A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Across the water is the place for me Oct. 26, 2007 As beautiful as the Capital Region is, it has taken me a long time to click into this place. I’m a Courtenay girl originally, and there’s not much that feels familiar in Greater Victoria if you hail from just about anywhere else on the Island. But then my partner and I moved to Esquimalt in early 2006. And for whatever reason, things just kind of fell into place. All of a sudden, I find myself taking an interest in goings-on in my community. Before I moved here, I wasn’t even sure what my “community” was. I’ve recently caught myself reading with great interest about the proposed redevelopment of the local shopping mall, and pondering what kind of retail mix I’m secretly hoping for. I care about how things will turn out at Kinsmen Gorge Park after new facilities are added, and whether one of my favourite bird-watching fields along one side of the park will be affected. Those are healthy signs. If I live here, I ought to care about what’...

Homeless solution rests with all of us Oct. 19, 2007 Up until I read that damn Frances Piven and her research into social change, I was certain that a bright new day was just around the corner in terms of people living sick, homeless and desperate on our streets. The darkest days are just before the storm, I’d tell myself. People wouldn’t take it for much longer. The better part of a decade has passed since I first had that thought, prompted by a walk through Vancouver’s tragic Downtown Eastside. But the street situations in Vancouver and Victoria have worsened significantly since then, and I’m still waiting for that storm. Fortunately, a friend pointed me toward Piven’s 1979 book Poor People’s Movements earlier this year, and I saw in its pages the error in my thinking. Piven and co-author Richard Coward looked at U.S. movements that had sprung up over the last century around issues such as welfare rights, unemployment insurance, and civil rights for American blacks. In each case, ch...

Pine-beetle devastation marks end of B.C.'s pine forests Oct. 12, 2007 My first glimpse of what has now become a catastrophic natural disaster for B.C. was in 2003, when I was travelling around the province writing stories from the so-called heartland. At that point, the mountain pine beetle was already into its fourth voracious year of attacking B.C.’s pine forests. In my stopovers in Quesnel and Prince George, the briefest glance from the car window was all it took to see the damage. In the worst-hit spots, dead trees covered the landscape. The people in affected areas were still trying to be cheery and entrepreneurial about the pine beetle disaster in those days. The greyish-blue wood colour that is a hallmark of a beetle-infested pine was being reworked as a niche product - “denim pine.” I returned to the coast and didn’t think too much about pine beetles after that. Lodge pole pine is a rarity in coastal forests, so it’s easy to forget the whole tragic thing if you don’t get o...

Ideology is no way to run a country Oct. 5, 2007 The problems of ideology-based governance clearly must be more obvious from afar. Otherwise, Canadians wouldn’t be able to bear the hypocrisy of railing against oppressive and backward regimes elsewhere in the world while committing ourselves anew to the folly of a “war on drugs.” With news this week that we’re returning full-force to the same fruitless battle we’ve already lost several times over, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has once again reminded me why word of his 2006 election plunged me into a pit of despair. Here we are one more time, at least 60 years after we first heard from the experts that we were doing things all wrong, talking about “crackdowns” and the need to “get tough” with those who use illicit drugs. Posturing about all the butt-does kicking we’ll be doing at the border once our new anti-drug strategy is in place. Planning the latest version of an earnest but pointless campaign to convince teenagers not to use drugs...

Nothing beautiful about cosmetic surgery Sept. 28, 2007 We ought to be grateful for people like Krista Stryland and Micheline Charest, whose sad deaths present an opportunity for all women to reflect on the demons that send us searching for happiness through surgery. Stryland died last week in Toronto of a heart attack after undergoing liposuction, in which a thin, sharp instrument is rammed repeatedly into your body to break up pockets of fat. Charest died in Montreal in 2004 following six unconscious hours on the operating table being sliced, diced and skinned in the pursuit of “beauty.” Death is merely the worst-case scenario on a laundry list of ugly possibilities when it comes to cosmetic surgery, mind you. So I’m grateful too to celebrities like Cher, Joan Rivers, Burt Reynolds, and legions more. One glimpse of their mannequin-like faces is all it takes to remind me of the mighty price people pay for thinking they can get one over on the aging process. We can talk all we like a...

U.S. corporation takes another piece of B.C.'s human service work Sept. 21, 2007 For better or worse, the bulk of B.C.’s back-to-work programs for people with disabilities are now under the control of a large, aggressive American corporation. The ink is barely dry on the Aug. 3 agreement that saw the sale of the local company that has run the programs up until now - WCG International - to Arizona’s Providence Service Corp. So it’s much too soon to speculate whether clients will notice any difference, or to assume that it’s automatically a bad thing when one more big U.S. company takes over yet another aspect of B.C.’s human services. But man, I get cold shivers down my spine when I think about how easily British Columbians are giving this stuff up, all of it without a whisper of public debate. Providence in particular is a heavy-duty acquisitor of government social-service contracts, and delighted to be gaining its first foothold in Canada. Providence bought WCG less than a month a...

Add one more homeless man to Victoria streets Sept. 14, 2007 For more than a year now, I’ve watched Roland Lapierre cobbling together at least some semblance of a normal life aboard his tidy little raft on the Gorge. Once homeless on Victoria’s streets, Lapierre had found a way out. I’d see him sitting in the sunshine on his patchwork raft –reading the paper sometimes, or having a nap – and would send good thoughts his way for having the creative mettle to come up with his own solution. I wondered how long he’d get away with it. The answer came this week. The City of Victoria has ordered Lapierre to leave the little bay where he anchors, off Banfield Park near the Selkirk Trestle. In a city that knows no end to people living homeless on its streets, add one more. The city is within its rights, of course, and I can already hear the “slippery slope” arguments taking shape in defence of rousting Lapierre. We can’t have people thinking they can just pull up a raft somewhere on the Gorge a...