May 2004

在过去的一年里，新市的低收入亚裔女性一直在与镇议会进行激烈的斗争。议会一直努力关闭她们的按摩业务，声称这些工人既是不光彩的罪犯，又是性交易人口贩卖的受害者。

Mobility is not just how we get from A to B; it is about social justice and health, housing and democracy, and the climate crisis.

Designing and building cohesive, disciplined, and transformative mass movements isn’t easy. This reading list is an offering to anyone committed to that effort.

In B.C., 2021 was one of the most extreme weather years on record. Each new crisis pulled the curtain back on an ugly truth about the province’s climate adaptation strategies: they leave disabled residents behind.

Demand for gender-affirming health care is surging across the country. Already facing the brunt of a primary health care crisis, small provinces and territories struggle to meet the need.

A grassroots collective is putting forward a different vision of a Métis future – one based on reciprocity, good governance, and anti-colonialism.

In southern Ontario, Doug Ford plans to convert farmland and natural areas into suburban housing. But a coalition of farmers, environmentalists, and Indigenous activists are fighting back, and asking: “Do we need sprawl at all?”

Honeybees pollinate millions of acres of monocultured crops and produce vast amounts of honey for sale. They have become workers in the landscapes of capitalist agriculture. But they’re dying at a terrifying pace, plagued by mites, pesticides, and poor nutrition.

In some ways, winning a $15/hour minimum wage by 2024 is a truly hopeful sign for Saskatchewan politics – and shows that even the most right-wing governments will bow to movement demands. In other ways, it’s deeply inadequate. 

In Newmarket, Asian massage workers have been engaged in a battle with the town council, which is intent on shutting down their businesses by claiming that the workers are both disreputable criminals and sex trafficking victims.

the revolution will need savvy / party planners, capable / of seeing / how the carnival’s already here.

These books and films represent an unflinching critique of colonialism from a perspective where the personal and the political cannot be separated.

Envisioning a liberated Palestine means imagining liberated Palestinian women. What is a Palestinian feminist future, and how do we get there?

At the beginning of the pandemic, the Pacific Gateway and Hilton Metrotown hotels laid off their workers – then refused to hire them back. Hotel workers are fighting for their jobs, and for the future of the hotel industry after the pandemic.

From drug users in Vancouver to opium poppy growers in Mexico, activists across borders say safe and legal drugs will save lives.

The Winnipeg police union says officers are constantly under attack by everything from “gang members” to video games to bedbugs. It’s a strategy to persuade the public that the only solution is more police and more money.

More strategies for challenging patriarchal white supremacy in labour

Lessons for the climate justice movement from the University of Toronto fossil fuel divestment campaign.

Mainstream feminism’s wildest dreams involve women being represented at the top of their fields. It’s a depressingly bland and narrow dream. This issue of Briarpatch thinks bigger, asking: how can we ensure all women are safe, healthy, cared for, and free?

An interview with Chantelle Spicer and Tashia Kootenayoo on rooting our movements in consent.

Canada’s predatory lending crisis is no accident.

The archives of Canada’s security state are being strangled by secrecy, censorship, and years of delays.

An interview with Chris Dixon on doing research with social movements.

How do we avoid a world in which human creativity and knowledge becomes just another occasion for commerce?

Future worlds and survival in a changing present gripped by the Anthropocene are on everyone’s minds, and now is the time to dream and lean into what’s coming.

Nearly two years after the summer of 2020, donations and public support for Black police abolitionists on the Prairies have dried up. Meanwhile, police budgets keep growing.

If you’re like me, your path out of this prison will follow the path of grief: denial, anger, negotiation, depression. But only acceptance and behavioural modification open the Big Locked Door. The staff say you are here to get better, but you are here to mourn your illusion of sanity.

nowhere is a prison / is a psych ward / is a suicide / is a death / from ‘natural causes’ is a mass grave

Three years after leaving my family’s home and leaving the double life I was living as a closeted queer Muslim teen, I moved back. With this series, I explore how my relationship with religion, family, and my own queer identity has grown and has manifested in the atmosphere of our home.

If we could reimagine our world in order to put trans women’s well-being at its centre, maybe we could make the system more equitable and safe for all parents and children. 

In Carlyn Zwarenstein’s new book, “On Opium,” she forces us to reconsider everything we’ve ever thought about pain and opioids. Her call to action is unmistakable: policies that criminalize and dehumanize drug users will continue to drive the opioid crisis.

After revelations of rampant sexual violence and abuse in Regina’s non-profits, where can survivors turn for justice?

Police-free schools means kicking cops out, keeping them out, and much more.

In 2018 the Kaska Dena created their own hunting permit system, to protect their land and the animals that share it. In doing so, they amplified a complex dispute between the Kaska and settler governments about who has authority over the land.

In British Columbia, a little-known arm of the RCMP is dedicated to enforcing injunctions for resource extraction companies. Interviews with land defenders, a C-IRG commander, and an anonymous source reveal details about their history, training, and practices.

The fight to protect old-growth forests – one of the last few places where it’s possible to witness land before capitalism.

The theme of property – and the vision of a world no longer organized by its logic – is one that is threaded through most of the stories in this issue.

We must use as many tools as possible to fight against oppression, including – or maybe especially – rest.

Anti-gossip policies, like other ostensibly good policies, are wielded by management to keep workers from building solidarity and transforming their workplaces.

As the logic of capitalism infiltrates our social movements, we must choose between being paid for our activism and building a strong culture of social struggle.

Millions of Canada’s plastic Remembrance Day poppies have been made by prisoners and people labelled with intellectual/developmental disabilities, who are paid pennies on the hour. It’s part of a long history of prisons and institutions using poverty to control disabled and criminalized workers.

Pour mobiliser les travailleuses et travailleurs migrant∙e∙s en région rurale, il faut d’abord les trouver. La seconde étape est de réussir à desserrer l’emprise de surveillance et de peur qu’exerce leurs patrons.

The first step in organizing rural migrant workers is finding them. The second step is breaking through their bosses’ iron grip of surveillance and fear.

Union members and staff say that sexism, anti-Black racism, and other oppressive attitudes are deeply entrenched in many unions. Drawing on a history of women, trans, and racialized workers fighting for their place in the labour movement, trade unionists share ideas to transform unions today.

Canada’s sole sex worker’s union wants to organize the industry coast to coast. But with members spread out in different cities, and working for online services like OnlyFans, how much support can a union provide?

It’s time for unions to expel police from their membership, because a strong labour movement can only be built on a foundation of safety for Black and Indigenous members. 

My newsroom unionized. We were shut down two weeks later. Here’s why it was still worth it.

Where can we speak honestly about the weaknesses of the labour movement, offering constructive criticism and debating paths forward, without making the movement vulnerable to bad-faith attacks by neoliberal columnists and far-right ghouls? 

In unnaturally small prison cells, it’s common for prisoners’ eyesight to degrade due to a lack of stimulation, distance, and depth. It begs the question: which other senses does confinement diminish? To what degree? Do they come back?

How prisoners helped stop the construction of a new prison camp in Kentucky