May/June 2020

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.

In February, in the midst of solidarity protests against the RCMP’s invasion of Wet’suwet’en territory, I created a Google Doc: “How to explain what’s happening to the Wet’suwet’en people in Chinese.” The long history of grassroots translation work shows that it is one of our strongest tools to build solidarity against white supremacy.

In Guatemala, traditional Indigenous governments are battling municipalities and transnational corporations for control of their land

The massive fraud at The Pas is a modest entry in the annals of Canadian racial capitalism. In light of the town’s history of Cree and Métis political action, it could be said that a quarter-billion dollars were stolen out of the mouths of children, from over the heads of families, from people seeking meaningful work in the prime of life.

The Democratic Socialists of America Canada Twitter account was fake – but its popularity was not. What’s the power of socialist branding to shape a movement?

Today, Tamil people are Toronto’s working class as well as, increasingly, its elite – but behind the Canadian Tamil community’s historic struggles and resistance lies the fact that most of us arrived in Toronto fleeing a genocide

“A Planet to Win” does not call for a utopian adoption of yet-to-be-invented technologies to fix things, but contends that we can build using the technology we have now to both address people’s real needs and decarbonize.

Free speech isn’t a cause the left can afford to leave to liberals or the right. And when “no platform” is called for, we shouldn’t appeal to authorities to do it.