A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Put Langford 'vision' to work on homelessness Sept. 12, 2008 Mayor Stew Young and his council have much to be proud of in the transformation of Langford over the years. They’ve helped create an attractive, well-serviced town out of a place that not so long ago was more likely to be the punch line of a bad trailer-trash joke. Councillors, take a bow. Municipal staff, you too, because you’ve proven the worth of a fast and efficient civic bureaucracy that knows how to get things done. But the greatest test of Langford’s visionary capability is still to come. As the City of Victoria can woefully attest, the gentrification of a community inevitably strips away its ability to hide its social problems. Once you’ve torn down the bad part of town, there’s no hiding anything anymore. Can we anticipate that Langford will be ahead of the curve in dealing with those coming challenges, too? So far, the verdict is still very much out on that front. On the one hand, Langford has established c...

Deli-meat sandwiches should be no-go for elderly patients Sept. 5, 2008 So I’ve done my due diligence this week and read through several dozen news items, reports and public-health warnings about the listeriosis outbreak that’s killing Canadians. I’m afraid I have to fall back on that old cliché about being left with more questions than answers, particularly around why old, sick people are still being fed deli meats. Like most of the bacteria that cause food poisoning, listeria monocytogenes is found everywhere: In our soil and water; in almost 40 species of mammals (including humans); in fish; crustaceans; ticks; sewage waste; sickrooms. Healthy farm animals and humans alike can harbour it quite comfortably with no symptoms. For a healthy adult under age 50, a bout of listeriosis is unpleasant but generally manageable. Still, the overall fatality rate is 20 to 30 per cent. And for those whose health issues put them at greater risk, the fatality rate is 40 per cent or more. Pregnant wo...

VIHA's problems go much deeper than communications department Aug. 29, 2008 It’s a poor workman who blames his tools, so let’s hope the Vancouver Island Health Authority rethinks its decision to lay the blame for bad communications on its long-suffering public relations staff. That VIHA pays $1 million a year to communicate badly is certainly a problem. But if the health authority genuinely believes the root cause of that is due to the communication department not doing its job - well, that goes a long way to explaining why these kind of problems continue to dog VIHA. I’ve been an observer of the local health scene for many years, having started my work at the Times Colonist in 1989 as the paper’s health reporter. I’ve never lost interest in the subject, or the ongoing communication problems that have plagued whatever entity was running regional health services at a particular point in time. When I arrived here, the Greater Victoria Hospital Society was running things, under the t...

The secret "chill pill" for outrage: Grandkids Aug. 22, 2008 Outrage is an opinion writer’s stock in trade. So at one level I’m grateful for having a deep vein of wide-ranging indignation inside me to mine as needed. But just back from a holiday with the grandchildren, I’m also grateful for the things that allow me to let go for a while. Tending to the basic needs of young children is the best therapy I’ve found as a break from chronic outrage. As any parent well knows, looking after young children is a full mind-body activity. I’m a superb multi-tasker in most areas of my life, but I can barely make it all the way through a single magazine article over the course of a long summer day if also charged with the care and feeding of three engaged and energetic little boys. It’s a blessing that I didn’t appreciate the first time round, when I was a young woman fearful that my full-time life of raising children was turning me into the worst kind of bore. In those days of endless s...

Oldest profession much like any business Aug. 8, 2008 The business of sex is surprisingly unsexy when you’re getting all you want, and our little film crew has certainly had its fill this past week in New Zealand. Four of us are down here right now trolling through a few of the country’s brothels - legalized five year ago when New Zealand scrapped its Canadian-style laws against adult prostitution and started treating the industry like any other business. The most immediate result of our travels will be a documentary next spring on Global TV. But what I’m hoping will be the ultimate outcome is the beginning of change in our own country. Like Canada, New Zealand has long had an active sex industry and many, many brothels regardless of laws against them. The sale of sexual services has been legal here all along, as it is in Canada, so the 2003 changes were primarily about acknowledging the right to safe, fair workplaces for the country’s estimated 4,000 sex workers. The naysayers - and t...

  Aug. 1, 2008 As you read this, I’m somewhere in Auckland, in the midst of an intense few days immersed in the New Zealand sex industry. I want to learn, and there’s no better way to do that than to go see things for yourself. New Zealand had laws very much like ours governing the sex industry up until 2003, when the country changed course and decriminalized prostitution. I figure it’ll be a great place to look for really current information on what happens when a country stops viewing its sex workers as criminals. Thanks to a law student from the University of Victoria, Hillary Bullock, I’ve got a binder full of information on how New Zealand made the transition. She was looking for a class project and I was looking for exactly what she delivered, which was a detailed report on how that country made it happen. It was a remarkably fast transition. Introduced in 2000 by Labour MP Tim Barnett, the Prostitution Reform Bill was passed into law just three years later. Most aspect...

Lessons learned from the brothel project July 25, 2008 It’s been close to a year since I started talking publicly about wanting to open a brothel. And let me tell you, it’s been one of the most fascinating and surprising years of my life. Brothels and escort agencies flourish in our region and right across the country, so I and my good pal Lauren Casey weren’t breaking new ground on that front with our little plan to start an escort agency with a difference. Our aim was to develop a fair and benevolent workplace for adult sex workers that also donated a share of profits to services and supports for disadvantaged workers. As you might expect of a volunteer project taken on by two very busy women, our plans poked along at a snail’s pace for months. But in the spring we quite accidentally connected with a human dynamo of a sex worker here in Victoria, who in turn connected us with a human dynamo of an entrepreneur with experience running a Vancouver escort agency noted for being a fair an...