Letter from the publisher

This newspaper which you are holding in your hands or reading on-line today first saw the light of print 32 year ago.

The first edition of The Caribbean Camera came off the press on June 6, 1990.

And for its founders – Editor Raynier Maharaj, Accountant Kiffayette Muhammed and Sales Manager Kamal Shah – to whom we owe an immense debt of gratitude, it was a time of  exciting challenges.

All newcomers from Trinidad, they shared a vision of providing a weekly newspaper to serve a small but growing community that was finding its feet in a new land but hungry for news from “back home.”

And The Caribbean Caribbean made sure to provide news of the latest developments in the sunny islands down South and in Guyana.

Whether you were Afro-Caribbean or Indo-Caribbean or somewhere in between, you were sure to find news of interest in the paper– whether it was the result of elections in your native country

or the latest cricket scores in a test match.

Of course, the news was not always of happy events. Over the years we have had to bring to our concerned readers the sad tidings of dreadful hurricanes and earthquakes and political upheavals.

In fact people in our community look to The Caribbean Camera to obtain more detailed information about important developments “ back home”  – information which they will not find in the mainstream Canadian newspapers.

And we are extremely proud of our record of service to our Caribbean community.

In the early days of The Caribbean Camera, most of the news in the paper was about what was happening “back home.”

While we continue to provide news about these developments, today we make sure that the many important events in our growing Caribbean community are given the coverage they deserve.

Readers will recall that over the last few weeks, we focussed a great deal of attention on the Ontario elections.

We made appeals to our readers to go out and vote and we reported about various candidates from our community who ran in the election, many of them young women.

We note with pride that many Caribbean candidates were successful at the Jun 2 polls.

The Caribbean Camera also continues to focus attention on the problem of anti-Black racism which raises its ugly head in our community.

As a Caribbean community newspaper, we realize that we have difficult tasks ahead but we are prepared to deal with them.

We must point out, however, that as a free circulating newspaper, we do need the support of our advertisers.

Like so many newspaper in Canada, big and small, we are having our share of problems.

The advent of COVID-19 has been a big blow to the newspaper industry and we are in a major battle to keep our head above water.

But we are determined to press on and we are changing with the times.

We now have a website – thecaribbeancamera.com – and we also have an e-paper with embedded links so that advertisers can be connected seamlessly and videos can be propagated into the paper and pictures can have a life of their own while adding galleries at no cost to the reader. But there’s much more work to be done.

Next month we will be launching our first internet store which will be carrying Caribbean Camera-branded merchandise – a wide variety of products from clothing to small equipment.

We are open to suggestions as to what you would like to purchase on our site.

We hope that you will benefit from the service as we attempt to increase our product line.

This year we will also be introducing our first awards program – the Caribbean Impact Awards – which will be held at the Ontario Science Centre in October.

 We look forward to your support in celebrating some of the outstanding citizens in our community who have reached the pinnacle of success in their various fields of endeavour. 

Thanks for your continued support and we look forward to serving you for many year to come.

  Afro-Caribbean, Caribbean-Impact-Awards, Indo-Caribbean