There’s nothing “free” about free trade: a reading list – Briarpatch Magazine
Simplifying the debate over free trade to a focus on “Canada-only” overlooks the opportunity to further international worker solidarity| briarpatchmagazine.com
Mirabel Sirois On February 14, 2025, Queer Yukon Society (QYS) signed its first collective agreement. As an organization that promotes, supports, and organizes events for the 2SLGBTQIA+ community in the Yukon, it was important for QYS workers, along with their union, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) and its component, the Yukon Employees’ Union (YEU) to fight for some immense wins such as sick leave for gender-affirming care, Indigenous-led alternative dispute resolution, and th...| Briarpatch
Photojournalist Salama Nabil Younis relies on his phone for work since his camera and laptop were destroyed in airstrike. Photo courtesy of Younis. “A working day in Gaza for a journalist feels like waiting to be executed on the gallows.” This is how 27-year-old photojournalist Salama Nabil Younis describes the brutal reality he faces each day. For front-line journalists like him, reporting from Gaza isn’t just a professional challenge – it’s a psychological, emotional, and existent...| Briarpatch
The shimmer of nuclear power seems to be growing brighter of late, ensnaring even those on the left. The Canadian Nuclear Workers Council, invited to present by the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour (SFL) to present at their 2024 convention, extolled the virtues of nuclear; Jacobin Magazine has been moving over to an increasingly pro-nuclear stance within its pages; and Marxist geographer Matthew Huber argues that support for nuclear electricity generation should be a cornerstone of left-wing...| Briarpatch
Late 2024 saw two political records broken in Nova Scotia’s provincial election: the lowest turnout of eligible voters in the province’s history and the Progressive Conservative (PC) party winning its highest number of ridings. The party’s platform – which preached health-care reform and addressed the cost of living while centring business interests, the importance of family, and the need to reduce taxes – made no mention of universities. So when the supermajority introduced legisl...| Briarpatch
Simplifying the debate over free trade to a focus on “Canada-only” overlooks the opportunity to further international worker solidarity| briarpatchmagazine.com
Since 1973, Briarpatch has been serving up regular doses of news and analysis from its home in Regina, Saskatchewan. Believing that a truly free press is essential to the creation of a truly democratic society, Briarpatch provides a thoughtful, principled, and irreverent alternative to the false consensus of the corporate media.| briarpatchmagazine.com
Since 1973, Briarpatch has been serving up regular doses of news and analysis from its home in Regina, Saskatchewan. Believing that a truly free press is essential to the creation of a truly democratic society, Briarpatch provides a thoughtful, principled, and irreverent alternative to the false consensus of the corporate media.| briarpatchmagazine.com
Degrowth advocacy needs to meaningfully engage existing labour movements to avoid perpetuating policies of austerity| briarpatchmagazine.com
Cover illustration by Ibrahim Abusitta “Speak up for us and don’t let us down. We are not numbers [...] each of us has a sacrifice and a story,” writes Salama Nabil Younis, a freelance photojournalist in Gaza, in an Instagram tribute to four journalists killed by Israel in late August 2025. Those four journalists – Hussam al-Masri, Mariam Abu Dagga, Moaz Abu Taha, and Mohammed Salama – were killed by Israeli forces on August 25, as were Middle East Eye reporter Ahmed Abu Aziz and Al...| Briarpatch
The CCGS Amundsen is Canada’s only icebreaker dedicated to research. The field school participants were part of the second half of its last leg back from Resolute Bay to Quebec City last fall. Photo by Meral Jamal. The last day we are all together is a quiet one. It is late October along the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. The Torngat Mountains are around us, Ungava Bay firmly behind, and the captain of the Canadian Coast Guard Ship (CCGS) Amundsen has just announced we will be arriving...| Briarpatch
Dozens of cultural workers at the launch of No Arms in the Arts in front of Hot Docs Cinema on Bloor Street. Photo by Yuula Benivolski. On March 26, 2024, Scotiabank-sponsored Hot Docs announced its slate of festival programming to a crowd of media and industry regulars. As the scheduled remarks came to a close, dozens of artists, filmmakers, writers, and cultural workers took over the street outside the Bloor Street cinema. In front of a backdrop featuring a pattern of bloody Scotiabank logo...| Briarpatch
Matheus Cenali/Pexels I have in my mind the memory of one Christmas Eve. Thick snowflakes were coming down and the sun was starting to set. I was running around getting last-minute items on Avenue Cartier, a street dominated by restaurants and bars, in Quebec City’s Montcalm. There was a group of carollers singing Ça berger outside of my favourite grocery store, Provisions Inc. Provisions Inc. always dressed up for the season, that year covered in soft yellow lights and adorned with ever...| Briarpatch
In May 2025, the night before Toronto city council voted in a “protest bubble” bylaw, two Israeli Embassy staff members were murdered coming out of the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. The shooting and the bylaw came on the heels of several gun incidents around Toronto since Israel’s relentless bombing campaign and genocide began in response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. According to Zionist organizations like B’nai Brith and Hillel, Jew hatred is on the rise and re...| Briarpatch
