A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Look left, look right - you still end up with child poverty If we devoted even a fraction of the time to ending poverty that we spend on debating whose statistics are right, we’d have been a nation of thriving citizens from coast to coast a long time ago. Instead, we divide into ideological camps and bicker over the differences between “relative” and “absolute” poverty, and that’s as far as things ever go. It’s a good explanation for why we’re 20 years into a national commitment to end child poverty in Canada with no real end in sight. The latest figures, released this week in First Call’s annual report card on child poverty in B.C., use relative poverty as the gauge. That measurement, also known as the low-income cutoff (LICO), is based on what an “average” Canadian needs to spend for food, clothing and shelter and presumes relative poverty among those who have to spend significantly more. LICO is the favoured standard for those who want government to do more to support Canadians at t...

P roject Connect 2009 stats Here's an interesting document I did up for the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness as part of my work co-ordinating the Project Connect service fair last month at Our Place for the local street community. Sorry for the weird formatting in the "comments" part, but that's what Excel tables do when you paste them in Blogger, I guess. Analysis of surveys done at Project Connect 2009 Nov. 18, 2009 The following is a summary of surveys done with participants at Project Connect 2009, held Oct. 14 at Our Place Drop-In Centre. This is the second year of PC and the second year of doing surveys, so there is some ability to compare the data from year to year (the actual survey had to be shortened from last year due to it taking too long, so some questions asked last year were gone from this year’s survey). We managed to survey about a third of the 700+ people who attended Project Connect, and completed considerably more surveys than last ye...

Federal government fumbles again. And again. And again... Never mind the federal inquiry into B.C.’s vanishing sockeye salmon that will soon be underway. How about an inquiry into the federal government itself? I’m sure the feds must be good at something. But they’re routinely quite hopeless, in ways that would almost be funny if it weren’t for the harm being done to Canadians and the country. How have they hurt us? Let me count the ways: H1N1 - If this had really been “the big one,” we’d have been as hooped as a New Orleans hurricane victim waiting for rescue after Katrina. As luck would have it, we’ve been allowed to test our national pandemic strategy with a virus that wasn’t as terrifying as expected, but picture the shape we’d be in right now had the new flu strain remained as lethal as it was in its early days in Mexico. Canada has a 550-page pandemic preparedness plan, developed by the Public Health Agency four years ago after a botched national response to the SARS crisis. But ...

If you want to fight back, make it effective I find myself thinking about protest a lot these days, mostly because of the ill-considered social cuts going on in B.C. right now. It’s really the only form of democratic action we have in between elections, and a proven tool. When the public “blowback” is intense enough, as Housing Minister Rich Coleman might say, governments tend to change their minds. But last week’s Olympic torch dustup reminds us that there’s protest, and then there’s effective protest. Those of us who want real change had best keep that in mind. I mean no disrespect to those who protested the torch relay last Friday. The majority were there for all the right reasons. I certainly share their pain over a $6 billion party being thrown next February even while growing numbers of vulnerable British Columbians lose the programs and services that help them cope. Still, little is gained when the only thing your protest accomplishes is to frustrate and sadden the people who d...

Excuse me, doc - any advice for the uncertain? What are we to take from the fact that a majority of adult Canadians don’t want to be immunized against the H1N1 flu? I know how they feel. I’m still on the fence myself about whether to get the shot. Being immunized definitely appears to be the logical, civic-minded choice, but there’s this part of me that’s just really hesitant about getting a flu shot. And 51 per cent of the Canadians apparently feel the same way. Asked in an on-line poll this month about whether they’d be getting vaccinated against H1N1, more than half said no. That’s up significantly from July, when only 38 per cent were saying no. That fact must be a great disappointment to the public-health officials working hard on the H1N1 front. People were alarmed as all get-out when the new strain of influenza first took hold in Mexico, and the task back then looked like it was going to be about keeping a worried public calm until a vaccine could be developed. Instead we’ve ...

It's community involvement that sets Project Connect apart For the past two years, I’ve had the honour of organizing the Project Connect service fair for the street community, put on by the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness. This year, we saw at least 700 people through the door for the event at Our Place drop-in last Wednesday. They came for help: a new birth certificate, care for their broken and battered feet, a haircut, vet care, a backpack full of useful stuff They also came for food, eating a whopping 2,100 hamburgers and 1,000 hot dogs by day’s end. I don’t know whether to be delighted or heartsick that the number of people at the event was up by more than 200 this year, or that we served twice as many burgers and dogs. Sure, it’s great to draw a crowd, but I dream of the day when an event for people living in profound poverty fails to attract anybody. If you’ve done any event-planning, you’ll know it’s a crazy-making activity with a million details to attend t...

Pointless prostitution laws help no one but hurt many Sex work is back in the headlines again, and will be for quite some time with a constitutional challenge to Canada’s prostitution laws finally underway this week. I wish miracles for the three brave sex workers who launched the challenge. That’s what they’ll need to survive the savaging they’re in for at the hands of those who staunchly oppose anything that might make it easier or safer to be a sex worker. The case in front of the Ontario Superior Court is challenging three sections of the Criminal Code: the “common bawdyhouse” laws that make anything to do with operating a brothel illegal; procuring or living off the avails of prostitution; and communicating for the purposes of prostitution. In deciding the case, Justice Susan Himel will be gauging whether our prostitution laws are proportionate to their purpose, or if they have the effect of forcing sex workers into unsafe situations where they can be preyed on by deviants and ser...