A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Court decision on homeless 'camping' is ticket to real change So now people can sleep in our city parks, but have to be gone first thing in the morning. Hope somebody at city hall is developing a Plan B, because I sure don’t see that 7 a.m.-curfew stuff working out to anybody’s satisfaction for very long. Here’s the thing about last week’s B.C. Supreme Court judgment that brought us to this point: It’s one of the most powerful tools to emerge so far as a means of ending homelessness. Dealing with our problems requires political will, which in turn requires community outrage. The spectre of hundreds of people sleeping in our parks every night - even if rousted by 7 a.m. - will quickly generate all the outrage we need to get this ball rolling at long last. In fact, it has already wrested 85 new beds out of the province, none of which had even been hinted at until the judgment came down. B.C.’s highest court essentially ruled that because there aren’t nearly enough shelter beds fo...

With a municipal vote coming up in the Capital Region in November, here's a few questions that might help you quiz your municipal candidates as to what they plan to do about homelessness in the region if elected: CANDIDATE QUESTIONS What do you think are the reasons Victoria has such visible problems around homelessness and street issues? How do you think those problems should be handled? Where do homelessness and street issues rate in your list of priorities for the city? How would you describe your own level of knowledge on this subject? How did you come by that knowledge? Please describe an “ideal world” around homelessness in terms of which levels of government would assume most responsibility for dealing with the issue. What are the responsibilities of: the federal government? The provincial government? Municipal and regional government? The business community? Individual citizens? If elected, how would you demonstrate leadership in tackling the issues in Victoria and h...

1860s-era NYC tenement brings modern times to mind Oct. 10, 2008 Children falling sick - even dying - from milk contaminated by unscrupulous suppliers. Families struggling in substandard, overcrowded housing. Sound familiar? It could easily be a story ripped from today’s headlines. But in fact it was 1860s New York City, in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side. I heard the story last week on a visit to NYC. Tipped off by a Victoria acquaintance we ran into on the ferry to Ellis Island, we took her advice and visited the New York Tenement Museum, where I found myself in a small, dark apartment that in 1869 had been the home of an Irish immigrant family. The Moores had four children, one of whom died that year at the tender age of four months from the “swill milk” commonly sold to impoverished families. As has just happened in modern-day China, the milk was being diluted to increase profit, in this case with water, chalk and ammonia. Hard to escape a certain sense of déjà vu when...

Text of a speech I gave at the University of Victoria Oct. 7 as the Harvey Stevenson Southam lecturer: Thank you so much for coming tonight, and I’d especially like to thank the Southam family, both for giving me the opportunity to speak this evening and to teach a journalism course this fall at the University of Victoria. Both are pleasures I never expected to have, and that I’m enjoying very much. What I’ll be talking about this evening is this thing we call “media, ” and the role I think it needs to play in leading change in our communities. Seeing as some of what I’m going to be talking about will be about understanding the difference between being passionate versus being biased, I guess I’ll identify myself right off as being biased in terms of believing that change DOES need to come in our communities, on many front, but at the same time I work very hard to keep myself completely open-minded around the ways that we might go about achieving that change. Of course, I want to use ...

Donations most welcome for Oct. 16 event for street community Oct. 3, 2008 Winter approaches, and my friends on the street are still mostly out in the cold. Our region is trying much harder than it was a year ago to do something about homelessness, but little has changed in the short term for the majority of people living out there. The good news: Our community now knows what needs to be done, and has the right people in place to do it. As one of the volunteers who sits on the co-ordinating committee of the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness - the group that grew out of last year’s Mayor’s Task Force - I can assure you that some of the best-connected people with the biggest hearts are getting together regularly to try to work this crisis out. But all that effort doesn’t mean much in the here and now to the 1,200 or so people heading into another long, wet winter. For them, it’s bundle up and wait, because another year has come and gone and they’re still stuck out there. I’...

Bad thinking all round in Battershill story Sept. 26, 2008 What’s done is done, so there’s little point in getting too worked up over the many missteps in the Paul Battershill saga. But boy, there was some flawed thinking going on there at a whole lot of levels. And what’s most disturbing is that if it weren’t for a Victoria businessman inadvertently bringing the messy business to light in the first place, we might never have heard a word about any of it. If you haven’t yet read Times Colonist reporter Rob Shaw’s excellent piece this past Sunday on Battershill’s hard, fast fall from grace as Victoria’s police chief, add it to your must-read list. It chronicles an alarming amount of seriously bad decision-making leading up to Battershill’s forced resignation last month - on the part of Battershill, Mayor Alan Lowe and Victoria’s civilian police board. That the story took almost a full year to come out also tells you how badly those at the centre of the tale didn’t want you to know any o...

published Sept. 19, 2008 I’ve recently been reunited with my “hope chest” from a long-past marriage, and cracked open the lid this summer for the first time in nearly 30 years. Tucked in between the baby clothes and the wedding memorabilia were four years of my ex-husband’s tax returns. I find those returns coming to mind a lot these days amid the torrent of grim news about the economic meltdown in the U.S. For those too young to know, a hope chest is a relic from a time when teenage girls were given cedar chests for accumulating the household goods and treasures that they’d need to set up their house once they became somebody’s wife. After marriage, the wife was free to fill the chest with whatever she chose, which in my case turned out to be a random collection of keepsakes, photo albums, greeting cards, and my ex’s 1976-80 income tax returns. We were a typical young Courtenay couple of our day. My ex worked at the Campbell River mill. I taught piano for a few hours a week, bu...