Photo by Fight for Farmland “We’re not just losing farms, we’re literally stabbing a stake in the heart of the most productive farmland in the country,” says Kevin Thomason, an advocate for Fight for Farmland, a group resisting a large-scale agricultural expropriation in the Township of Wilmot. In March 2024, owners of six farmland properties and six residential homes in Wilmot Township received knocks on their doors. Canacre, a consulting firm with offices in the U.S. and Canada, ...| Briarpatch
These three photographs respond to the past and present reality of land loss in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I took these pictures in Ein Samiya, near the village of Kufr Malik. The area was inhabited by Arab Al Kaa’bneh, who had set up Madareb (enclosures) in that area to sustain their livelihood near the spring, or the Ein. The village no longer exists. The last two Palestinian families were forcibly evicted from there in May of 2023 as part of the Israeli expropriation of Palest...| Briarpatch
Tamil-Canadian settlerhood and the politics of remembrance Illustration by Sindu Sivayogam We arrive in Mullivaikkal as the sun peaks. My bare feet sink into hot sand that is peppered with the remnants of the livelihoods of the people whose blood soaked this Earth. Here, I find ghosts: the chatter of people who look like me, the outlines of bodies crouched under blue tarp shelters, and the smell of rice and water. The air here is soaked in anguish and grief; it is drenched in longing. Here, I...| Briarpatch
Since 2020, Distro Disco Mobile Free Store has been distributing survival supplies to neighbours in need living in so-called Vancouver, B.C. Inspiring their community to contribute to monthly donation drives and fundraisers, Distro Disco distributes three times monthly with the help of 20+ rotating volunteers. Redistribution of wealth and resources is at the heart of community care and an action that you can make happen wherever you are. The following guide provides some low-cost and actiona...| Briarpatch
We have seen the global escalation of fascism with Donald Trump (U.S.), Narendra Modi (India), Benjamin Netanyahu (Israel), Viktor Orbán (Hungary), and Giorgia Meloni (Italy) in power. Their rise, and the fervour of accompanying anti-migrant and anti-trans violence, has animated discussions about fascism. Liberals use “fascism” to identify uniquely authoritarian politicians – exceptions to the status quo neoliberal order. In contrast, these books highlight how fascism is a consistent...| Briarpatch
Collaged image made with photos by Praveen Kumar Nandagiri (Canadian flag) and Markus Spiske (barbed wire) on Unsplash Within faint memories, I hear my joy intertwining with that of my childhood friend, W.’s, transcending colonial regimes and borderlands. I fondly remember the sun and the swings holding our tiny bodies as we swayed freely in the air. I achingly remember the day I saw a picture of him and his sister – his face emotionally hollowed – on the front page of a newspaper. He a...| Briarpatch
Inspired by the Black Panther Party's rainbow coalition, the former Hampton Hub was a community space of radical possibility. Photos provided by Tiro and Thabo Mthembu. A few short weeks after his speech at a Regina campus, Fred Hampton was assassinated in his home by Chicago police. While the visit of the deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) left its mark on Regina in 1969, over 50 years later, his memory was mobilized by brothers Tiro and Thabo Mthembu ...| Briarpatch
A workshop for parents on antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism co-facilitated by Toronto Palestinian Families and Toronto Jewish Families. Photo provided by Iman Annab and Ben Losman. Over the span of two evenings in mid-February, Palestinian, Jewish, and allied community members fighting for equity and fairness within the Toronto school system came out in full force to a Toronto District School Board (TDSB) planning and priorities committee meeting. Their goal? To respond to a concernin...| Briarpatch
Illustration by Kumé Pather. At the onset of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in October 2023 – a Hamas operation that broke the siege on Gaza with the goal of attacking Zionist military troops, taking 250 individuals as captives within the Gaza strip – we quickly understood that this war was going to be unlike the last major war in recent memory: the invasion of the Gaza strip in 2014 which killed 2,251 Palestinians. While reminiscent of previous wars on Gaza and southern Lebanon in the past few...| Briarpatch
Writing in the Margins 2024 poetry honourable mention| briarpatchmagazine.com
Since 1973, Briarpatch has been serving up regular doses of news and analysis from its home in Regina, Saskatchewan. Believing that a truly free press is essential to the creation of a truly democratic society, Briarpatch provides a thoughtful, principled, and irreverent alternative to the false consensus of the corporate media.| briarpatchmagazine.com
An interview with Ameil Joseph about the history and present of Canada’s discriminatory treatment of disabled migrants| briarpatchmagazine.com
Canada’s support for Israel has taken many forms, but perhaps its greatest gift has been its example – As both Canada and Israel come under increasing scrutiny on the world stage for their crimes against Indigenous peoples, their fates are increasingly bound together.| briarpatchmagazine.com
