Sale of legal mags sends titles out of GTA

The Cartwright Group’s sale of Canadian Law Book to largely foreign-controlled Thomson Reuters constitutes a “major shakeup” in the magazine industry, D.B. Scott reports on his Canadian Magazines blog.

Scott writes:

“[Former judge Ian] Cartwright, who believed that Canadian legal data should be controlled in Canada, bought Canada Law Book
more than 25 years ago to keep it out of the hands of a
foreign-controlled buyer. (Ironically, that is precisely what is
happening now in the deal with Thomson Reuters, largely owned outside of
Canada.)”

Scott adds that the Cartwrights have donated portions of the company’s profits to charities like the Sick Children’s Hospital Foundation, and non-charity organizations like the Association in the Defence of the Wrongly Convicted. The 75-year-old Cartwright has said that, now that the sale has happened, he wants to make a “significant and meaningful donation” to charity.

Scott writes:

“The decision to sell the remaining b2b titles to Annex Publishing and Printing significantly changes the magazine landscape, essentially removing a major competitor and consolidating those titles in a much bigger company, based outside of the GTA. Annex is based in Simcoe and started out as a publisher of community newspapers but has been steadily launching and acquiring small-scale niche titles for many years”