They've never been at Westercon, have they? It wouldn't be difficult to decide that Westercon is a marginal convention of little political importance. As important as it is to me, I can see that its national and international importance has dropped significantly as the convention has shrunk. (OTOH, Montreal made much better results at Westercon than at BayCon, which was five weeks earlier, in the same hotel, under substantially the same management, and had three times as many attendees.)

Mind you, the only reason Montreal had a presence at Westercon was due to having an Emergency Holographic Canadian module stored in the Bay Area. (Montreal's bid has to preserve resources for NASFiC and Worldcon themselves.) And Lisa enjoyed throwing a party for them. We just wish we could have figured out a way to actually do poutine without having to pay to replace the carpet afterwards.