• Magazine

    Dreaming of home care futures

    Without a public home-care system, disabled people are forced to choose between living in a long-term care home, medical assistance in dying, and hiring an underpaid migrant home-care worker.

  • Magazine

    MAiD in heaven

    On medical assistance in dying

  • 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.

  • Online-only

    notes of joy from the margins

    What does it mean to pass or not to pass as a trans person? I am, I am, I am. 

  • 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

    “Health is capitalism’s vulnerability”

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

  • Three black-and-white illustrations, done in pen and ink, of the three roundtable participants. Each participant is shown from the shoulders up and is slightly smiling at the camera.
    Magazine

    Roundtable on long COVID in Canada

    Three people living with long COVID discuss government responses to the pandemic, what doctors need to know, and how people can support long haulers.

  • A digital illustration showing assistive devices – a wheelchair, a cane, and a blood glucose monitor – floating against a light blue background.
    Magazine

    Care without institutions

    Four case studies of projects that are meeting disabled people’s needs through community care.

  • The cover of Briarpatch's Disability Justice Issue on a light blue background. On the cover, someone with light brown skin, who is wearing a mask and a black hoodie, is seated and looks ahead into the distance. On their right arm, just above the elbow, is a tourniquet. A person with light brown skin, curly brown hair, and a mask stands over them, inserting a needle into their arm.
    Magazine

    Disabled leadership and wisdom

    When we say we want disability justice, we don’t just mean wheelchair-accessible buildings and sign-language interpretation. We mean an end to the systems and structures that disable and debilitate us and a future where there is enough care, community, and support for everyone to thrive. 

  • Magazine

    The growing struggle to access gender-affirming health care in rural Canada

    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.

  • Online-only

    No more pandemic platitudes

    In her new COVID How-Not-To manual, Nora Loreto takes a month-by-month look at the first year of the pandemic – and the pro-business politicians and docile press that led to its mismanagement.

  • A group of disabled queer Black folks talk and laugh at a sleepover, relaxing across two large beds. Everyone is dressed in colorful t-shirts and wearing a variety of sleep scarves, bonnets, and durags. On the left, two friends sit on one bed and paint each other’s nails. On the right, four people lounge on a bed: one person braids another’s hair while the third friend wearing a C-PAP mask laughs, and the fourth person looks up from their book. In the center, a bedside lamp illuminates the room in warm light while pill bottles adorn an end table.
    Online-only

    Abolish long-term care

    We don’t need to confine elderly and disabled people to deadly and dehumanizing institutions. What if they lived in the community and received at-home care from a support worker?

  • Online-only

    Suppress The Virus Now Coalition Statement

    Canadian governments are putting corporate profits ahead of the health and well-being of our communities. We are a network of community groups, labour groups, and individuals in Ontario, standing together to demand that our elected officials explicitly adopt the humane goal of eliminating community spread of COVID-19 – centring the needs of those most impacted by the pandemic, and by the ongoing violence of the Canadian state.

  • Online-only

    Finally, New Brunswick is being sued for unlawful restrictions on abortion access

    New Brunswick’s refusal to fund clinic-based abortions is discriminatory, partisan, and simply harmful to health. A new lawsuit by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association is a last-ditch effort to lift the restriction and save a Fredericton abortion clinic.

  • Online-only

    Health care toward liberation

    Amid the twin crises of neoliberal capitalism and COVID-19, two health-care workers ask: how do we practice health care in ways that increase people’s access to freedom?

  • Online-only

    Suppress the virus now!

    The Ontario government’s idea that we need to “learn to live with” COVID-19 is murderous abandonment of vulnerable people. Instead, the left should mobilize around a clear demand: our governments must adopt aggressive suppression of COVID-19.

  • Magazine

    The labour of care

    When the pandemic took hold in March, the nature of my work as a doctor in remote communities in northern Quebec and Ontario changed drastically. The practice of medicine is defined by coping with uncertainty, but few had experienced the scope of the ambiguity through which we lurched. 

  • Sask Dispatch

    “My quality of life has been compromised”: U of S study finds STC closure has had a devastating impact on Saskatchewan people

    A new study from the University of Saskatchewan has found that the 2017 closure of STC has had wide-ranging impacts on everything from social connections to the functioning of the healthcare system itself.

  • Online-only

    Transcript of Briarpatch’s “Covid-19, Recession, & the Future” webinar

    A full transcript of Briarpatch’s webinar with David McNally, Isaac Murdoch, Nandita Sharma, John Clarke, and David Camfield on the global COVID-19 and economic crises.

  • Online-only

    Khalil Abu Yahia: Dispatch from Palestine on COVID-19

    “If you don’t put the maximum pressure on Israel to lift the siege right now, Gaza will become a graveyard.” Khalil Abu Yahia, a 24 year-old English teacher in Gaza City, reflects on life under the COVID-19 pandemic.