Catching up on MediaPolicy – journalism subsidies for news broadcasters ? – Australia lowers price on Big Tech news levy – Age verification bill tabled in House of Commons

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May 2, 2026

On Wednesday I posted about the new report written by Senator Andrew Cardozo and myself on the future of subsidies for news journalism. 

One of the not so surprising options we propose is to extend the federal QCJO  journalism labour tax credits to news websites operated by broadcasting companies. The Québec provincial government did it in March with their labour tax credit that parallels the federal QCJO.

Entirely by an accident of timing (promise!), on Tuesday the Carney government announced a public consultation proposing to extend QCJO labour tax credits to “audio and audio visual news production,” which is not quite the same thing as digital news websites operated by broadcasting companies, but close enough. 

Law professor Michael Geist was out of the gate fast opposing public journalism subsidies being paid to major broadcasters, in particular the three owned by telco pantomime villains Bell, Rogers and Québecor. It’s fair to say, Geist won’t be alone on this. 

I have a long winded rebuttal which I will save for later. 

***

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The Australian government has taken the next step in responding to Meta’s refusal in March 2024 to reboot news licensing agreements under the News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC). The 2021 NMBC legislation was the prototype for Canada’s Online News Act.

To counter Meta’s exit from news licensing agreements, the Australian government announced in December 2024 that it would replace the NMBC with a News Bargaining Incentive (NBI). The key provision in the proposed NBI is a default cash levy on Meta, even if it tries to elude payments by banning local news. The NBI news levy would be reduced by any licensing deals struck between tech platforms and news outlets. It also would extend the levy net to catch TikTok, in addition to Meta and Google.

The calendar months have flipped by and it was not until this week that the Australian government at last announced the next step for the NBI, a public consultation.

The most newsworthy item in the announcement was the proposed price point for the cash levy: 2.25% of a company’s Australian revenues.

At first glance, that number suggests a climb down from an old levy rate of 4% of revenues that in 2021 generated $190 million in annual licensing payments by Google and Meta. The de facto 4% figure was identified by reverse calculation back in September 2023 by Canadian officials commenting on the monetary value of the 2021 Australian deals with Google and Meta.

Canadian officials said at the time that applying the Australian 4% target under our Online News Act would mean Canadian outcomes of $172 million from Google and $62 million from Meta. When Ottawa finally settled in December 2023 with Google for $100 million instead of $172 million, that converted the Canadian 4% into 2.32%.

Which is awfully close to the 2.25% proposed now by the Australian government.

But the lower Australian levy rate is still intended to produce the same $190 million contribution outcomes from 2021 because the legislation adds TikTok revenues and reflects the growth of Google and Meta revenues in the last five years.

Back in Canada, it’s unclear what Ottawa is going to do about the Meta ban on mainstream news (going forward I am calling it “Meta’s mainstream media ban” as it’s now clear that Meta permits certain Canadian news outlets to post on Facebook and Instagram provided these outlets sign off that they are not, or would not be eligible for federal QCJO labour tax credits or a share of the $100 million in Google money under the Online News Act. Effectively, this means the Meta news ban on Facebook and Instagram targets mainstream Canadian news organizations who produce original news).

This selective news ban gives the peripheral news organizations —whether they behave as honest news outlets or political activists — a leg up on mainstream media in the quest for audience. 

The policy boomerang that smacks mainstream media in the mug, whether you blame Meta or the legislators of the Online News Act for the ban, results in the loss of audience exposure and click-through referrals to news websites.

But there are self-help strategies.

On this, Torstar President Angus Frame appeared before the parliamentary Heritage committee on April 23rd and offered some interesting information. 

In the course of testimony about Big Tech in Canada, Frame said that since Meta imposed the news ban in August 2023 the Torstar chain of dailies and community weeklies has neutralized the loss of referral traffic.

I asked how and his answer, about leaning into web traffic generated by Google Discover and e-mail distribution strategies, is succinct enough to quote in its entirety:

There are always a bunch of variables in the mix, but the simple story looks like this:

In July 2023 (the month before Meta pulled out of news in Canada) our community sites generated 1.6M page views from Facebook referrals. This was typical for the first half of 2023 though the number had been declining since about 2018.

In July 2023 we generated 550K page views from newsletter click-throughs (people visiting from our own newsletters). We had 5.2M page views from Google.

Last month we had 1.55M page views from our newsletters, which almost completely replaces the views lost to Facebook. Google referrals were at 5.1M.

So the way that all came together is this:

-With the Meta ban, we shifted focus to optimizing for Google and in particular Google Discover. This gave us a good recovery heading into 2024 but it has since declined a bit with some reductions in Google traffic.

-Once Google was in better shape, we started to emphasize newsletter growth and newsletter effectiveness. This involved a number of tactics to get more people to sign up for our newsletters, to make sure our newsletters were landing in people’s inboxes properly and to optimize the newsletters (both design and story selection) for the best possible click-through rate. And that gets us to where we are today with newsletter traffic almost completely replacing the lost Facebook traffic. 

And the newsletter traffic is better for us — we have a direct relationship with that audience, they come back to us more frequently and we can continue to grow that audience channel without worrying about algorithm changes or other things that can disrupt the strategy.

***

The Senate Bill S-209 that would introduce age verification to block underage access to porn sites and porn on social media apps has now made its way into the House of Commons.

The Opposition Conservatives always supported S-209 and Saskatchewan MP Rosemarie Falk tabled it in the House for first reading on Thursday.

Now that the Liberals have a majority in the House, don’t expect the bill to get far, even if they find themselves on the wrong side of public opinion on this one.

The door isn’t completely shut. Heritage minister Marc Miller was quoted in the Globe and Mail as saying S-209 “has merit,” the opposite of what the Trudeau PMO used to say.

But Miller appeared to pour cold water on the bill anyway, simultaneously saying that age verification would not be in a Liberal online harms bill while referring the issue, along with the idea of a blanket age ban on social media, to his expert advisory committee.

As part of the debate over child safety and social media, expect the troubling privacy and compliance issues to keep bubbling up to the surface.

