We have notified & refunded our attendees, and chatted with the speakers. Now we can let everyone else know:
The SEM Canada Conference has been postponed until October of next year for the following reasons:
1. We are in final talks with a new corporate sponsor who will enable us to really make the SEM Canada series [...]

This year has already resulted in numerous shifts in the search marketing space as we know it:
Trends From an Investors Perspective

Microsoft bid for Yahoo!, then withdrew the offer and Yahoo!’s shares dropped nearly 20%
Google and Yahoo! are still skirting around a search advertising partnership
Ask withdrew from main stream search to focus on women searchers
Google’s search [...]