Briarpatch Articles

Though 80 per cent of Canada’s COVID deaths have happened in long-term care homes, Saskatchewan has fared better than the Canadian average. It was thanks, in part, to its relatively robust system of publicly owned homes. But in recent decades, cracks have begun showing in that system.

For over 30 years, Canadian employers have turned to a private security firm called AFIMAC to help surveil picket lines, provide scab labour, and break strikes.

A new digital pill that tracks whether it has been ingested is poised to enter the Canadian market. But for people who are incarcerated and medicated, it threatens to expand surveillance both inside and outside prisons.

Migrants are now a central part of the local working class in virtually every town and city. Organizing against capitalism involves treating migrants not as objects of charity, but as revolutionary subjects.

Under the peatland and permafrost of northern Ontario lies some $60–$120 billion worth of copper, nickel, and chromite. The Ontario government is hell-bent on passing the Far North Act and mining the so-called Ring of Fire, but the Anishinaabayg have a sacred responsibility to protect the land, and with it, their language.

Defeat happens all the time in leftist campaigns, but very few leftists (including leftist media) have developed honest, helpful ways of talking about it.

How do we build a transformative mass movement against pandemic-era injustice?

Deeper than oceans, channels twice removed / from their native basins. This blood is thicker / than the St. Lawrence, quicker / than the Demerara, sicker / than the Ganges.

This year, I read Maria Campbell’s foundational memoir in a book club of Métis women. Nearly 50 years since it was published, “Halfbreed” still holds important teachings for those of us on the journey of understanding what it means to be Métis.

What does it mean for Indigenous people to be good guests on each other’s land?

Amid escalating tensions between the U.S. and Chinese governments, a troubling campist discourse has been growing in the Canadian left. Socialists should side with neither the American nor the Chinese state – instead, we need to build internationalism from below.

A note from Briarpatch’s editor, clarifying four factual inaccuracies that existed in the baby book, and how they came to be published. 

The largest freshwater delta in North America is under threat from a charity whose goal is seemingly to generate more ducks, no matter the cost to local Indigenous residents and wildlife.

Portraits of the Indigenous people and settlers of O:se Kenhionhata:tie, the camp that reclaimed land in Victoria Park and Waterloo Park for six months of 2020.

Without the war, we would still be the boat’s people, Má. We try to find land, where the joyful people are, but we only surround ourselves with water. 

At its best, Briarpatch stitches together the fragments of a progressive community across so-called Canada, quilting a powerful movement for collective liberation.

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.