Tag: Health

On medical assistance in dying

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

When Canada boasted about its foreign aid while repeatedly blocking a proposal to waive the intellectual property rights to the COVID vaccines, it revealed a 150-year-old pattern of empty generosity.

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

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.

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?

Briarpatch began 49 years ago as a four-page newsletter produced by and for low-income earners, welfare recipients, and the unemployed. Today, as so many of my friends lose their jobs or have their shifts halved during the COVID-19 pandemic, I can see clearly the thread that connects Briarpatch to its origins half a century ago.

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.

Across the country, governments are giving police heightened powers during the pandemic. But as I’ve seen in my home of Kitchener-Waterloo, when police embed themselves in poor and racialized communities, they may simply decide not to leave.

Briarpatch hosted a discussion between David McNally, Isaac Murdoch, Nandita Sharma, John Clarke, and David Camfield on the global COVID-19 and economic crises. Here are the key take-aways.

“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.

“We don’t have the capacity or equipment to keep us safe from this virus. It will spread very easily, and we will start to see the numbers here that we’ve been seeing in Italy and Spain.” Asmaa Tayeh, living in the Jabalia Refugee Camp in the north of the Gaza strip, reflects on life under the COVID-19 pandemic.

Saskatchewan’s freezing evictions and Trudeau’s promising $2,000 to laid-off workers. But activists are calling for cancelling rent and more protections for workers.

The coronavirus outbreak has sparked a rise in anti-Chinese racism. What are the historical roots of this response, and how might we confront it in Canada?

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?

Part two of Ryan Meili’s conversation with Gabor Maté.

Two physicians discuss the political economy of human well-being.

The fitness industry and the obesity panic are two sides of the same coin, both signs of a serious contempt for the body – at least in its natural state.

This is the kind of place where Ashley Smith died in 2007. It is also the kind of place where Julie Bilotta gave birth on a cement floor last year.

“It’s going to be very painful without the anaesthetic in your toe.” My face twists in anticipation. “Maybe we could give you something to relax a little, send you off to sleep.”