Briarpatch Articles

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Organizing prisoner workers is the first step toward abolishing prisons.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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. 

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

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

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.