There are anecdotal reports of Australian teenagers circumventing the new social media ban in that country.

As well, the technical issues of privacy breaches keep arising, as they just did in Europe. The hacking of adult viewers’ age verification data is a problem that gets bigger depending on where the digital gatekeeping of age verification happens, from the narrow access to online porn sites to universally accessed social media or device operating system sign-ins.

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Here’s a few things to read that follow up on issues followed in MediaPolicy:

The Paramount sneeze and the Canadian cold: The possibility that a soon-to-be- sanctioned merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery will sideswipe Bell Media, by cancelling HBO’s exclusive Canadian distribution through Crave, is further off in the future than previously thought. The Globe & Mail‘s Barry Hertz got Bell to talk.

Canadian book publishing: Hugh Stephens has reviewed Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature. Stephens offers his skepticism of Stursberg’s “draconian” proposal for state intervention into the Canadian book publishing market. Knowing Stursberg, he wouldn’t flinch at “draconian” but would argue that drastic measures are required after 40 years of federal neglect.

CanCon: Cartt.ca is publishing Brad Danks’ seven-part series on the future of Canadian content in a small domestic market and a global streaming audience. So far there are two instalments and if you find the first one a little abstract, the second (“why Canadian media keeps missing the upside”) makes his arguments with brevity and persuasion. I won’t give away more than that. 

Journalism standards: Are you a Canadian journalist? Colette Brin of Laval University is shaking your tree to get involved a survey supporting a study on whether there are consensus standards for news coverage that we should be articulating for the industry. If you don’t help, consider your dissenting privileges revoked!

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Lastly, a magnetic documentary to watch.

CBC is streaming Canadian filmmaker Ric Esther Bienstock’s two-part “Speechless,” profiling the pitched ideological battles staged on American university campuses and inside faculty lounges.

The film got a meh from Globe reviewer Kelly Nestruck, but I found it both riveting and kind of terrifying (after having tuned it all out for years for just that reason).

***

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.

A sustainable Canadian news media: what is to be done? A new report.

April 29, 2026

Today, Senator Andrew Cardozo released his new report “Making News Media Sustainable,” co-authored with yours truly, on future policy options for supporting Canadian news journalism. It’s about subsidies. 

Our project is to put forward new ideas. For discussion. The working assumption is that public support of private journalism is here to stay in one form or another, so what can we offer in terms of continuous improvement? The Senator already put forward his ideas about public support for the CBC in a 2024 report here, so this new report focusses on public support to privately owned news journalism.

Some of our ideas will roil the waters. Just to choose one, we suggest that federal news subsidies should be reduced or eliminated to heavily indebted news organizations (i.e. Postmedia) that are using public money, in whole or in part, to pay off their controlling owners and creditors.

There are other ideas that you might call technocratic, invoking the subtle art of policy design, such as offering news organizations an opportunity to go paywalled, or to stay paywalled, and forego journalist salary subsidies in favour or more enticing subscription tax credits offered to citizens. To work properly, the federal government would have to launch a seriously generous news voucher program for citizens, whether or not they pay taxes. 

Another idea, that we lean on pretty hard, is that the federal government end its arbitrary exclusion of broadcasting companies from accessing subsidies for their news websites that are indistinguishable from the digital operations of print publishers. By coincidence, yesterday the Carney government announced in its Economic Update that the Finance Department will launch a public consultation “to seek the views of Canadians and stakeholders on extending the Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit to audio and audiovisual news production.”

We give a lot of attention in the report to the under appreciated history of innovation success in Canadian news journalism, both with respect to digital technology and content strategies. There have been many successes to admire or replicate, both from start-ups and legacy news organizations. One policy idea that emerges from that experience is public funding of innovation-related expenses, such as IT staff salaries. 

We also applaud the gaining traction of non-profit news journalism. It is no silver-bullet to cure all that ails the beleaguered industry. But it clearly can be tapped for greater potential.

One of the challenges to change-management in our sprawling news industry is that we lack a cohesive public policy for supporting news journalism. Policy initiatives have been ad hoc, reactive, and initiated under overlapping jurisdictions of federal government, provincial governments, and the federal regulator, the CRTC. Unsurprisingly, there is no central institute equipped to collect and analyze a broad and deep well of industry data that might guide the best decisions for supporting journalism.

And our closing advice in the 100-page report: the policy solutions for news journalism may not be one-size fits all. We have an array of Canadian news markets where consumers seek or passively consume the news of the day: national, regional, local, by language, by content silo, by platform preference, etc. 

The biggest conundrum, the one that reveals our deepest policy conviction in writing the report, is the enormous gap between the number of Canadians who will pay for news (about 20%) and those who won’t. That 20% number is stubborn: even hypothetically lower paywall prices don’t seem to budge it very far. 

All Canadians vote (well, 68% of those eligible in the last federal election), whether they consume news or not. As the loss of advertising revenue to Big Tech platforms has destabilized news organizations that distribute trustworthy news for free and without a subscription, the threat of a news consumption deficit becoming a democratic deficit is something that only the naive would avoid looking straight in the eye.

Finally, we have a lot to say about the connection between public trust and public subsidies to news journalism.

We don’t subscribe to the idea that a penny of subsidies means a pound of distrust: the healthy and unhealthy skepticism expressed around the world about news media is powerfully influenced by many things other than subsidies and, for example, is far more profound in the United States where there is precious little subsidy of news journalism. Regardless, care must be taken regardless by making greater efforts to make the gatekeeping of Canadian news subsidies arm’s length from the government. 

The report begins with a brief executive summary. It’s followed by a landscape review of subsidy programs, a comparison to policy initiatives in non-Canadian jurisdictions, and then an extended series of policy issues inviting you to engage in the debate over what is to be done.

***

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.

When you’re the last to know.

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April 25, 2026

We, the people, were the last to know.

On Thursday, CBC president Marie-Phillipe Bouchard told Heritage committee MPs the $150 million increase in the public broadcaster’s parliamentary grant for 2025 was “temporary.”

