A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Respite from the streets Feb. 22, 2008 We’re an unusual group of travellers assembling on this rainy morning outside Our Place street drop-in, and we’re bound for an unlikely destination: A nun’s retreat in East Sooke. We load into the rental van with our morning faces on, some of us just waking up and others so worn out from being up all night that they’re practically asleep in their seats before the van even gets moving. In the driver’s seat: Margaret O’Donnell, the good-hearted woman who is leading us on this adventure. O’Donnell worked with Our Place to launch the monthly retreats to Glenairley last April, moved to action by findings of a regional spiritual-health survey that identified spirituality as the missing piece in the recovery process for people living on or near the streets. Beside her sits Lynn, a newcomer who is clearly anxious about being there. Margaret pats her hand and keeps her close. Fred and Ginette cuddle up in the next row of seats, having become a couple sinc...

It's a hard, lonely life when you're different Feb. 15, 2008 He lives like a recluse, holed up with his snakes and lizards in his mother’s basement. Besides his brother and an outreach worker who knew him as a kid, nobody ever comes by, and that’s just fine with him: “No one can hurt me if I don’t know anyone.” His name is Brandon and he’s 21, but that’s just a number. He’s lived way more life than that. His story is achingly familiar to anyone working with youth on the streets. Abusive and violent childhood. Lots of problems in school. Bumped around from place to place while growing up, then handed a welfare cheque and thrust into the world at the age of 16. He managed to hold onto an apartment for three years in spite of it all - until the landlord evicted the whole floor he lived on. Brandon couldn’t get a grip after that, and spent a miserable year on Victoria’s streets when he was 19. He’d do just about anything not to go back - like living in his mother’s basement until ...

Wrong thinking on addiction stops us from solving street problems Feb. 8, 2008 If you read my column with any regularity, you might be starting to see a theme emerging these past couple of months. As my mother has noted more than once, “All you ever write about is homelessness!” That pretty much sums it up. With the indulgence of the good folks at the Times-Colonist, I hope to use my weekly platform to write about street issues almost exclusively for the next while. Homelessness is one of the great tragedies of modern times. To tackle it successfully requires understanding where it comes from. I think I can play a small role in setting things right by telling the stories of the people out there. I like to think the stories are having an effect. One woman saw her own daughter in the sad tale of my young friend Chantal. Another fellow read the story of Blaine and felt sufficiently moved to buy him a bus pass for the next three months (which, let me tell you, cheered Blaine up immensely)....

This piece of mine ran Monday, Feb. 4/08 in the Montreal Gazette. I wrote it in response to a piece by Janet Bagnall that had appeared in the Gazette the previous week. I've posted Bagnall's piece here as well, right after mine: There was a time when I wouldn’t have questioned columnist Janet Bagnall’s recent declaration that 90 per cent of prostitutes have been forced into the work. That’s more or less what I’d been told over the years by those who considered themselves expert in such matters. I, too, presumed most sex workers were victimized and exploited women manipulated by pimps, bad boyfriends and shady customers. Back then, news of a Vancouver sex worker’s campaign to build brothels for the Olympics likely would have incensed me as much as it did Ms. Bagnall last week. But then I got out of the newsroom and met a few sex workers - maybe a couple of hundred all told. And I realized I had it all wrong. That 90-per-cent claim is neither true nor supported by any resea...

Crack cocaine a fast ride down Feb. 1, 2008 Guy Grolway and I came across each other at a bus stop near City Hall one morning a couple weeks ago - me looking for someone out there who felt like talking, him taking in the morning before another day on the streets set in. He’s 57, and up until a couple years ago was making good money as a heavy-equipment operator in Fort McMurray. But then he met a woman - and soon after, crack cocaine. And wouldn’t you know it, crack cocaine was the one that stuck around. “I came to this city from the Ottawa valley 35 years ago with nothing, and two years ago found myself like I started,” says Grolway. “There’s a lesson to be taught from all of this: Never get involved in crack.” Grolway has been a drug user all his life. Marijuana first, starting at age 11. Cigarettes at 12. Crystal meth at 13: “My best friend put a needle in my arm and I woke up seven years later.” Then cocaine, for most of his adult life, but never so much that he couldn’t hold down...

