Amy Reiswig

The allegorical figure of Justice, with her scales and sword, was first blindfolded in the sixteenth century, and today she is seen as an embodiment of impartiality: a weighing of evidence and arguments that is unmuddied by prejudice. But some detect a much less noble reason for Justice’s covered eyes: they represent the system’s blindness to abuses right under its…

In its 2002–03 annual report, the Security Intelligence Review Committee first acknowledged that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had “reorganized its operational structure” and begun to “deploy resources in novel ways,” including through “relationships with organizations not subject to the Committee’s review.” Documents in subsequent years referred to (equally vague) “non-traditional partners” and the need to manage “relations with the private sector.” What this all…

A page on the National Housing Strategy’s website begins, “There is no place like home.” It’s a cozy-sounding, feel-good line — a glib reference to a ruby-slippered fiction full of magic and happy endings that highlights the divide between those tasked with creating solutions to homelessness and those who need them. The same could be said about public health messaging in the early days of the pandemic: Stay…

Prisoner. Convict. Inmate. Criminal. What’s often missed in this list of terms for incarcerated people — by unconscious habit or deliberate choice — is the foundational truth underpinning everything else: human being. Labels work like walls; they can obscure, separate, and silence. And as with physical barriers, efforts must be made if we want to get around…

When the sun and the wind play together just right, the hill of young cedar and Douglas fir behind my house looks alive with green fire. It’s almost impossible to imagine this place without trees, yet even my small island in British Columbia’s Salish Sea was extensively logged in the first half of the twentieth…