Briarpatch Articles

In April, nearly 200,000 high-school and middle-school students across Ontario participated in the largest student walkout in Canadian history in protest of Doug Ford’s cuts to education. Reporters and older activists alike are asking: how did high schoolers pull it off?

In a recent article, Vijay Prashad argues that the challenge of the left is to be both present- and future-oriented at once. As the federal election looms, that’s what I’ve tried to do in this issue of Briarpatch.

The right, in general, understands the effectiveness of media manipulation. But does the left understand the importance of funding media? And do we put money into the media we want to see exist?

Today’s left wins when we challenge the right’s cruel and exclusionary imagination with more just, more beautiful world-making projects of our own.

As we stare down a climate crisis and a hard-right political wave, women activists are setting out to transform electoral politics in Canada. But are the parties ready for them?

Activists kicked Amazon’s HQ2 out of New York City. They ran Google’s new campus out of Berlin. Now, in Toronto, #BlockSidewalk wants to send Google – and their new “smart city” – packing. The battle against Big Tech is emerging as the new front in the fight for the right to the city.

Mexico’s new president promised “the end of neoliberalism.” But as he forces through megaprojects and steamrolls over Indigenous dissent, activists are beginning to understand that anti-neoliberal doesn’t always mean anti-capitalist.

It is easy for us to castigate those who bring assault rifles to mosques. But if we want to eradicate Islamophobia in Canada, we also need to pay attention to its workings in state violence, mainstream media, and anti-racist groups.

Whose interests guide the state apparatus that sets the parameters of city development? Yutaka Dirks reviews Samuel Stein’s Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State.

People who say “voting is harm reduction” wrongly assume that in the lead-up to elections, all we can do is vote for the least-bad candidate or party.

Activists are determined to halt the construction of a new migrant detention centre in Laval.

Around us, we see fear and uncertainty about the world that is coming into being. This issue of Briarpatch came from a desire to articulate a hopeful vision of the future, and a plan for how to get there by addressing interwoven social and environmental crises.

When the weight of our entire imbalance crashes down on me, I remember that, through treaties, our ancestors planned for us to remain in our homeland through another apocalypse.

This is some of the history of the just transition movement, traced across Turtle Island through three decades of struggle.

We convened a roundtable of activists from different movements to talk about what a just transition means to them, and what it looks like on the ground.

Two hours east of the Unist’ot’en camp, Wet’suwet’en land defenders from the Likhts’amisyu clan are starting a new camp in the path of the Coastal GasLink pipeline

As the Canadian government phases out coal, we set out to learn what a just transition could mean for Saskatchewan’s coal-producing communities

Just as Indigenous peoples are at the front line of climate impacts, we must also be at the forefront of climate solutions. This is where Indigenous Climate Action was born.

Environmental organizations can sometimes act as gatekeepers of environmental work. In response, the Imagining 2030 Network is creating new connections in Halifax’s climate justice movement.

The Beaver Lake Cree Nation is taking on the tarsands, arguing that they represent too much industrial development in the face of constitutionally protected treaty rights.