A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Maybe it's the mirror: A reflection on body image Dec. 1, 2006 Nobody in our household is quite sure when the happy mirror first arrived. For the longest time, only my stepdaughter knew of its magical powers. The otherwise ordinary full-length mirror hung in her bedroom for years and I learned of its charms only after she moved away and left it behind. I’ve known about the existence of bad mirrors for many years, of course, being well familiar with those kind. I can’t count the number of store dressing rooms that have broken my heart over the years with their bright lights and bad mirrors. The happy mirror, on the other hand, tells a much different story to those who look into it. Wherever your body type and tendencies have taken you, it makes you look taller and thinner, and quite nicely proportioned. Your clothes look better. Your hair is neater. You look rested. At first, I resisted its allure. A mirror that made you look good just seemed like too guilty of a pleasure after a li...

Eating: The new smoking? Nov. 24, 2006 Underlining that truth really is stranger than fiction, the human species appears to be destined to eat itself to death. Could Jules Verne ever have imagined a more fantastical end? But here we are, growing fatter with each passing year and taking our children down with us into poor health, early death and depression. How has this happened? It’s as easy as too many calories and not enough activity, and as complex as globalization, public policy, urban planning and genetics. But whatever the reasons, the problems they’ve created are now abundantly clear, and frightening enough as public-health issues to warrant a response every bit as dramatic as we eventually mustered against smoking. This much we know: Overweight and obese people get sick more often and die sooner. They’re also more likely to raise kids who are overweight and obese themselves. Much like smoking, kids who grow up with parents whose eating habits and activity levels make them obese...

The hazards of parking-ticket policy Nov. 17, 2006 I’ve seen at least six cycles of the Victoria parking-ticket debate since moving here 17 years ago. They all basically unfold the same way. It usually starts with the City of Victoria musing about collecting more money by increasing the parking fines. Pretty soon, downtown merchants join the debate, questioning the impact on their customers of whatever new parking policy is being discussed at the time. Eleven years ago, for instance, downtown businesses sounded the alarm about a plan to give commissionaires handheld computers that instantly identified drivers with 10 or more unpaid parking tickets. Such cars caught at expired meters were to be towed. Businesses feared the vigilance was going to be a problem for some of their customers. But as the habit has been in the past decade or so, the city went ahead anyway. Back then, the city brought in $2 million a year in ticket revenue. It’s now almost $4 million. The changes have been part...

Prostitution and violence Nov. 10, 2006 The media came calling this week, with a short-lived and whirlwind intensity that I have come to recognize as the hallmark of being “in the news.” The subject at hand was a new report that briefly touched on drug-fuelled parties in the Western Communities luring youth into the violence of the sex trade. It was the briefest of mentions, really: One paragraph in a 78-page report. But for me, it would be the dominant force that would rule my Tuesday. As someone who works at an agency that helps sex workers, I would be in high demand that day and the night before for my comments about the rumoured party place. I had little to offer, having never heard of the place. But politicians and others waded in with gasps of disbelief, and demands for police to “do something.” The story blew in and out of the headlines in little more than a day. With no young, partying Western Communities children stepping forward to fuel more coverage with confessions of being...

Norman Spector and the "bitch" Nov. 3, 2006 A co-worker of mine keeps a “to do” list taped to her computer to remind her of ways to improve her life. Rule No. 1: “Keep ‘inside voices’ inside.” As newspaper columnist and ex-politico Norman Spector is learning for himself this week, that’s a rule to live by. Having no fear about speaking your mind has its charming aspects, as anyone who has met Spector in person will know. But sooner or later, it’s going to trip you up big time. Spector did a radio interview with Vancouver’s Bill Good this week and let loose about Belinda Stronach, the Liberal MP whose personal life has seemingly captivated Canada’s federal press gallery. “Bitch is a word that I would use to describe someone like Belinda Stronach,” said Spector in the now infamous exchange. “You know, I’m not in politics, I can say it. I think she’s a bitch and I think that 90 per cent of men would probably say she’s a bitch for the way she’s broken up Tie Domi’s home and the w...

