A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Big picture essential when deciding on run-of-river projects Once upon a time, a previous generation of British Columbians made tough, costly choices on behalf of future citizens. Now it’s our turn, with no certainty that we’re ready for it. B.C. has enjoyed a seemingly limitless supply of cheap “green” electricity for 40 years thanks to the giant dams built on the Peace and Columbia rivers back when mega-projects and environmental sensitivities weren’t quite so at odds with each other. But in recent years the population has grown to the point that we’re using more electricity than we generate. The painful process of figuring out what to do about that is underway, but with all-new challenges and complexities that render much of our previous hydro history moot as a guide for what needs to be done. Is the provincial government up to the task? That’s a big question, as revealed in this week’s headlines about the feverish interest building in the private sector over “run of river” projects...

Hip, hip, hooray - Woodwynn Farm's going forward Hey, could this be hope I’m feeling? It’s such a hard thing to hold onto amid the gloom and doom of the day, but this past week I started to notice a distinct cheery bonhomie creeping over me. I’d almost forgotten how good it feels. It started last Wednesday, after I toured Vancouver’s terrific new emergency housing for people living hard on the street - the so-called “hardest to house. “ It’s a label that calls up scary images of people beyond help, but the Vancouver experience - set in motion by a committed city council focused on homelessness - is rapidly disproving the myths of that (more on that in a future column). And then this week, it was over the moon for me when I got the news that Richard LeBlanc and his team were successful in their bid to buy Woodwynn Farm. Chalk one up to instant karma, which LeBlanc has surely earned after a particularly hard year of trying to acquire Woodwynn in the face of a fierce NIMBY campaign f...

Update on HIV/sex worker issue I noted a couple weeks ago a report on HIV/AIDS that had wrongly been presented in the media as being about all Vancouver sex workers, even though the study had actually involved only street-entrenched and addicted outdoor sex workers in the Downtown Eastside. Here's a March 14 letter from the authors of the study that sets things straight on that subject: RE: Unintended results of research (14 March 2009) by Druyts, Hogg, Montaner British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS We thank Dr. Goodyear for his response to our article. We fully agree with his concerns surrounding the recent coverage of our work on HIV prevalence in British Columbia, Canada. Dr. Goodyear has expressed difficulty in seeing how this study will benefit the individuals who participated in the research. Of note, estimates of HIV prevalence among at-risk groups are vital in planning for the development and provision of appropriate policy and programmatic responses. We wish t...

Detox rules work well for some - so let's do it both ways Speaking up for the rights of one group invariably means stepping on those of another, as I was reminded following my recent column on the no-smoking policy at the new detox. An old acquaintance of mine - I’ll call her Shelly - phoned me after the column appeared to tell me I was wrong to be critical of Vancouver Island Health Authority staff for prohibiting smoking at the detox. She’d arrived for a stay at the brand-new unit last month prepared to hate the prohibition, too, but instead quit smoking - for the first time in more than 40 years. She was proudly 28 days nicotine-free when I met up with her last week at the Pembroke Street stabilization unit, which is where people fresh from detox ideally get to stay for a month while they work out the details of a life without drugs. Shelly had gone to detox primarily to get off heroin, valium, alcohol and cocaine, but was delighted to have gotten out from under her cigarette ha...

Sadly, I've had to give up some of my regular Friday columns, due to cutbacks to the freelance budget at the Times Colonist. I won't be writing for the first Friday of the month anymore. It's bothering me more than I would have expected, but so it goes. Change always ends up being a positive thing, in my experience, but that's not to say it ever starts out pleasantly. I've never seen the media industry in such a state. Where's it all going? Nowhere good for the immediate future, and for the industry as it currently exists. But something new will rise from the ashes, and perhaps it's time. My wish would be for a return to smaller, locally owned media. I never got to experience that during my career, because the Thompson corporation owned all the small papers I was working at in my early years, and since then it's been Southam, Hollinger and Canwest in rapid succession. But I've always thought that would be the model with the most potential for underst...

If you see this Vancouver Sun article in YOUR local paper, please write a letter to the editor! I'm an advocate for the rights of sex workers, and one of the biggest problems out there is that all the study, research and reporting is almost exclusively about the experiences of marginalized "survival" sex workers - who make up just 10-20 per cent of all sex workers - yet is presumed to be the experience of all sex workers. Case in point: an article from the March 4 Vancouver Sun, a shorter version of which ran in the Victoria Times Colonist and Edmonton Journal today (and perhaps other publications - those are just the ones I'm aware of) on HIV/AIDS prevalence among "female sex workers" in Vancouver. I tracked down the original study and the error begins there, as the information they wrote about came from three studies of survival sex workers in the Downtown Eastside, yet the language they use makes it sound as though the findings are representative of Vanco...

Health authority's detox rules block access for street users We met over coffee last week, each with our own reasons for being there. I was there to find out why the region’s new 14-bed detox unit is virtually unavailable to people from the street community. He wanted to know why the media always fixate on the negative. We talked for an hour and a half. I’m not sure that either of us fully understood the other one’s points by the end of it all. But at least we heard each other out, and I appreciated his frankness. As the director of addiction services for the Vancouver Island Health Authority, Dr. Laurence Bosley is an important man when it comes to addressing some of the immense problems on our streets. Addiction certainly isn’t the only reason why people end up homelessness. But it’s a major reason for why they get stuck out there. So when the health authority opens a new detox with policies that essentially exclude most of the several hundred people with addictions on our stre...