In fact, she said in response to a question from Bloc MP Martin Champoux, “we knew it was temporary.”

Bouchard’s answer is a revelation because, until the Carney government published its Main Estimates for the 2026-27 federal budget, neither the Prime Minister nor the author of the 2025 federal budget that included the $150 million, Finance minister François-Phillipe Champagne, told the public that the new CBC money was temporary. 

Announced this February, the 2026-27 budget projection cuts $192 million from the public broadcaster.

The Prime Minister, who promised the $150 million in his April 2025 election platform as a downpayment on a larger funding increase, also told voters on the campaign trail that that in addition to the $150 million “we expect that in the coming years, we will continue to increase that funding until it can be compared to that provided by other public broadcasters.” (On budget day November 4, 2025 a carefully worded press release avoided the characterization of either a temporary or permanent increase).

And while Canadians might have taken the Prime Minister and the Finance minister at their word, it seems the CBC president knew otherwise. “We knew it was temporary.”

A follow up question from the Bloc’s Champoux, a former journalist, might have been “when did you know it was temporary?” And who told you?

But the question never came. Conservative MP Bernard Généreux followed up, but only to rib Bouchard over the Liberal budget cut and how perhaps the CBC had more to fear from the government than would-be CBC defunder Pierre Poilievre.

Liberal backbencher Bienvenu-Olivier Ntumba then asked Bouchard about the impact of parliamentary cuts on Radio-Canada. The CBC president replied that some staffing resources shared equally between French and English language services would be affected if cuts were “significant.” 

The government’s main budget estimates have scheduled a $192 million cut to the CBC budget, representing the repeal of the $150 million increase from the 2025 budget. An earlier $42 million boost under the Trudeau government in 2024, renewed in the 2025 parliamentary grant, was also repealed for 2026-27. 

Heritage minister Marc Miller appears before the committee on May 5th (update: now rescheduled to May 7th).

***

In our last MediaPolicy post, we reported on the stale news — I was on vacation, okay? — that the CRTC had reversed itself and agreed to provide a three cents per subscriber increase to the parliamentary news service CPAC.

Minutes before or after I hit the publish button on that post, CPAC CEO Christa Dickenson announced the termination of CPAC’s evening news show. The $2.8 million boost to her $13 million budget from the CRTC rate increase wasn’t enough to stabilize finances, according to Dickenson. The cancellation of the show meant 12 staff layoffs, including show host Michael Serapio.

An online hue and cry followed in response to the CPAC announcement and Heritage minister Marc Miller joined in with a tweet suggesting that the CRTC’s delay in implementing the Online Streaming Act was to blame:

As I retweeted at the time, oh my.

By linking the CPAC layoffs to a live CRTC file dealing with requests to deliver financial relief to “services of exceptional importance,” the minister seemed to be saying that the independent regulator ought to giddy up and deliver it to CPAC.

That special funding was requested by CPAC on July 2, 2025, citing its services of exceptional importance including the now eliminated evening shows, and is still under consideration by the Commission.

Miller’s impatience with the languid pace of CRTC decision making on implementation of the Online Streaming Act is shared widely, for good reason. But now the Commission’s eventual decision on funding services of exceptional importance will either be a yes (submitting to its minister) or no (defying its minister). 

A footnote to this story: on the same day that Miller was tweeting about CPAC, the CRTC followed up its increase to CPAC’s subscriber rate with a two cent increase for TV5, the French language news service. 

CPAC’s Dickenson appears before the Heritage committee this coming Tuesday, April 28th.

CPAC CRTC Statement July 2 2025Download

***

One of the better kept secrets in minister Miller’s thoughts is what he has in mind by appointing a special advisory committee on the future of Canada’s audio visual industry.

The ministerial appointments are mostly not the usual suspects and stakeholders, bending instead towards active industry executives, producers and investors.

The committee’s mission is framed by the minister in high level language: 

The Government of Canada is reviewing how it supports the audiovisual sector. The current framework for federal audiovisual support was built for a different era and needs to evolve so Canadian stories can thrive, both at home and globally. The goal is to make sure that federal support remains effective, efficient and transparent, and that it can support the full spectrum of Canadian voices and stories. The work includes reviewing audiovisual policy and institutions.

Parsing that brief statement, change is certainly in the wind, but what? Presumably, committee members asked the Minister for something more detailed when they were recruited. It’s a good bet they aren’t signing on for a mere reorganization of government departments Telefilm, CAVCO, the National Film Board or the Canada Media Fund.

The CanCon-funding Canada Media Fund immediately expressed support for the minister’s “modernization” agenda. This suggested that the CMF, jointly governed and funded by the federal government and Canadian cable companies, knows what that agenda is. Asked for comment on its understanding of what in Miller’s agenda it is endorsing, the CMF replied “the CMF shares the Minister’s view that the current framework was built for a different era and needs to evolve.”

The rest of us, we’re on a need to know basis.

In the absence of more information, it is reasonable to speculate that the Liberals are going to re-launch something like the dead-ended 2016-17 federal policy review conducted by Heritage minister Melanie Joly that dismissed pleas for what became the Online Streaming Act in 2023 and instead called for more government support of exported Canadian content and a Canadian spending commitment from Netflix.

If you want to get a flavour of what an export strategy might look like, I recommend Ken Whyte’s latest Substack post which admires how Korea has remodelled its cultural production policies since the 1990s. (Coincidentally, Whyte served on Melanie Joly’s advisory committee in 2017). 

***

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Streamers spending less in Canada – CPAC gets a raise – Independent TV stations want interim funding – Bloc MP rips Rebel News

Slide from Profile 2025

April 21, 2026

This week the Canadian Media Producers Association released its annual Profile snapshot of how much money is being spent in Canadian video production, both for Canadian content and American shows shot on Canadian soil.

It’s best to draw conclusions from these Profile reports over an arc of multiple years. But there’s no mistaking what is going on.

The numbers are anemic this year and suggest that the lucrative FLS (“foreign location shooting”) business in shooting US shows is a little better than last year but not going to recover to its 2022 peak. 

