Consider the magazine you are now holding. At one level, it is a product: ink applied to paper. Yet the reasons for which you value this magazine have nothing to do with either ink or paper. You're reading these pages for the images, the messages, the ideas.
It is particularly important to you because, like you, it's Canadian.
Why the need our magazines
-They're produced (written, edited, photographed, illustrated) by Canadians, and thus carry information about us and present our point of view.
-They reflect what we are interested in, preserving and encouraging our own unique values, the way we look at ourselves, the way AT look at the world.
-They help us create the stars, the legends the need. Canadian magazines foster our own sense of ourselves.
-They present the best of the literature, prose and poetry that we produce.
-They express the regional differences that distinguish us from one another, and the national pride and purpose that link us together.
-They tie us together with a ribbon of print, and help us define who we are.
-They give us a vital voice of our own.

We've got our own excellence
A Canadian magazine is something special. It adds a journalistic dimension that no other medium can provide depth and wholeness and texture, plus the visual impact of graphic design. Because a magazine is free from daily deadlines, it can achieve a level of thoroughness and excellence that is seldom attainable in other media.
How the governments of Canada helped
To assure Canadians the information a free and independent people need (given our small, spread-out population and powerful foreign competition), successive governments over the past century have gradually built a structure of postal, tariff and tax related incentives and supportive measures.
And they have worked Today Canada has a healthier magazine industry than ever before, with some 5,000 periodicals for people of every interest and location.
But it's a fragile industry: At last count more than half of Canada's periodicals had circulations of fewer than 2,000 copies per issue, and only 110 periodicals had circulations of 100,000 or more per issue. Foreign publications still account for 77% of all English-language newsstand sales.
The threat to your magazine
The Government in Ottawa is now threatening to treat Canada's magazines as if they were so many widgets. It's threatening to eliminate the postal, tariff and tax related incentives and supportive measures ...to dismantle the very structure that past governments have worked so hard to build and maintain.
The Government in Ottawa is threatening the survival of the majority of Canada's magazines and considering measures that will significantly raise the cost to readers of those that survive.
Canada's magazines tell us about ourselves. They're a voice of our own. If the current Government in Ottawa were to treat Canada's magazines as if they were just another product, it would diminish (or even silence) that voice forever.