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Oct 31, 2024 | 
briarpatchmagazine.com | Simran Dhunna
Just over a year ago, Live Freely Foods (LFF), a prominent industrial bakery in Mississauga employing over 50 workers, shut down its operations without warning. Several days later the workers found a notice taped to the factory’s front door: their employer had filed for bankruptcy. The workers lost not only their jobs but also thousands of dollars each in unpaid wages.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
briarpatchmagazine.com | Tara Alami
In 2020, CBC Radio One host Duncan McCue publicly apologized for referring to Palestine as “Palestine” while interviewing Joe Sacco about his book Paying the Land.
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Jul 26, 2024 | 
briarpatchmagazine.com | Anna Lippman
For anti-Zionist Jews, particularly white, Ashkenazi ones like myself, it feels like an important duty to bring our community along in understanding the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Yet in my experience, it’s members of my own Jewish community who are among the most virulent and violent in their opposition to my political views. In these conversations, mustering compassion and understanding through my own Zionist upbringing doesn’t (ever) become easy.
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Jul 24, 2024 | 
briarpatchmagazine.com | Megan Linton
My neighbour's fire alarm went off before mine. I slept like a corpse as the alarms blared and flames roared through the windows of my apartment. I think I woke up briefly to firefighters trying to get into my apartment, but the memory is hazy.
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Jul 24, 2024 | 
briarpatchmagazine.com | Phoebe Fuller
Stepping down from the bus on a usually quiet North Vancouver street, Stephanie Wilson can hear her destination before she can see it. A chorus of cheers and blaring horns beckon her downhill, where the road bends to reveal the gridlocked Trans-Canada Highway below. It’s May 11, 2023, and every Thursday for the past 10 months, a group of protesters has gathered on the Mountain Highway overpass above the Trans-Canada, holding banners and signs in perfect view of the crawling rush-hour traffic.
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Jul 22, 2024 | 
briarpatchmagazine.com | Owen Schalk
“We felt like we put the knife in our own backs.”Kateri Saabe Ikwe Phillips is a high-school teacher at Hollow Water First Nation, on the southeast side of Lake Winnipeg. She is also a member of Camp Morning Star, a camp set up in February 2019 to stop the mining of silica sands by Alberta-based company Canadian Premium Sand (CPS). The camp was established on a road leading to the initial planned site of CPS’s Wanipigow Sand project – wanipigow being the Ojibwe word for Hollow Water.
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Jul 2, 2024 | 
briarpatchmagazine.com | marco muller
I took this photo in early June 2021 in Tkaronto, colonially known as Toronto, after the “Bring our children home” march. Canada had discovered 215 unmarked graves on the grounds of a previous residential school near Kamloops, B.C., but this wasn’t news to Indigenous people. Shortly after the march, the jingle dancer started dancing in front of architect of residential schools Egerton Ryerson’s statue, defying his legacy.
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Jun 27, 2024 | 
briarpatchmagazine.com | Emma Arkell
Catherine Dubé noticed something strange on the first day of picketing Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) Surrey campus: two men in plainclothes watching, taking pictures, and filming picketers. The following week, twice as many men showed up. Picketers speculated that the men worked for the mall next to SFU’s Surrey campus, but when they saw the same men at a picket on the Burnaby campus, that theory fell apart.
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Jun 17, 2024 | 
briarpatchmagazine.com | Adam King
After three longs weeks on strike, Jane* began to worry that the mood on her picket line was darkening. As a member of the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union (MGEU) and co-captain of her picket line, she has long prided herself on being “good at keeping up morale,” she says. But her employer, Manitoba Public Insurance (MPI), was refusing to meaningfully respond to the union’s wage demands and her colleagues at the rural MPI service centre were growing weary.
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Feb 2, 2024 | 
briarpatchmagazine.com | Fitsum Areguy
On March 5, 2023, activists gathered inside the Metro Toronto Convention Centre holding banners rippling with messages: “WATER IS LIFE #Wet’suwet’enStrong,” “LIFE OVER PROFIT.” Entrances were obstructed by long rolls of blue cloth painted with fish. This action, orchestrated by Mining Injustice Solidarity Network (MISN), took place at the world’s largest annual mining event: the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) convention.