We are past peak spending by global streamers and the viral FLS growth that Canada enjoyed from in 2015-17 has now, in real terms, appeared to have levelled off. In inflation adjusted dollars, Canada is back at 2018.

Aside from FLS, Canadian content spending is also down, even without taking inflation into account. 

That’s because the CRTC’s required investment and spending requirements for Canadian broadcasters continue to tail off with the decline in earnings. But CanCon investments by US streamers also continue to drop although you wouldn’t know it from parsing the statement that Hollywood’s Motion Picture Association gave to Cartt.ca in response to the CMPA report:

Global studios and streamers, including MPA-Canada member studios, are leading investment in the Canadian film, television, and streaming industry. In addition to driving the majority of production spending and employment in Canada, global studios and streamers have proudly become one of the largest sources of private financing for Canadian productions, providing more financing than the Canada Media Fund (CMF) and Telefilm combined. The report clearly makes the case MPA-Canada’s members have been making for years: global investors are already a vibrant and indispensable capital partner of the Canadian screen sector.

The MPA is making a couple of points here, the first being that Hollywood continues to shoot a lot of US production here in Canada, thanks to our world class facilities and production crews, a low Canadian dollar, and Canadian taxpayer support through subsidies. As I mentioned, FLS has receded to 2018 levels now.

MPA’s other claim is that US studios have proudly become “one of” the largest sources of private financing for Canadian content. That’s certainly a true statement of fact (the other “one of” being Canadian private investment). More to the point, it’s policy hieroglyphics for saying the streamers’ investment largesse ought to win them a mulligan from cash contributions to Canadian media funds, something they are opposing in court.

Revealed in the report’s fine print, streamer investments have declined in the last four years, from $480 million to $408 million in English language production, a 22% drop in real dollars. In French language productions, streamer investment has declined from $13 million to $7 million although the story there is not the decline but the size of the investment.

***

The creaking of the floorboards beneath the feet of publicly funded Canadian television news is getting louder.

In a decision that split the CRTC panel hearing the case, the non-profit parliamentary news channel CPAC finally obtained the increase to its regulator-fixed cable subscriber rate that it has been asking for since July 2024. The rate of 13 cents per monthly subscriber ordered by the Commission in 2018 will go up to 16 cents this fall. All cable companies must absorb the cost within the CRTC-capped price of a basic cable subscription. In an odd twist to the story, CPAC is owned by five cable companies Rogers, Eastlink, Cogeco, Québecor’s Vidéotron, and Access Communications.

Based on its 2024 regulatory filing, CPAC is a $14 million operation and lost $1.38 million in 2024. According to CPAC CEO Christa Dickenson, it’s now a $13 million operation and the three cent bump will bring in $2.8 million.

The Commission reversed itself from a ruling in November 2025 that it was deferring making a decision on the applications from CPAC, TV5 and Vue et Voix for higher subscriber fees because other CRTC panels are seized with the two high level reviews of television and streaming services that were publicly heard in the spring and fall of 2025 and which are due to be published “in the coming months.” Many months later, there remains a graveyard silence on those files.

During that stretch of time, CPAC very publicly warned that it was about to hit a financial wall and its programming was at risk. CPAC broadcasts Parliamentary proceedings as well as occasional coverage of court proceedings, political conventions, conferences and general elections.

What also happened in the intervening time was that nothing was announced for CPAC in the Carney government’s main budget estimates in February. In 2024, the Trudeau administration cut a $5 million cheque to upgrade its equipment. But historically CPAC has only been funded by cable subscriber fees, having been cut adrift from the CBC in the 1990s. It is not licensed to sell advertising. 

Update: Within minutes of publishing this MediaPolicy post, CPAC CEO Christa Dickinson posted on LinkedIn that despite the additional revenue expected from the increase in the subscriber rate, CPAC was cancelling its French and English language evening political shows and laying off 12 staff, including the host Michael Serapio.

***

Another loud floorboard creak just emanated from independently owned local television stations in Québec.

Executives from RNC Media and Télé Inter-Rives are making pleas for the CRTC or the federal government to do something quick about the shortfall in the Independent Local News Fund that supports as much as 70% of newsroom expenses to 17 independent stations across Canada. 

The stations relying on the ILNF media fund have been waiting since CRTC’s 2022 approval of the Rogers-Shaw merger to sort out the consequences of admitting 15 additional Global News stations to the $17 million ILNF pool sponsored by Canadian cable companies. The doubling of stations effectively cuts the news subsidies in half.

The Commission thought it had squared this circle in 2024 by ordering Netflix and the US streamers to inject a further $42 million into the ILNF. But the extra money is in escrow while the streamers fight the levy in court.  

Bloc MP Martin Champoux is advocating for the federal government to step into the breach. He is recommending the federal government extend federal QCJO labour tax credits from the current program supporting only online journalism provided by print publishers to include news websites operated by broadcast companies. The CAQ government in Québec did just that in March with its provincial news subsidies that parallel the federal QCJO program. 

***

It is always entertaining for the discomfitters to be discomfitted. Rebel News editor-in-chief Shiela Gunn Reid was ripped by Bloc MP Champoux at the parliamentary Heritage committee hearings for allowing her boss, Ezra Levant, to spin nonsense about the committee proceedings being “cancelled” to prevent Gunn Reid from speaking.

Karyn Pugliese has the story here.

***

If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page; 

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I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Liberal majority means business for Heritage MPs – Rebel News is back on the policy menu – Buddy cops are back

April 18, 2026

The new Liberal majority in the House of Commons puts the Carney government in command of Parliamentary committees, including Canadian Heritage.

That clears the path for the Carney government to bring forward its much (much) awaited online safety bill. It also green lights a bill to implement the Liberal election platform on the CBC: changes to the public broadcaster’s governance and the establishment of long term funding that is insulated from the federal budget cycle. 

The Liberals have not enjoyed majority control of House committees since prior to the 2019 general election. Their signature media legislation in the 2023 Online Streaming Act and the Online News Act of the same year needed support from the Bloc and the NDP to overcome Conservative filibusters in committee.