I had a cute science teacher back when I was 15 who I would have gladly had a thing with had he shown me any interest. Fortunately, he was the kind of teacher who understood you didn’t get involved with your students, so nothing happened. I’ve rarely appreciated that teacher more than in these sordid days of testimony from disgraced B.C. teacher Tom Ellison. Unlike my decent teacher, Ellison drew no boundaries. He had sex with his young Vancouver alternative-education students as if he was just another boy among them, with barely a thought to the teacher he was supposed to be. “I apologize to you guys because you’re my good friends,” the former secondary teacher said in court Wednesday to a dozen stricken female students from those years. “I just crossed the line. I know it was wrong.” Good friends? Since when was that ever a desirable characteristic in a teacher? Ellison made the ridiculous claim in court this week that it was “extremely common” for secondary teachers to have sex...

When good food goes wrong: e.coli, botulism, c.difficile Oct. 20, 2006 In the big picture, death by vegetable is an uncommon way to go. Six carrot-juice poisonings are small potatoes, so to speak, compared to the havoc caused by more common killers like cancer and car crashes. But this month’s toxic carrot story comes on the heels of last month’s tainted spinach alert, which in turn has been followed by an alert about our beef. What are we to make of the troubling fact that almost a fifth of the meat sampled at a Canadian grocery store in a recent study contained the toxin-producing bacteria c. difficile? It’s hard not to feel just a little alarmed about our food supply in light of recent headlines, and curious whether everything was OK. Having gone looking for some answers to that question, I can tell you that it’s not. First, let’s consider the spinach. More than 200 people in the U.S. got sick from eating bagged spinach that had been contaminated with the e.coli bacteria. It’s a bug...

School system fails B.C.'s aboriginal students Oct. 13, 2006 Perhaps it’s not particularly noteworthy in itself that 83 per cent of Canadians think our country’s schools are doing a poor job at teaching the basics. That may be their opinion, but it isn’t necessarily true. Still, it’s unsettling to hear that so many people give schools a failing grade on that basic test. What’s more disturbing is that at least on one front, they’re right. Whatever you may take away from the very subjective findings of the Canadian Council on Learning survey released this week, other more objective measures of how our students are doing tell us we’ve got plenty to worry about. Few things would be more challenging than teaching school, and I have respect and admiration for B.C.’s hard-working teachers. But the number of students failing to complete high school in our region is closing in on 28 per cent. Losing that many kids in a community as privileged and involved as ours is cause for considerable a...

B.C.'s Rental Assistance program Oct. 6, 2006 Like most of the agencies working with lost souls, I meet a lot of people who are really struggling. They’re still standing, but God knows how sometimes. They need a lot of things when we first meet them at PEERS. Simple things at first: A decent roof over their heads. A place to fit in. Somewhere to start to recover. Eventually, they’ll need to get at the deeper issues that lie buried beneath the drugs, but they can’t even begin that journey without a solid place to live. Our agency has the great fortune to have 14 portable housing subsidies that we administer on behalf of BC Housing. The subsidies give us the ability to provide real help to people - up to $116.50 per month - in being able to afford even the smallest of rooms away from the users, dealers, mice and infestations. Better still, the subsidies aren’t considered earnings under B.C. law for those on income assistance, which means people get a genuine boost in monthly income. ...

Children in government care Sept. 29, 2006 Everything you need to know about what’s going wrong in B.C. communities these days is summed up in the depressing little report released last week on the health status of children in permanent government care. If you’ve ever wondered where lost souls come from, look no farther. Child and Youth Officer Jane Morley and provincial health officer Dr. Perry Kendall studied health outcomes for children in permanent care between April 1997 and November 2005. Some 37,000 kids were taken into care in that period, with 24,800 eventually making their way out of the system. The report focuses on the 12,200 who didn’t. Not unexpectedly, the study found that kids raised solely by the government fare far worse than other kids, sometimes in ways that underlined for me the essence of family. Having a series of people being paid to care for you just isn’t the same as being raised by your family, a truth the study reveals in telling ways. For instance, kids in ...