CBA Canada Disbands, Cancels Trade Shows

by Cindy Crosby, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 4/25/2007

After more than a quarter of a century, CBA Canada, an independent nonprofit association for Christian booksellers and suppliers, will lock its doors and dissolve its association on April 30.

"The marketplace is tired here," said executive director Marlene Coghlin, who has been with CBA Canada for a dozen years. Membership in the association is down to 186 stores from around 250 in the 1980s, she said. "We're not in a financial crisis," she said, "but it's always better to dissolve when you're not in a bad place." Still, Coghlin admits, "We essentially got pushed by our year-end financials."

CBA Canada was formerly an international regional member of CBA in the U.S. In 1978, the Canadian Christian Booksellers Association became autonomous, with about 98 member stores, headquartered in Windsor, Ontario (it relocated to Guelph, Ontario, in 1992). Like its U.S. counterpart in Colorado Springs, CBA Canada provided trade shows, professional training and development and industry forums for its membership. "The association has served its original mandate and fulfilled it to a point," Coghlin said. "We've developed an industry and our people in Canada, but we're blocked to go on."

As in the U.S., bookselling's changing times have not been kind to Christian retailers in Canada. Coghlin said online competition, especially from Amazon.com in Canada and Christian Book Distributors (www.christianbook.com), hurt the stores. As store owners got grayer, the next generation often declined to take over the family business. There also was an American flavor to most of the Christian books available that made them a difficult cross-cultural sell. It became hard for the association to even recruit board members, she said.

Coghlin said registration at their main revenue generator—the trade shows—had continued to decline, and "our suppliers were less and less satisfied with attendance." In response, the association changed to regional versus national events, but the size of Canada relative to its population presented exhibitors with extra costs for shipping and travel.

In an open letter to Christian booksellers in Canada on the www.cbacanada.com Web site, chairman of the board Lando Klassen stated that in the new century "[CBA Canada's] relevance waned somewhat…[and] we did not have the time, energy, finances or will to turn this ship around."