The lack of a committee majority also plays out in the cultural war prosecuted by the opposition Conservatives, especially against the CBC.

Only this fall, the Conservatives got their wish to turn the Heritage committee into a forum to fuel an attack on the CBC, with the Travis Dhanraj controversy as its fodder. 

Without control of the committee, the Liberals had to compromise by agreeing to a series of new committee hearings on “the state of the journalism and media sectors,” less than a year after the committee completed a report on “The Holding of a National Forum on the Media.”

The new hearings offer an oddly bifurcated narrative that features the Conservatives inviting witnesses to disparage the CBC or allege bias in mainstream media while the Liberals summon a string of private news organizations eager to endorse existing federal subsidies or advocate for more of them. 

In other words, the committee has been stuck in performative gear instead of legislative mode.

One of the legislative issues that we can expect to hear more of, possibly packaged into an online safety bill, is Senate Bill S-209 which just passed Third Reading in the upper chamber. It now goes to the House of Commons, provided it is sponsored by an Opposition or government MP.

Previously covered by MediaPolicy, S-209 would ban underage access to online pornography through the implementation of age estimation technology. While porn sites are clearly targeted, the bill also authorizes a government regulator to scope in social media apps such as Elon Musk’s X where children can access pornography for free.

This policy furrow has already been ploughed by legislation in the UK, Europe and 25 American states. In addition, many countries have imposed outright social media bans.

The recent Liberal Party policy convention voted for a total ban on underage access to social media and Heritage minister Marc Miller was quoted by Canadian Press as saying he was taking the proposal “very seriously.”

The sponsor of S-209, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, told MediaPolicy that she was gratified her bill passed the Senate unanimously in a voice vote, her third try over five years and three parliamentary sessions. 

When she first tabled the bill in 2020, age estimation technology was in its infancy and its development since then —and implementation in other countries—  has dulled the edge of privacy concerns expressed by critics. 

Miville-Dechêne said that support from parents and grandparents kept her going and described S-209 as a “magnificent victory” for child safety. 

Her previous bill in the last Justin Trudeau parliament also passed Third Reading in the Senate in 2024 and had support in the House from opposition parties as well as, according to Miville-Dechêne, a significant number of Liberal MPs. But the bill faced the implacable opposition of the Trudeau PMO. 

This time will be different for S-209, she said, and she would be happy to see the House either take up the bill or for the government to fold it into its own online safety bill. 

***

If things get boring in media policy, there’s always the chance that Rebel News will make it less so.

In December 2025 the CRTC published its letter to Rebel News explaining that the Commission could not entertain Rebel’s application filed in August 2025 asking for a share of Google’s $100 million in mandatory licensing payments under the Online News Act. The role of gatekeeping the fund is assigned by cabinet regulation to the news consortium chosen by Google to distribute the cash, the Canadian Journalism Collective.

The CJC confirmed to MediaPolicy that in spite of the CRTC ruling Rebel News has not asked them for recognition or money, raising the inference that Rebel was more interested in being denied by the CRTC than the Google cash itself.

Rebel also applied for federal journalism labour tax credits in 2021 but was denied by the CRA’s independent committee on a number of grounds, both with respect to its lack of original news reporting and its not meeting recognized standards of fair reporting. A federal judge upheld the CRA committee.

Most recently, the Quebec Press Council threw out a public complaint against Rebel and its controversial Quebec reporter Alexandra Lavoie on the grounds that Rebel is not a really a news organization.

The Conseil panel ruled that Rebel’s true identity is a political action group, not an independent news organization, evidenced by its registration as a federal lobbyist and with Elections Canada as a third party political action group seeking to “influence” elections.

The Conseil’s written decision includes a gratuitous aside about Rebel News being “an activist organization with ties to far-right circles,” however the key passage takes a “pith and substance” approach to characterizing Rebel:

Although it does not describe itself as an activist organization, the entity itself promotes its activist side, as demonstrated by its purported “Code of Journalistic Ethics and Professional Conduct,” which states: “We may launch crowdfunding campaigns, letter-writing campaigns, or petitions to support people affected by the events we cover.”  This has nothing to do with journalism.

By advocating for its political and ideological interests, Rebel News cannot cover the news independently and thus cannot offer its readers and listeners an accurate picture of reality. Its contributors, whom Rebel News calls “journalists,” are therefore not working in the public interest, but rather in the interest of its political causes.

The Rebel News platform cannot be considered a news outlet as defined by the Quebec Press Council, since it is not a publication of a “journalistic nature.”

The Conseil is a self governing assembly that has no coercive powers over news organizations but unlike the English-Canadian National News Council the Conseil accepts public complaints about news organizations that don’t belong to it or pay dues, such as Rebel News. 

***

On May 7th, the Raptors may still be in the NBA playoffs and the Blue Jays may be back over .500.

But what MediaPolicy is holding its breath over is the reprise of Bon Cop, Bad Cop on Bell Crave. 

The franchise has already produced two dramedy cop buddy movies that feature cheeky bilingual repartée and good humoured riffs on the cultural stereotypes of French and English Canadians. 

***

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Being Galen Weston – California budget cuts – Liberal culture cuts, revisited

April 4, 2026

In case you missed it, last week I posted something I have been needing to get out of my system for a while, a counter-rant against the false labelling of mainstream media (whatever that is) and Canadian journalists as “left-wing.”

***

There’s more mainstream media on the way, left wing or not.

The Weston family’s foray into non-profit news journalism, Be Giant, launched April 1st.

The Editor in Chief is veteran journalist Alison Uncles, commanding an initial newsroom complement of ten and a new magnet for freelance pitches.

Uncles describes the editorial mission as solutions-based and innovation-focussed news coverage: the branding is Canada’s potential to “Be Giant.”

The long-form journalism feels best suited to weekend readers and magazine lovers.

You can sign up for their weekend e-mail distribution: the business model is ad-free and subscription-free. In short, it’s 100% billionaire backed.

