• Magazine

    Busting the union-busters

    As thousands of workers push to unionize, their bosses are hiring union-busting companies to cling to power. Here’s how you can out-organize your boss.

  • Magazine

    MAiD in heaven

    On medical assistance in dying

  • Magazine

    New look, same politics

    Our new print design, Meta’s tax tantrum, and more.

  • Magazine

    A reading list on Palestinian refusal

    On the tail end of the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, these articles, books, and podcasts demonstrate Palestinians’ strong spirit of refusal.  

  • Magazine

    Sex worker feminism

    Anti-sex work feminists endanger the lives of sex workers and prop up the far right. To fight fascism, the left must adopt a sex worker feminist politic.

  • Magazine

    COVID capitalism

    Tithi Bhattacharya, Nora Loreto, and Naomi Klein on the impact of COVID-19 neoliberalism and working through pandemic-era isolation to build a better world.

  • Magazine

    Disability and the prison system

    It’s not a coincidence that so many prisoners are disabled – the system was designed that way.

  • Magazine

    A message to nurses: it’s time to organize

    Governments are selling off the health-care system to the private sector, compromising patient care and nurses’ working conditions. If nurses organize, we can stop the sell-off.

  • Magazine

    Indigenous cops are cops, too

    To stifle Indigenous organizing, the Canadian government is investing in Indigenous police officers.

  • Magazine

    Indigenous policy is foreign policy

    Canada’s Indigenous relations aren’t domestic – Canada is an imperialist settler colony. If our movements stand a chance against the fascist far right, we need to reject the liberal reconciliation narrative and understand that Canada is an invasive force.

  • Magazine

    Thank you, readers

    Thank you Briarpatch readers for making this issue of the magazine possible. We’ll do what we can to keep earning that support, for as long as it takes us to bring into being the better world we’re all fighting for.

  • Magazine

    Black radical love in Waterloo

    For over 200 years, Black people have built community and taken care of one another in so-called Waterloo, Ontario.

  • Magazine

    What is Cash Back? A settler FAQ

    Settlers have a lot of questions about the call for Cash Back. Briarpatch sat down with Yellowhead Institute researcher Rob Houle to learn about the movement.

  • Magazine

    Buzzkill

    As governments decriminalize psychedelics, companies are clamouring to gain a foothold in the market. But is the medical industry best suited to bring psychedelics into the mainstream?

  • Magazine

    Graphic novels for leftist readers

    Leftist reads are often dense and difficult to understand. Thankfully, there are many graphics novels that cover the same issues in a more accessible format.

  • Magazine

    Who is a prisoner?

    From psychiatric facilities to youth detention centres, the prison keeps growing. To abolish prisons, organizers first need to map the system.

  • Magazine

    “We will be back”

    Four years after the historic Hong Kong protests, organizers reflect on how to grow the labour movement under China’s increasing political repression.

  • Magazine

    Pushing climate refugees into migrant worker programs

    As climate change displaces millions worldwide, the Canadian government is expanding temporary foreign worker programs and funnelling migrants back onto the front lines of the crisis.

  • Magazine

    Fighting fascism in feminism

    Five trans feminists on the rise of fascist feminism and how to fight back.

  • Magazine

    Pushing pipeline ownership onto First Nations

    How industry and governments hatched plans to pass the most contentious pieces of resource industry infrastructure onto First Nations

  • Magazine

    Who is the NDP for?

    Rule changes, hostile colleagues, and a lack of democracy – Anjali Appadurai, Kaitlyn Harvey, and Navjot Kaur share their experiences organizing and running with the NDP.

  • Magazine

    The struggle lies beyond the bargaining table

    Losing an election or settling for a subpar collective agreement can feel like devastating losses in leftists’ larger struggle for power. As we continue to organize for better working and living conditions, the articles in this issue remind us that the struggle isn’t won at the polls or at the bargaining table, but on the picket line, on doorsteps, and in conversations with our communities.

