A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

I'm going to be writing about the "camping" problems on Pandora boulevard this Friday - did a quick search on Google News around homelessness and discovered this story out of Australia , which now puts its homeless population at 105,000. Can't imagine what Canada's figure would be if we ever added everything up, seeing as B.C. has at least 15,000 people living homeless even by conservative estimates. The one thing that seems to unite all the western, democratic countries these days is a staggering rise in homelessness over the last couple orf decades.

I always wondered how funerals for poor people got paid for, and now we know, at least in Toronto. Haven't been able to find B.C.'s rules yet, but here's a related story from 2008 about the same issue in Quebec. Looks like prices have risen significantly in less than two years if you compare the figures from these two stories.

Our sex-work laws kill people. We had a reminder of that just last week, when Willie Pickton’s murderous ways were news again. Only the streets can provide so many potential victims to a predator like him, and it’s our ineffective and dangerous laws around sex work that create those streets. Then last Friday, the Vancouver Police Department released the report that we all knew had to come - one that detailed the tragic inability of B.C.’s police forces to act on years of tips that women were being killed at Pickton’s farm. I’ve watched our conflicted attitude around the sex industry for too long to be surprised by the public’s muted response to that damning report. We talk a good game about how much concern we have for the women who Pickton and his ilk prey on. But our actions tell a different story every time. It’s beyond ironic that even as the shameful story of B.C.’s missing women returns to the headlines, the federal government is introducing much tougher penalties that ...

Very worrying stuff going on around the changes to Canada's bawdyhouse laws. By lumping bawdyhouses in with other "signature activities" of organized crime, the federal government will dramatically increase jail term for people convicted of operating a bawdyhouse - from a maximum two years to a mandatory minimum sentence of at least five years.  Seeing as the law has already defined a bawdyhouse as anywhere that a sex worker routinely does business with her clients, that sets the stage for a crackdown on indoor sex work. And as we learned in the last crackdown in the 1970s, that in turn sets the stage for an increase in street prostitution and a rise in violent crimes against sex workers. Here's the press release and the backgrounder on the issue released by the Department of Justice in early August. I'll be writing about this in my Friday column.

Troubling news: The federal government wants to ramp up enforcement of Canada's bawdy-house laws as part of a "crackdown" to reduce gang activity. In the last crackdown in the 1970s, the result was a drastic increase in street prostitution and a corresponding rise in the violence experienced by sex workers, what with them having lost a safe indoor place to work. Here's an excellent Vancouver Sun editorial from last week and a column by Sun writer Peter McKnight on this alarming issue.

Back to my blogging today after a great kayaking trip in the Discovery Islands. More on that later. In the meantime, let's get serious: here's the report from the Vancouver Police Department on the problems within the VPD and the RCMP that tripped up investigators looking into the Pickton killings in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Kudos to the Times Colonist's Lindsay Kines for kicking his excellent reporting up a notch and cranking up the pressure to get this report out there.

Special friendships grow out of Cool Aid connection The two young women across the table from me look a lot like friends. They keep up a running banter. About the disastrous time they tried to go ice-skating. The great meal they shared at Anawim House. How weird it is that they each have parents who’ve been to Germany to see The Passion , and mothers who are nurses.   Friendships come in all shapes and sizes. The only thing that distinguishes this one is that it took a little planning to make it happen.   One of the young women is a mentor and the other, her mentoring match. They met through a local program that aims to nurture new friendships to life in the region. The Mentoring Project is a joint effort of the Victoria Cool Aid Society and the Umbrella Society, and is fully funded by the United Way.   Mentors and participants come from all walks of life, although most have in common an experience with mental illness or addiction either in their own lives or that of the...