At first glance, Be Giant’s news genres put it in competition with the Globe & Mail and The Logic, but the solutions based mission means that smaller outlets like The Tyee, The Discourse and The Narwhal are going to face more competition for the best in Canadian freelance journalism. 

With more than 20% (i.e. 100%) of its philanthropic funding coming from the Loblaw-owning Westons, the non-profit Be Giant will not be able to issue tax receipts should it start accepting donations from readers or foundations.

One thing seems likely: Be Giant will not lack for investment capital. 

***

Public financing of news journalism, public or private, does not exist at the federal level in the United States.

At the state level however, five Blue states representing almost a quarter of the national population have significant subsidies for local news. The biggest state (with the least significant subsidies) is California.

Perhaps not for long. Governor Gavin Newsom’s final budget proposal for 2026-27 (he terms out in December) eliminates the state’s $10M support to local news. The state contribution is the condition of Google’s matching $10M support.

Not discouraged, state assembly Democrats have tabled a bigger subsidy for inclusion in the budget.

***

On the other hand, Newsom isn’t backing off the state’s recent doubling of the state’s 35% subsidies for film and television production, expanded from an annual $330M USD to $750M.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the grinding down of the Californian film and television industry continues as Hollywood sheds jobs, labour hours and its share of  both US and global production.

With the next, and pre-midterm, federal budget cycle approaching, Hollywood is agitating for a federal production subsidy to match its own state subsidy. Unlike Canada, the US does not offer federal subsidies. (Canada’s combined federal-Ontario labour subsidy is about 35% for US productions, higher for Canadian content).

Over the last decade, the US has lost market share of video production and the main winners have been Canada and the United Kingdom that offer competitive subsidies and a supply chain of world-class production clusters that Hollywood producers have integrated into their business models.

graphic from the Hollywood Reporter

Months ago, President Trump touted slapping tariffs on movies shot abroad for the US market, paid for by Hollywood studios. This is not what Hollywood studios want: they want federal subsidies. The analogy to continental auto manufacturing seems apt.

The story in the Hollywood Reporter notes that David Ellison’s Paramount, the winner of the Warner Brothers merger sweepstakes, has committed to producing at least 30 movies annually to fend off anti-trust objections. That opens up a scenario in which the Trump FCC ties the location of shooting to the merger approval, a move that would impact the UK more than Canada. 

***

Two weeks ago MediaPolicy pointed out some big Liberal cuts to cultural funding in the Parliamentary budget process, the “Main Estimates” for 2026-27.

Impacting News:

  • CBC: elimination of $192M from the $1.454 billion parliamentary grant;
  • Canadian Periodical Fund: cut $13M from the $86M budget with a further $14M cut in 2028/29;
  • TV5: cut $2M from the $13M budget.

Impacting Culture:

(The latter two media funds are co-funded by government, broadcasters and streamers). 

My sources suggested that the cuts to the CBC and the Canada Media Fund might not end up being so dire. Possibly, some of the funding might be resurrected in a later, Supplementary Estimate, at a time of the government’s choosing.

Well, I wanted to know more before I cast my ballot at the advance poll this weekend in Toronto’s University-Rosedale by-election.

I e-mailed Canadian Heritage and asked what the story was. I found the answer less than 100% clear, but here is the information I got:

The Heritage spokesperson described the absence in the Main Estimates of the Liberals’ much touted $150M increase to the CBC in the last budget as a consequence of the new money being part of last year’s Supplementary Estimate (which just got Senate approval two weeks ago) and therefore not rolled into the 26-27 Main Estimate. 

Moreover, the spokesperson said categorically the missing $150M is not part of the budget cutting under the government’s three-year Comprehensive Budget Review.

Bottom line: without promising the $150M is coming back, it seems likely it will.

But that leaves the fate of the remaining $42M cut to the CBC grant unclear. That $42M figure reflects the extra funding that the Trudeau government pumped into the CBC in 2024 as a response to falling revenues and mass layoffs announced by the CBC. Nothing in Heritage’s answer to my email clarified whether that money is coming back.

Heritage didn’t respond to my question about cuts to the other media funds, including whether the budget reductions were impacting civil servants or program subsidies.

The Canada Media Fund, which pumps extra subsidy cash into Canadian TV dramas, documentaries, and children’s programming, has been limping along on the same $135M base funding from the federal government since 2011.

In 2017, Heritage minister Melanie Joly committed to an annual supplement of $42M to neutralize the falling contributions to the Fund from the declining cable TV companies. Last year, the government publicly committed to extending that supplement for three more years. 

The $42M supplement has never been part of the CMF’s base funding that shows up in the Main Estimates. So probably it’s coming back and/or the government is going to claw it back once the streamer contributions to the Fund begin. 

On the other hand, about $20M in time-limited DEI funding for CMF-supported programming just expired and by the end of this budget year the remaining $5M will stop. 

Final CMF budget cut: unknown.

The rest of the Heritage cuts are part of the comprehensive expenditure review and they are real. According to Heritage: “Reflected in the 2026-27 Main Estimates are planned spending reductions. Incremental reductions in 2027-28 and in 2028-29 will be reflected in future Main Estimates for those respective years.”

***

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.

“The Left Wing Mainstream Media,” and other acts of magic.

April 2, 2026

If there is one thing that sets my teeth on edge these days it’s the phrase “the left-wing mainstream media.”

I hear it from right-wing voices, both those I respect and those I don’t.

It’s as if the centre just fell out public life and disappeared with the wave of a magic wand. It suggests a world that does not exist.

Is it possible to move a discussion of newsroom culture, values and that hackneyed B-word, “bias,” from the realm of opinion to numbers?

Well buried in a recent scholarly article about harassment of US journalists is some supporting demographic data collected from nearly 15,000 journalists. 

In 2022, US journalists expressed their “partisanship” (how they voted or were registered to vote) as:

  • Independent – 51%
  • Democrat – 35.4%
  • Republican – 3.4%
  • No Preference – 10.2%

The Republican numbers kind of pop out, don’t they? 

A generation ago the Republican-leaning cohort among journalists was closer to 20%. It began to change quickly during the oughts, so this is not about Trump. Some would argue it’s about changing newsroom hiring preferences (in favour of college grads) but I’m not sure that’s true and I suggest we don’t step into that rabbit hole just now.

