Human Rights Advocate folds
Periodical profile published 1991

Year Published:  1991
Resource Type:  Serial Publication (Periodical)
Cx Number:  CX4200

Abstract: 
The Canadian Human Rights Advocate, which has provided invaluable background information and analysis of a wide variety of human rights issues in Canada, is shutting down. Publisher Charles Walden says that many of the Advocate's 1,200 subscribers are small community-based organizations which have been severely hit by government funding cutbacks. Many have shut their doors, many others have had to cut back on expenses even as modest as a subscription fee. Simultaneously, the Advocate itself, like other Canadian publications, is faced with substantial cost increases in the form of the GST and a big hike in postal rates. The Advocate notes that "The Mulroney government's policies to cut the postal subsidy for Canadian publications and then to tax reading are policies that threaten Canadian publications and Canadian cultural existence. They are policies that discriminate by having their harshest impact on the most oppressed and disadvantaged in our society. Native publications, that helped expose hidden-away abuses like the crime against Donald Marshall, and women's publications have been directly attacked by the Mulroney government and many have close down. The postal subsidy removal and the GST tax on reading is, as George Woodcock says, a 'non-too-subtle form of censorship' on those that remain."