It was a scene no one wants to encounter when they walk into work.
On Tuesday morning, the majority of Canpages employees in Burnaby were laid off, with a skeleton crew of employees kept on to close up shop, according to an anonymous source - someone in management who asked not to be named as he was still negotiating his severance package.
"About 7:30 a.m., security guards came to the front door, and I noticed some people came in crying," he said. "We had noticed some weird things going on even in the last few weeks, and on Monday a few of us were chatting, 'Hey, what's going on?'"
At 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, the employees were gathered for a meeting. Most of the sales department was let go, with some top performers offered positions with Yellow Media. The entire marketing department was let go and almost all of customer support, finance and operations, he said.
A skeleton crew was kept on to put out a couple of phone books that are about to go out, he added, and some IT workers were kept on for the next couple of months.
"Other than that, Canpages as a company is shut down," he said.
He added it was especially unfortunate as Canpages was about to launch a rebranding campaign in the next couple of weeks, and was redesigning its website.
Kurtis Wallis, who identified himself as a sales associate at the Burnaby Canpages office, emailed the NOW stating that he had lost his position at 9:31 a.m. on Tuesday.
Media reports that Canpages was shutting down surfaced after 50 employees at the Central Saanich office arrived at work on Tuesday morning to find the doors locked, with a sign on the door referring them to Yellow Media's head office in Montreal, according to The Vancouver Sun and the Victoria Times Colonist.
Yellow Media bought Burnaby-based Canpages for $225 million about two years ago. On Wednesday, it announced that it was closing eight offices in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario.
Employees at the Burnaby office directed media to call Yellow Media for comment. Yellow Media did not respond to multiple interview requests from the Burnaby NOW before press time.
However, company spokeswoman AnneSophie Roy spoke with The Vancouver Sun by phone on Tuesday and said Canpages is not being shut down, it is being integrated into the Yellow Pages Group.
Canpages.ca will continue to exist, but with a different focus than the Yellow Pages website, she said.
It doesn't make sense for both Canpages and Yellow Pages to produce phone books and compete for advertising dollars in the same cities, Roy pointed out, adding the majority of markets will only have one combined phone book in 2012.
Yellow Media's Yellow Pages Group publishes phone directories in B.C., Alberta, Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Ontario and Quebec. Canpages publishes directories in B.C., Alberta and Ontario and has an online phone number search service, and phone directory applications for smart phones, as well.
Roy would not say how many employees Canpages had, or how many were let go, but said that some were being moved into positions with Yellow Media.