My point is that the voting preferences are a reasonable proxy for “left, centre and right” wing values among journalists. In the US, it’s decidedly centre-left within the prevailing spectrum of political values.

What about in Canada?

An in-depth study of Canadian journalists’ self-perception of their occupational role was published in 2019 with data collected between 2014 and 2016 and correlated to an ongoing global study. 

The Canadian response rate of 342 (out of potentially 12,000 journalists) was not ideal, but you can’t blame the study authors for that.

Above all, the study demonstrates that Canadian journalists cleave to the dryly described “monitorial” role (I call it the “watchdog ideology”):

  • Be a detached observer
  • Report things as they are
  • Monitor and scrutinize politics and business
  • Provide analysis of current affairs
  • Tell stories about the world
  • Educate the audience.

They identified less with “the interventionist journalist role,” although they were dead-centre in the agree/disagree spectrum over “advocating for social change.” 

They tended to be in stronger agreement with an assigned role for journalists to “promote tolerance and cultural diversity.”

As for “political stance” of these Canadian journalists, on a scale of 1 (Left) to 10 (Right) the mean average of self-identification was 4.22. Narrowly, centre-left. The authors noted that “60.5% of journalists who stated their political stance identified themselves in the centre-most range of 4, 5 and 6.”

If you insist upon data of their voting preferences, and why not, the data came back this way, covering the 2011 and 2015 federal elections:

  • Liberals – 27.1%
  • NDP – 23.7%
  • Conservatives – 13.5%
  • Bloc, Green, other – 13.5%
  • Did not vote – 4.8%

(And 22% of those surveyed ignored this question).

The actual outcome in the 2015 election was Liberals (39%), Conservatives (32%), NDP (20%), Bloc (4.7%) and Green (3.4%), numbers that are relevant to sketching out our own Canadian political spectrum of “left to right.”

Altogether, I read these numbers supporting the notion that the Canadian cohort of journalists is centre-left, although how much “left” is a little hard to say.

Now we’ve settled that, the next step is a discussion about how well Canadian journalists, hailing from various places on the political spectrum, practice the professional detachment of journalism; an imperfect but essential pursuit of The Truth. 

***

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – CRTC will adjudicate Meta’s ban on Canadian news outlets – US juries find Meta and YouTube liable for online harms to children

Narcity news post

March 30, 2026

Today is the CRTC’s deadline for the public to weigh in on the application by several independent television stations to officially designate Facebook and Instagram as digital news intermediaries under the Online News Act and force Meta to bargain news licensing fees with the broadcasters.

Despite Meta’s ongoing “ban” on Canadian news, there’s still plenty of Canadian news to consume on Facebook and Instagram.

Forty-four per cent of Canadians surveyed by Reuters in its 2025 Digital News Report said they still got news from social media.

But if news is banned from the two biggest social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, how come so many Canadians find news on social media?

As you suspected, it’s because the Meta ban is selective.

For example, I follow the news site Narcity Canada on Facebook. I keep up with the biggest stories in the news cycle by reading its artfully presented posts linking to Canadian Press stories. Narcity also writes and posts travel and lifestyle news stories written by its own journalists, but not as much as it posts Canadian Press stories.

As the steady flow of Narcity posts suggest to the casual observer, Facebook appears to be a digital news intermediary that “makes news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada,” ban or no ban.

But the key is the phrase “produced by news outlets”: news publishers that would have a claim against Meta for licensing revenue if their news content wasn’t banned. If a news publisher has no claim, it isn’t banned.

This is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s legal strategy and, so far, it seems to be working: if Meta forbids Canadian “news outlets” to post news stories, or refuses to suffer others posting their stories, then he figures Meta doesn’t trigger its legal obligation to negotiate the mandatory licensing payments that the Online News Act contemplates.

That’s his plan, in theory anyway. The practice is different. Meta’s swiss cheesey news “ban” has holes:

  • According to CRTC filings, Meta only half heartedly deletes user posts of news stories published by Canadian news outlets. Some posts remain for months or years as pointed out by the broadcasters who found their own news content posted by others on Facebook and Instagram.
  • My own observation is that Meta doesn’t appear to be deleting news items posted by persons employed by banned news outlets (I’m not outing anyone!)
  • As pointed out as a flagrant example by the litigating news companies, Facebook allows Rogers to post news videos from its Breakfast Television current affairs show, my guess is someone has decided wrongly that’s not news.

But most significantly to Meta avoiding cash liability, it seems to be quietly making its own calls on who is a news outlet, and who isn’t.

Despite the stream of Narcity top news stories of the day, the CRTC does not seem perturbed by this kind of thing in its December 2025 staff letter that wound up its staff investigation into the Meta ban.

Back in 2024, Narcity publisher Chuck Lapointe publicly celebrated Meta green lighting his publication’s return to Facebook. His post indicated this was a mindful decision by Meta and linked it to a ruling by the Independent QCJO Panel that Narcity doesn’t publish enough of its own news reporting to become eligible as a “news organization” to collect federal journalism subsidies under the Income Tax Act.

Replatformed by Meta, Narcity’s posts are a firehose of Canadian Press’s current events reporting, with less frequent posts of its own lifestyle and travel news.

Presumably Meta had Narcity sign-off on any compensation based on this policy:

In the meantime, social media influencers like Mario Zelaya can post their own news content on Facebook, as can Canada Proud or freelance journalists like Rachel Gilmore. Meta doesn’t owe Gilmore or Zelaya any compensation for their content because a “news outlet” must employ at least two journalists under the Online News Act.

The bottom line is that Meta is not banning all news or news reporting, it’s only banning news published by news organizations that might make a legal claim for compensation as a “news outlet.” The rest, it doesn’t ban.

That draws the eye to section 51 of the legislation. It’s the undue preference provision which prohibits Meta from giving “undue or unreasonable preference to any individual or entity” while unjustly discriminating against or disadvantaging a news outlet.

