Briarpatch Articles

Canada’s prison farms are being reopened. But when prisoners will be paid pennies a day, and the fruits of their labour will likely be exported for profit, there’s little to celebrate.

Toronto Pearson Airport is Canada’s largest workplace. There, workers are building up an organization that aims to match the airport’s power.

How have restrictive new laws like America’s FOSTA/SESTA and Canada’s PCEPA impacted sex workers’ labour conditions? Lindsay Blewett reviews Red Light Labour: Sex Work Regulation, Agency, and Resistance

In mainstream media, labour journalism has been replaced by financial reporting and business sections. But journalism students are raising the labour beat from the grave.

Can Alberta’s labour movement rise to the challenge presented by the new UCP government?

Corporate, for-profit planning, aided and violently enforced by the settler colonial state of Canada, will not bring about a just transition.

The climate crisis is the biggest story of our time, but it’s a story that’s extremely difficult to tell. And as corporate owners shutter local newspapers, we’re losing our best tool in understanding what climate change looks like on the ground, and our best method to empower people to fight back.

Corporate media owners are killing local newspapers – which is making it difficult for everyday people to understand the on-the-ground impacts of the climate crisis.

Conversations with disabled, trans, and racialized survivalists who are changing what it means to be a disaster prepper

End-of-life doulas are gaining popularity, as people begin to resist highly-medicalized palliative care and seek a gentler, more personalized death. But will they ever be integrated into Canada’s public health system?

In every sense that matters, poverty is a 2S-LGBTQ issue. So why aren’t mainstream Canadian 2S-LGBTQ organizations treating it as such? And who’s picking up their slack?

If “the 1990s were Black,” why is anti-Blackness still cemented into Canadian society today? Phillip Dwight Morgan reviews Rinaldo Walcott and Idil Abdillahi’s BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom.

In the preparation for a global general climate strike on September 20 – that’s centred around a tactic that came directly out of the labour movement – where are the unions?

The struggle over whom Winnipeg’s downtown library belongs to serves as an unexpectedly sophisticated example of what’s possible when leftists organize outside of the electoral sphere and commit to winning a single protracted struggle.

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.