Jan. 25, 2008 Now's time to push door wide open on homelessness They say that the darkest hours are just before the dawn. Boy, I hope so. I’m essentially an optimist. But 26 years in journalism has also immersed me in the real world, where happy endings are far from a given. I now consider myself a pessimistic optimist - still hopeful, but all too aware of this world’s frailties. In terms of homelessness, I admit to having wondered in the last couple of years just how dark things would have to get before something finally happened. Pretty damn dark, as it turns out. But is that a sliver of light I see on the horizon? This week, for instance, the province announced new money to house and shelter 170 people living on or near the streets in Victoria. I’m also hearing good things about BC Housing - that the Crown corporation is working hard to get some action going around new housing. Not that it’s the dawn of a new day or anything quite so dramatic as that. But I do get the feeling we...

Jan. 27, 2008 - Contact information for government officials Want to get something happening around homelessness? Here's a whole lot of contact information that will direct you to the right government officials to receive a letter at the federal, provincial and municipal levels. Letters still count for a lot in the world of politics, and we're sure to get noticed if lots of people write lots of letters on this issue. ' All info in the list is current as of today's date, but keep in mind that cabinet shuffles and elections can change things in the months to come. Write on! PROVINCIAL: You’ll want to target your letters about homelessness - if the issue you are pressing in a particular letter is housing, write to the housing minister; if mental illness and addiction, write to the health minister; if welfare, to Employment and Income Assistance, etc. You can also write letters directly to the premier and his deputy minister. But even when your letters are directed t...

Hard fall to streets after lifetime of working Jan. 18, 2008 Not even 18 months ago, all of this would have been unimaginable. He’d been 10 years at the same job, and 10 years in the same apartment. He’d never had problems finding work. But then came the fateful day in October 2006, when Blaine got into a heated discussion with his boss over whether he deserved a raise. It turned into a fight, and Blaine got fired. It took him a scant six months to blow through what little savings he had. Six months to wear out the patience of his long-time landlord. Six months to discover that nobody wanted to hire him anymore, and to end up homeless for the first time in his life. It’s been a humiliating and hard ride down. He’s found a little work here and there, but a 52-year-old guy with health problems just isn’t the first pick for the kind of jobs he’s experienced in: truck-driving for the most part, and jobs with moving companies. He recently found out he’s got diabetes and vascular problems, w...

Why won't we help sex workers before they're dead? Jan. 11, 2008 We spent $20 million to gather enough evidence to charge Willy Pickton with murder. We spent another $46 million to convict him. And I guess we’ll just have to take Attorney General Wally Oppal’s word that we may need to spend many millions more to try Pickton all over again - for zero gain, seeing as the mass murderer has already been handed the maximum sentence for his crimes against B.C. women. But what a difference the smallest fraction of all that money could have made in changing the lives of the broken women Pickton preyed upon. Why is it we have money for the desperate women working our streets only after they’re dead? With the prison gates barely closed on Pickton, another serial killer has already emerged in the Lower Mainland. In Edmonton, where 20 survival sex workers have been murdered in the past two decades, police have begun collecting DNA samples from other street workers to make it easier to iden...

Life can be lonely for people with mental illness Jan. 4, 2008 I have a layman’s understanding at best about mental illness as a medical condition, but years of experience in how it plays out in real life. You meet a lot of people living with mental illness when you work in the media. Those in the throes of an acute stage of illness often think their only hope is to get their story out there. So I’ve had many conversations with people carrying that label, and made a lot of shifts in my thinking as a result. The more I’ve seen of mental illness, the less certain I am of what it is. But I do know it’s a damn difficult thing to live with, particularly in a world with little time for anyone who can’t keep up. It can also mean a life of terrible loneliness. I’ve had a dear friend for about six years now who has been a remarkable tutor for me, including waiting patiently for probably the first two years of our acquaintanceship while I worked my way clear of defining her only by her illness. ...