A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

It all comes out in the wash March 9, 2007 On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters. With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories. I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go. But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could. The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched th...

Restaurant calorie counts a weighty subject March 2, 2007 In this time of angst over how fat we’re all getting, the only real villain to this point has been our own gluttonous selves. Nobody’s out there making us eat too much. And for the most part, that’s true. If people are putting on weight to the point that it’s having an impact on their health, then it’s up to them to do something about that. We have the right to good health care no matter what bad choices we make, but we still need to take personal responsibility for staying healthy. That said, the astounding figures in a U.S. health organization’s newsletter this month certainly underline the restaurant industry’s significant role in helping North Americans lard on the pounds. We may be eating the stuff, but it’s the industry that has cranked up the calorie count to truly obscene levels. The restaurants listed in the March newsletter of the Centre for Science in the Public Interest were all American, but I don’t imagine the resu...

Hard to stay positive when faced with our inability to act Feb. 23, 2007 Life on the front lines of a load of social issues these past three years has underlined for me the problems of a community that can’t come to grips with what’s going on in its streets. It’s been something of a grim awakening. Not the issues so much - 23 years in journalism had already introduced me to things like drug addiction, the sex trade and people living on the streets before I started working in the not-for-profit sector in 2004. No, it’s my newfound knowledge - that we’re paralyzed with indecision about what to do about any of it - that has proved the most unsettling. I sometimes fear I’m drifting into cynicism, which was certainly a risk even in my previous job as a journalist. On that front, I remain haunted by the ghost of the Victoria Health Project of the late 1980s. I was a relatively new reporter in those days, and loved the strategy for its common sense. Tasked with finding a way to keep aging peo...

If exotic dancers' money not good enough, don't count on mine Feb . 17, 2007 When I first heard about a national breast cancer charity turning down a donation from exotic dancers in Vancouver, I got mad. I fired off a furious e-mail to the Breast Cancer Society of Canada, and suspect a lot of other people did too. Being an exotic dancer is, after all, a legal profession. Up until 2004, Canada even had a special fast-track immigration category for exotic dancers to ensure the country never ran short of them. Do we want our charities getting sniffy about taking donations from hard-working, fully legal dancers just because somebody disapproves of how they make a living? That’s what happened in this instance, when the cancer society rejected the proceeds of a fundraiser being put on by Vancouver’s Exotic Dancers For Canada next month. But while I was poking around on the Web in search of insight into what could have possibly possessed the society to refuse the donation, what became...

Nothing appealing about Victoria's Centennial Square Feb. 9, 2007 What is it about a space that makes you want to stay in it? You and I might have differing theories on that, but I bet we could agree on at least one point: Centennial Square doesn’t have it. I cut through the square on occasion, and find myself wondering each and every time what it is that makes the place so completely uninviting. I don’t think I’m alone on this one, either, because the square is disturbingly empty most of the time. People just don’t seem to go there. No disrespect to the square’s original planner, Rod Clack. I’m sure Centennial Square was a heck of an improvement over what was there 45 years ago when it was built. Victoria’s downtown was still very much in transition from its rough-and-tumble past in those years, and creating public space next to a renovated city hall was a terrific move. But whatever it was about the square that worked in 1962, it stopped working quite some time ago. To walk thro...

Jannit Rabinovitch's death a call to action Feb. 2, 2007 My friend Jannit Rabinovitch is dead. The loss is huge, and not just to the throng of people who loved her in all her many roles: mother, mentor, lover, friend. She was that rarest of breeds - someone who set out to change the world and really did. Our communities will feel her loss for decades to come. The real shame of it is that Jannit had at least 20 more years of community work in her. She was only 57, and showing no signs of growing weary of the fight. Never mind that by that point she’d already built a women’s shelter, launched five grassroots community groups, gotten her PhD and co-parented two fabulous children. Jannit was nowhere near done. But then the cancer set in last summer. She died last Friday. She hated the weakness and vulnerability brought on by the disease and its debilitating treatment, and in a way I was glad t hear that she had been set free. But I really don’t know how we’ll create change without her...

Pickton trial no relief for outdoor sex workers Jan. 26, 2007 Today was going to be the day I didn’t write about social issues. Too much thinking about the frightening mistakes being made these days can really bum me out. But then Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan came out with his happily-ever-after take this week on how the trial of Robert Pickton will be the thing that changes everything for the troubled women the pig farmer allegedly preyed on. “There's no doubt that a very big, negative impression is going to be created by this," said Sullivan when asked about the impact of Pickton’s trial on Vancouver’s reputation. "But hopefully, out of this, we can turn it into a good-news story and find a way to ensure that no women will ever have to put themselves at risk again in this way." I just couldn’t let that go. If we actually planned on making a difference in the lives of the women who go missing on our streets, there’d have been some sign of it by now. We’ve known for...

Going nowhere fast, and spending a fortune to do it Jan. 19, 2007 If you’re the type to worry about where we’re headed in this world, these are bleak times. We’re at one of those points in history where things on any number of fronts are either going to get much better or a whole lot worse based on whatever we do next. Unfortunately, we’re showing few signs of being up for the challenge. I’ve often wondered at what point a community ignites. How did the small, brave acts of people in the U.S. finally explode into the civil rights movement? What finally elevated gay rights to being a legitimate issue that mattered? To know that would perhaps be the secret to unlocking this national stupor of ours, one that seems to render us incapable of addressing an array of really serious problems unfolding around us. We would not for a moment be so cavalier in our personal lives. We wouldn’t continue to do things that clearly weren’t working, or spend vast sums of money without ever questioning the ...

The tale of two foolish teenage boys hired to carry out a murder that was supposed to make them rich is a veritable Aesop’s fable in terms of the obvious moral of the story. One of the boys admitted his guilt from the outset, and did what the system required of him during 10 years in prison. In return for his good behaviour, David Muir was granted parole five years ago for the two murders he helped carry out in 1990. The other has steadfastly denied his guilt. He has refused to take required prison programs, and his father has developed into a notorious agitator who infuriates prison officials. So Derik Lord remains in jail, denied parole for a fourth time last month. The moral: Things go better for people who accept responsibility. Unfortunately for Lord, the opportunity to act accordingly just may have passed. Lord, Muir and pal Darren Huenemann were teen friends in Saanich when they were convicted in 1992 of carrying out the murders of Darren’s mother and grandmother at the old...

The entrenchment of MRSA Jan. 5, 2007 More than 1,000 people in our region will catch a terrible infection this year that no antibiotic will easily defeat. The worst cases will be fatal, but even the ones that aren’t will still be dangerous, unpleasant and extremely difficult to clear up. Once upon a time, an infection like the one taking root right now was a problem only for very specific populations. A few isolated tribes of Australian aborigines. People living on the streets. Athletes playing contact sports. Military recruits. Not anymore. The staph infections showing up in our community lately are occurring in people with no known risk factors. “We are the epicentre of the country,” local infection specialist Dr. Pamela Kibsey said this week. Human beings have been grappling with staphylococcus infections for millennia, of course. No small wonder penicillin was given a hero’s welcome upon its invention in the 1940s, considering how many people had been killed by infection up to tha...