“It’s looking increasingly unlikely that BookExpo Canada will be happening this year,” according to Scott McDonald in this report from Quill & Quire, Canada’s leading publishing industry trade magazine. McDonald says that after Friday’s report from the Globe & Mail that HarperCollins Canada and Penguin Canada were joining Random House Canada is skipping the 2009 show, other smaller publishers have started pulling out too: Scholastic Canada, H.B. Fenn and Company, and DK/Tourmaline all say they’re not going, and Fenn marketing VP Tom Best adds, “I think we’re likely seeing the end of the show.” Meanwhile, last week MacDonald also reported that The Toronto Book Fair, the newly announced fall book fair announced by BookExpo Canada’s parent company, Reed Exhibitions (see the earlier MobyLives report), was “meeting resistance.” At a meeting held to announce the event and address questions of publishers, McDonald said, “One of the most notable aspects of the meeting was the lack of major publishers present.”