  • Magazine

    The canoe as home

    Youth canoeing camps resist colonial policies and occupation by restoring Indigenous youth’s relationships with canoeing.

  • Magazine

    “They don’t know how to fight for this”

    In year four of the COVID-19 pandemic, will unions fight for workers’ right not to get sick on the job?

  • Magazine

    Black radicalism has always included disability justice

    In her new book “Black Disability Politics,” Sami Schalk highlights the Black disability justice activism overlooked by mainstream disability rights movements and writing.

  • Magazine

    The case for abolitionist sex education

    If we’re serious about addressing sexual harm and providing consent-based sex education, we need to teach students about alternatives to the police and equip them with tools to deal with harm when it happens in their communities.

  • Magazine

    A reading list on resisting dehumanization

    In this reading list, Black women, queer and trans people, people who use drugs, sex workers, and migrants share their stories of marginalization and their fight to be recognized as valuable community members.

  • Magazine

    Desire path

    A photo essay on displacement, grief, and Land Back in the Philippines

  • The cover of the March/April 2023 issue of Briarpatch magazine is on a maroon background. The cover features the WiFi connectivity symbol in the center of a blue circle. The semicircular bars of the WiFi symbol are an aerial view of cul-de-sacs from above with the last 'bar' of houses fading out. Below the cul-de-sacs/bars are the symbols of an anonymous video conferencing participant with a red muted microphone.
    Magazine

    A principle and a place

    While the state abandons people it deems disposable, many of the articles in this issue highlight and strategize how to better organize and include people in the margins in our movements.

  • Magazine

    A Marxist reader for disorienting times

    A reading list to help leftists face the conditions within which we organize without consolation or despair. 

  • A historical black and white image of a number of people protesting at an assembly, some with signs around their necks that say
    Magazine

    Assembling a digital dystopia

    The Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board’s “digital-first” hearing model is silencing tenants and helping landlords evict them.

  • A person sits, kneeling in water, surrounded by mountains and a purple moon. They have a fire in their belly, and long wavy hair with four heads - each one feeing a different emotion (sad, calm, enraged, and nervous).
    Magazine

    Birth control and reproductive justice

    Hormonal birth control has long been a feminist symbol of choice, but without other options, is it truly a choice?

  • Magazine

    Sand

    We song our stories – put them to a beat, draw the melancholy out of them, voices like droplets squeezed out of a braided dish rag on an open balcony.

  • Magazine

    “Health is capitalism’s vulnerability”

    An interview with Beatrice Adler-Bolton on her new book “Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto”

  • Magazine

    Cause of death

    Sophie didn’t mean to die. She had simply arrived at the point where she was prepared to try anything to feel better.

  • A prisoner at Guelph Correctional Centre flexes his bicep. He is prying apart jaws of steer skulls at work for Better Beef Ltd., a private company operating on prison grounds. He is inside the factory and wearing an apron and a hairnet.
    Magazine

    The case for a prisoners’ union

    Organizing prisoner workers is the first step toward abolishing prisons.

  • Magazine

    Journalism with movements in the South

    When journalists insist the world’s problems, no matter how big or small, are caused by U.S. government interference, grassroots struggles against austerity and authoritarianism fall out of view.

  • Four pieces of media against a blue background: a book cover for Indigenous Media Arts in Canada, a movie poster for Writing With Fire, a movie poster for Tell The Truth And Run, and a book cover for the Community Radio Toolkit.
    Magazine

    A reading list on alternative and grassroots media

    Alternative media’s promise is that all people have a right to participate in making media, free of commercial and government control. These are a few of the guiding voices on how to build media for people, not profit.

  • A digital collage showing an underwater ecosystem. Fish swim near fish-shared lures with Google logos for eyes. At the top, a dragnet made of interlocking Meta logos looms over the fish.
    Magazine

    The dangers of Big Tech funding journalism

    Google and Meta are spending millions on programs and awards to help news outlets in crisis. What’s at stake when tech giants are allowed to brand themselves as the saviours of an industry they helped destroy?

