Articles

Indigenous land defenders are receiving the harshest treatment for protesting the troubled Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. How far will the courts go to repress those opposed to a project that seems doomed to fail?

New Brunswick’s refusal to fund clinic-based abortions is discriminatory, partisan, and simply harmful to health. A new lawsuit by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association is a last-ditch effort to lift the restriction and save a Fredericton abortion clinic.

Migrant workers are keeping us alive through catastrophes like COVID-19, but they face an impossibly complex, punitive, and high-stakes immigration system. It’s time to completely overhaul the way we value those who do the most vital, life-giving work.

As Lorna Poplak’s new book “The Don: The Story of Toronto’s Infamous Jail” shows, it’s impossible for a history of a prison to disappear the continuity between one institution and the carceral whole.

For the Anishinabe people of the Ottawa River Watershed, preserving the species is intertwined with food sovereignty and land rights. Land defenders promise to be back at the blockades in September 2021, enforcing the moose-hunting moratorium if the government won’t. 

Unions are meant to defend their working-class members against unfair criticism and wrongful termination. But in Winnipeg, the police union is working to obstruct accountability for police officers who kill and abuse people.

The Northwest Territories Housing Corporation was created with a colonial mandate that was meant to keep Indigenous Peoples in the North from being sovereign nations. Nearly half a century later, not much has changed.

When humans degrade the land, Indigenous women, girls, and trans and Two-Spirit people are the most severely affected. This isn’t an accident; it’s an integral part of settler-colonialism.

As COVID fanned the flames of Toronto’s preexisting housing crisis, the Keep Your Rent posters on every block were a reminder that, all around me, there were people fighting for the soul of the city I grew up in. 

A six-page comic about Keep Your Rent’s tenant organizing in Toronto during eight months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

When we imagine rural Canada as white, we erase the history, present, and future of rural Black life – from Black Loyalist settlers to justice for modern migrant farm workers.

Top Canadian companies were among the sponsors and attendees of Canada’s largest union-busting event, according to photos and documents obtained by Briarpatch.

1492 Land Back Lane is about more than just one housing development. Six Nations has a treaty they must protect, and the precedent set by every broken treaty affects us all.

Amid the twin crises of neoliberal capitalism and COVID-19, two health-care workers ask: how do we practice health care in ways that increase people’s access to freedom?

The Ontario government’s idea that we need to “learn to live with” COVID-19 is murderous abandonment of vulnerable people. Instead, the left should mobilize around a clear demand: our governments must adopt aggressive suppression of COVID-19.

When the pandemic took hold in March, the nature of my work as a doctor in remote communities in northern Quebec and Ontario changed drastically. The practice of medicine is defined by coping with uncertainty, but few had experienced the scope of the ambiguity through which we lurched. 

Amazon has become lodged in our society. The only way to exorcise it is to organize it. The Amazon Workers Collective needs your help: sign up to join the fight to organize the workers of Amazon.

In her new book, Nora Loreto tracks the rise and fall of Canada’s organized feminist movement, and observes how formal organizations were replaced with a mix of online personalities, bloggers, and service organizations. How do we once again build a feminist movement that can pose a serious challenge to neoliberal austerity and misogyny?

As precarious work becomes the norm, labour activists need to combine the best of our traditions with new approaches that respond to the changing realities of work. To do that, we look to the history of community unionism, worker centres, and whole worker organizing.

An interview with the judges of Briarpatch’s 10th annual Writing In The Margins contest: Larissa Lai, Pat Kane, and Sonnet L’Abbé.