we’ve got a lot more to worry about than can ever be addressed by just firing the guy at the top. Poleschuk has worked in upper reaches of BC Lottery Corp virtually since its inception in 1985, first as vice-president and then as president. During his tenure, the lottery corporation presided over a 500 per cent rise in gambling revenues, to more than $2.5 billion a year. That’s pretty impressive from a business perspective. But the gambling industry isn’t just another business. Poleschuk talked on many occasions about that very thing, and th...

Tomorrow's disasters visible in report on kids in care June 1, 2007 I spoke to a Grade 10 class about homelessness a few months back, and was profoundly discouraged to realize that to them, the problems in Victoria’s downtown were just the way it was. They’d never known any different. The sleeping bags, the shopping carts, the drugs and the craziness - these kids had no way of knowing that just 10 years ago, most of that didn’t even exist. On the one hand, the problems all seem so new. But as a report released this week makes clear, creating homelessness is in fact a slow, sad process. Where did the trouble come from? People ask me that a lot. I then recite a long list of best guesses, starting with the drastic cuts to Canadian mental-health support that started in the early 1980s and carrying right on through two decades of missteps and flawed thinking. We’ve now reached a point where we not only provide less help to people who need it, but also create the conditions that lead to ...