___

An important element in maintaining this site's integrity is not to assume or claim what cannot be evidently shown to be true. It is also meant to avoid pitfalls of static sources, in that they must give an answer without the ability to quickly clarify/replace incorrect information when new information surfaces.

What is difficult to do in a lot of cases is demonstrably prove exactly when a set released. The US side has better sourcing, so we can triangulate the exact when/where for specific sets and designs, allowing us to have confidence in otherwise minor details. Canadian sources, on the other hand, are difficult to come across and often only highlight a few sets in the line.

So the problem you'll see below is that there are some sets under "Unknown", those are sets I know have Canadian variants, but no contemporary source as to whatever year(s) they were available. Similarly, especially with Model Makers, I suspect the line was much more diverse than this site currently reflects. However, I cannot claim a Canadian release existed without a parallel to cite. To assume would be to leave invisible cracks in the ice below us. We may stand in the correct spot through reasoning or by shear luck, but it is much more likely the entire system falls apart when something new is inevitably introduced.

In conjunction with all that above, I'm organizing these sets by their first confirmed year of release. What this means is that an earlier release is possible, but we cannot claim it blindly. So these values are able to be updated overtime and should NOT all be considered as absolute. It is up to you to evaluate each situation.

The reason we did not need a special note for the US side of things is that with more diverse sources, very little is up for debate anymore. For the Canadian side, I want to be abundantly clear to everyone about exactly how this site treats information. We'll leave the nuance and speculation to the article, where I can signpost it as such.

If you have evidence demonstrating an earlier release, please contact me at [email protected], I very much welcome corrections and new information to further our understanding. But what I will not accept are modern sources (i.e. catalog sites, hobbyist posts, etc.) that do not provide evidence for what they claim. Similarly, just because a set released in X year in the US, does not inherently deduce a similar release date in Canada. The two subsidiaries of Samsonite operated as two separate entities in regards of LEGO after production split in 1965.

That is why it is difficult to research LEGO Samsonite, but that is also why we’ve been able to derive so much new information from an otherwise stagnant field.