March 21, 2025
Letter to CPIA Membership and Partner Organizations: 2024 Year End Report
It is our pleasure to provide you with an update of your national association activities in 2024 and to date in 2025. Our Board, Committees and Advisory Groups continue to play an important role in making our association a vibrant and sustaining entity within the Canadian marketplace.
Our mission is to provide a national voice and platform for our industry and a connection point for regional associations, sector associations and print-focused post-secondary educational programs.
In order to fulfill our mission, the association has initiated the following activities:
· Your Board composed of volunteers continues to meet regularly to review progress to date and to plan future association activities. Your board met 11 times in 2024. We made changes to our by-laws to allow more inclusion and hoping to attract new members. Through our Nominating committee we are conducting a search to fill the roles of Vice-Chair, Secretary Treasurer and Association Manager’s position.
· Our 5 standing committees continue their hard work:
1. The Government Affairs Committee under the leadership of Clinton Foss (APIA) expanded the number of committee members. The group prepared a letter writing campaign addressed to Federal Government Ministers and other members of Parliament requesting expanded dialogue on issues of concern to the printing industry. The Government Affairs group also wrote to both the Government and the Canada Post Executive expressing our concerns over the impacts of the Canada Post strike at the end of 2024. Since that time, we have requested information on next steps that the Canadian government will be taking to avoid work disruptions at Canada Post moving forward.
2. Our Education Committee continued to expand our partnerships with post-secondary graphic-arts programs in Canada with the addition of Saskatchewan Polytechnic to our advisory group. The committee is presently looking into the Learn 2 Print program a provider of training programs in the printing and graphics industry. Our intent is to help in the development and deployment of a national trades’ certification program.
3. Our Supplier Committee continued its work at expanding the CPIA Supplier Partner Program which aims to support your association through the sharing of resources and ongoing educational events. We ended the 2024 year with 28 supplier partners. We continue to work with our Supplier Advisory Group composed of representatives from Spicers, Domtar and Heidelberg. We are pleased to report that the vast majority of Supplier Partners have renewed their membership in the past year and we are very appreciative of their ongoing support.
4. Our Communication and Events Committee organized a highly successful virtual event called: Technology Trends Roundtable. In this virtual Pannel discussion, the CPIA engaged Canadian print leaders on which technologies stood out from their visit to Drupa 2024 and which they plan to invest in 2025. The event panelists included representatives from Marquis, Hemlock, Godin Productions, Friesens, Cober and Ikon Digital. The committee is presently hard at work organizing our next event on Tariffs Impacts on the Canadian Printing Industries which will be held in April 2025.
5. Our Printer Advisory Committee, formed in 2023, is a group composed of printers from various sectors of the printing community. This group meets quarterly to advise the CPIA on possible activities and events of interest to the industry.
· We have updated our website with a dedicated page to supplier initiatives of interest to our many stakeholders. We encourage our partners to make use of this dedicated page. We also have begun sharing CPIA event information on our recently relaunched CPIA LinkedIn page.
· The CPIA in cooperation with Connecting for Results conducted a national survey on the state of our industry, highlights of which was published industry wide by Print Action Magazine.
· We will be participating in the Graphics Canada Expo being held in April in Toronto. The show will give us the opportunity to meet a number of printers from across the country and to dialogue with a number of suppliers.
We intend to continue to develop programs that provide value to our regional associations members as well as partner organizations. We thank our regional associations, supplier and educational partners for their continued support.
Sincerely,
|
Gerry Lacombe glacombe@cpia-aci.ca |
Richard Kouwenhoven 604-439-5102 |