Ezra Levant’s ‘Western Standard’ Goes Under

Like numerous other Canadian bloggers categorized as ‘left leaning’, I too have been singled out and attacked on The Western Standard website in the past. That being said, I am very happy to announce that Ezra Levant’s magazine is no longer financially sustainable and is going out of print.

Of course, in today’s Globe & Mail, Levant denied that the magazine’s closure had anything to do with a downturn in sales. Instead he suggested that the Western Standard had generated…

“a tremendous amount of enthusiasm that we just weren’t able to turn quickly enough into an economic concern.”

So either Levant is employing lame rhetoric to detract from the fact that the magazine’s readership was extremely low, or he’s admitting that he’s just a shitty publisher.

Let’s face it, it’s not as if it was the New Yorker, Harpers, or any other magazine of lasting repute. They tend to stick around for a good reason, primarily because they’re actually good. The Nation, which began as an abolitionist publication, has been around since 1865 (the oldest continually published weekly in US history), and for good reason – it actually includes articles by highly respected intellectuals and journalists that produce coherent and well thought out pieces. Of course, many label it a ‘leftist’ magazine, but given that it outsells The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, and the National Review, I would assume that it’s doing something right.

Levant claims that the closure of The Western Standard doesn’t reflect a downturn in conservatism in Canada, only that the state of print media is tumultuous. Personally, I never found it to be a traditionally conservative magazine, only a rag that, without the existence of the post 9/11 fear state, would never have existed in the first place. It was, in truth, a Canadian print version of Fox News in many ways – loud and empty.