A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

You’ll be reading this today, or maybe even weeks from now. By then it will be old news that the Ontario Superior Court tossed out the bulk of Canada’s prostitution laws. But it’s Tuesday, Sept. 28 right now, 11:01 a.m. I’m sitting down to write this mere minutes after the first amazing email landed in my inbox with the news. I’ve been crying happy tears ever since. I’m still in the buzz of the moment, so please don’t mind me if I get all emotional. Years of battle lie ahead, of course. Brothels, living off the avails and communicating for the purposes of prostitution were all rendered legal in Ontario with the decision, which ultimately has implications coast to coast. The first thing the Crown’s going to do after everybody gets past the shock is file an appeal. Then it’s off to the ultimate arbiter, the Supreme Court of Canada. Still, there’s no going back from what has already changed. The moment Ontario Superior Court Judge Susan Himel handed down her decision Tuesday, ...

Wow, we are living in kooky times when a U.S. newspaper does a straight-up story about how homeless students have a tougher time than other students when schools in their neighbourhood close down. Pretty unsettling story not so much because of what it's actually about, but because it treats the concept of homeless students like it's a normal thing.

Check out the fascinating buzz going on at the CCSVI Facebook page , where the piece I wrote today about multiple sclerosis got posted. This is clearly one hot topic among people with MS.

What's the real reason for resisting help for people with MS? Paulo Zamboni must have been hanging out with the marketers too long when he coined that cursed phrase “liberation therapy” for a garden-variety angioplasty. Maybe if the Italian doctor hadn’t made it all sound quite so fancy and amazing, we’d just be doing what we always do for people with blocked veins, giving them angioplasties to open things up.  Instead, we’re acting like it’s some unheard-of procedure and putting up a real fight to stop people with MS from trying it. You probably know the story by now. Zamboni tried angioplasty on people with MS to test his theory that the devastating illness might be caused by blocked veins that affected blood flow in the brain. Patients responded in near-miraculous ways, and the “liberation therapy” was quickly news all over the world. But even as people with MS grew hopeful at the news, a massive resistance was building among governments, doctors, MS support groups and virtuall...

Why some of our biggest problems just drag on (and on) My late father took to calling me “Little Miss Know-It-All” once I became a columnist. My mother still teases me about it. It’s a funny thing, being an opinion writer. You have to be out there with something to say - otherwise, what’s the point? It seems I’m always weighing in on one thing or another, and never mind that I might not have known the first thing about the subject prior to that.   I wish I really did know it all, because wouldn’t that just be the coolest thing? But what journalists are good at is identifying problems. That doesn’t mean we know how to solve them. Still, you learn a lot after years of writing about problems.   The upside of journalism is getting to see big thinkers working together with the information, insight and team skills needed to solve a problem. The downside is realizing how often we get stuck, and how the ruts in the road just keep on getting deeper in the places where we’ve spun our w...

There's a great new report out from the Vancouver Board of Trade and the Justice Institute that really puts some solid figures to the argument that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure when it comes to social services to children and families. We all know that - even government knows it. But the reality is that time and again we ignore the wisdom and scrap preventive services, leaving some future taxpayer to foot the bill for all the crisis costs that will come due once the child who didn't get the support they need grows up into the adult awash in poor health outcomes, criminal involvement and low productivity. Read the report here. 

I can relate to that poor bus driver who got lost on the way to Bamfield with a busload of students. I've done that drive, and found myself wondering many times along the way which was the most likely outcome: That I would take a wrong turn and get lost forever on the winding gravel roads between Victoria and Bamfield, or be killed by one of the giganto super-size logging trucks whooshing past me. Fortunately, I happened to pick up a mom-and-son hitchhiking duo a couple weeks ago on a drive back to Victoria from Courtenay, and they hailed from Bamfield. The son gave me very sound advice for staying on the straight and narrow while driving to Bamfield: Follow the power lines. Either that or drive in sensible fashion to Port Alberni and take the Lady Rose steamboat in. Lovely way to see Bamfield.