  • An illustration of a person with six arms. They have brown skin and black locs. With their many arms, they are frantically sipping an energy drink, typing on a laptop, holding a cell phone to their ear, waving a newspaper, and holding a
    Magazine

    Independent media’s bad labour problem

    From union-busting to systemic racism, when bad labour practices have embedded themselves in the very publications trying to write into existence a more just world, what is to be done?

  • An illustration from the perspective of a person working at a laptop. Looming over their laptop screen is a wide man in a suit and Canadian flag brooch, his hands grabbing the laptop screen. Beside the laptop is a sticky note that says
    Magazine

    Doing anti-imperialist journalism while the world marches to war

    After Russia invaded Ukraine, anything other than support for sending unlimited weapons to Ukraine was painted as pro-Russian propaganda. What does anti-war journalism look like in a climate of social media harassment and state attacks?

  • A digital illustration of a ship (similar to the one on the New Brunswick Flag) sailing on an inky purple sea against a yellow sky. The sail on the ship is a newspaper copy of the NB Media Co-op.
    Magazine

    “Don’t hate the media, be the media”

    How New Brunswick’s Media Co-op is standing up to the Irvings’ corporate power

  • A collage of magazine clippings from New Breed, showing Métis people cooking, meeting, and protesting, along with headlines like
    Magazine

    Métis militancy and Saskatchewan media

    In the ’70s and ’80s, Saskatchewan’s left was chronicled by two formidable magazines: New Breed and Briarpatch. This is the story of how they made grassroots media in Saskatchewan.

  • An illustration of a gaggle of Briarpatch community members: someone wearing a sasquatch costume, people holding cameras, ice skates, a baby, a receipt, and a stack of magazines.
    Magazine

    The people’s magazine

    The funny, strange, and dogged ways that Briarpatch’s readers have helped this magazine reach its 50th anniversary

  • The covers of four archival issues of Briarpatch, against a light blue background
    Magazine

    50 years of editing Briarpatch

    Four editors reflect on decades of editing Briarpatch: what they learned, the stories that challenged them, what’s changed, and what’s stayed the same.

  • A photo of copies of Briarpatch from 2009 strewn across a wooden table. The cover of the topmost issue shows a police in riot gear looming behind a woman, with the words
    Magazine

    File rejected

    In 2009, Briarpatch’s $33,000 application to the Canada Magazine Fund was rejected, without explanation, by Stephen Harper’s Minister of Canadian Heritage. It would take an access to information request to reveal that, behind the scenes, the fund’s staff were also being stonewalled by the minister’s office. 

  • A copy of Briarpatch laying on a pink background. On the cover, it shows a cartoon-like illustration of a house with an orange roof, and a a big pink tree. In front of it is a cluster of people, representing different members of the Briarpatch community: someone wearing a sasquatch costume, people holding cameras, ice skates, a baby, a receipt, and a stack of magazines. On the cover it reads
    Magazine

    Happy 50th birthday, Briarpatch

    This issue tells the story of Briarpatch’s survival, and explores how to build better media in Canada.

  • A photo taken from bird's-eye view. In the center, copies of an alt-weekly newspaper called The Grind are fanned out. The cover of The Grind shows a person standing in a subway station and the words
    Magazine

    The case for large-scale workers’ media in Canada

    Unions, union members, and people with access to wealth need to think big about shifting the media landscape in Canada.

  • The covers or posters of four pieces of media, against a dark blue background: the book
    Magazine

    A reading list on labour’s role in a just transition

    A transition to a sustainable economy is a monumental task that will require transformative change. Whether this transition is just, democratic, and reflective of the scale of the crises we face is still to be determined.

  • A photograph of gravestones on the grounds of Huronia. The gavestones are long, thin gray stones with only a number at the top. They are set into a concrete pad close together, nestled next to each other on the ground.
    Magazine

    Class inaction

    Survivors are speaking up about the abuse they endured in Canada’s government-run institutions for disabled people. Class-action lawsuits promise them justice – but can they deliver?