***

The first two in a string of consumer lawsuits against Meta and YouTube has resulted in jury findings of liability and multi-million dollar damages against the social media platforms in Los Angeles and New Mexico.

The civil convictions were based on Meta’s and YouTube’s addictive design features, causing mental health damage to children.

The New Mexico case, where the jury awarded $375 USD million in damages, was also based on Meta and YouTube concealing the risks of sexual exploitation of children.

The juries made their decisions against YouTube and Meta regardless of the fact that US juries are prohibited by federal law from considering the harmful nature of the posted content —-shielded under a 1996 law that gives immunity to online common carriers of content posted by third parties— so plaintiffs must convince juries that the platforms’ addictive design features and the lack of default safety mechanisms are to blame for human harm.

***

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.

Richard Stursberg drills down on policy proposals for Canadian books he says can be winners (if only Ottawa would listen)

March 27, 2026

In January, Sutherland Books published Richard Stursberg’s tonic for the anemic domestic market in Canadian authored books, Lament for a Literature.

Now semi-retired, Stursberg served as a senior advisor on cultural policy to the Mulroney government and went on to a string of important jobs in cultural production that culminated with a tour of duty as the VP English services at the CBC. He wrote a memoir of his CBC days, The Tower of Babble, which is a fun read (though not for his skewered adversaries).

Lament for a Literature chronicles the decline of the Canadian book publishing industry and Canadian authored books in a domestic market dominated by foreign book houses. The Canadian book publishing landscape is dominated by a handful of multinational publishers owning 95% of book sales, with small independent Canadian publishers chasing what’s left. And that’s before we consider the chokehold on book distribution that Amazon and Indigo have and the implications of that for publisher profits and author royalties.

MediaPolicy reviewed the 100-page book that is bursting at the seams with major public policy proposals to reverse the decline.

To get a better handle on his proposals, I interviewed him.

***

MediaPolicy: How’s Lament for a Literature doing?

Richard Stursberg: I would say I’ve been very pleased so far. A lot of reactions. There was an excerpt published in the National Post. And they had over 400 reader comments before they cut them off.

MP: You saw my review of your book?

RS: Yes, and John Ibbitson did one in the Globe, and there’s an interview in Canadian Affairs.

MP: About that interview, they asked you a lot about the cultural controversy you stride right into in the book, this contested terrain of decolonizing literature versus telling iconic Canadian stories. The bottom line in your book is that we need to legislate help for Canadian book publishing. But you can’t legislate the cultural zeitgeist, can you?

RS: No you clearly can’t. The difficulty for a curator of cultural funding, like the Canada Council for the Arts, is you end up pursuing an ideological agenda by carving up a fixed budget for book publishing based a policy agenda. And I don’t think that’s what you want to do. I think what you want to do is something different, which is to create a set of arrangements that allow publishers and writers to decide what they are going to write, not bureaucrats.

And the way you do that is simple. You make the book subsidies automatic, like we do in film and television tax credits. And so you get rid of this sort of notion that we’re going to have people sitting around and deeming what’s worthy and what’s not worthy, and what’s politically correct or not. You leave the decisions about what gets published in the hands of authors and publishers.

MP: Right. You talk in Lament about this tax credit, this subsidy program that we already have in film and TV. You are proposing that something like that would replace the federal budget lines for the Canada Book Fund and the book funding program inside the Canada Council?

RS: Yeah. And the way the TV credits work is that typically they’re labour-based. The producer files a cost report and then as a certain proportion of those total costs the government sends you a cheque. Now, there’s two good things that happen with this which don’t happen with any of the book programs.

Right now, the book programs are all zero-sum. So, one publisher gets more, the other has to get less. That doesn’t happen with television tax credits. It would allow you to grow the book industry. 

But secondly, what happens is the tax credits are bankable. The publisher can take the tax credit down to the bank and get a loan, more investment [for author advances or marketing].

And they will. You can’t do that with the current book program because you never know how much money is going to come out the other end.

MP: You also write in Lament that we need to re-establish Canadian ownership of publishing houses if we’re going to revive Canadian books. Isn’t the horse out of the barn on Canadian ownership?

RS: The horse is out of the barn and into the meadow. He’s been grazing for a long time. Ninety-five per cent of book sales in Canada go to foreign owned publishers.

MP: So reversing that foreign ownership is not your top priority?

RS: Well I would say this. We should have a federal ownership review process that is transparent. The whole secrecy is bizarre. The entire process over the years has been a complete disaster. The last one was Allan Lau’s Wattpad, it was sold to a Korean company in 2021.

MP: I think the most challenging policy proposal in the book is to create a Canadian rights market where foreign publishers have to make deals with Canadian book publishers to have their foreign-authored books retailed and distributed in 

RS: I don’t know if it’s back to the future. No doubt, it would be a little complicated to set it up. But it’s a way of compensating for having allowed the industry to have become completely dominated by multinational publishers. The first right of refusal has to go to Canadian publishers and distributors. 

 We know that in the early days, whether it was Macmillan or McClelland & Stewart, that’s how they made a lot of their money and financed these extraordinary lists of Canadian artists. With a rights policy, you’re trying to recreate that publisher capacity.

MP: Another proposal you make that also looks complicated to me is your idea to stop Amazon and Indigo from undercutting independent Canadian bookstores on discount pricing. Straight-up price regulation, in other words.

RS: It’s worked in Germany and France for decades. Quebec too. And the reason why it’s a good law is threefold. 

One is that, outside of Quebec, our independent bookstores can’t compete. It’s because they’re small and their margins are small, with giants like Amazon or Chapters. But independent bookstores are very important, because one of the fundamental ways to promote books is so-called hand selling at your local bookstore.

You go there. They know you. They know your taste. They say you might be interested in this new title. 

So you, you know, instead of saying to yourself, “oh, I think I’ll go to Chapters, because I’ll get 20% off,” it’s the same price everywhere. In France, not only does Amazon have to sell it at the same retail price as everybody else, but they have to charge 10 euros for shipping.

And it’s been very successful. You walk around Paris and there’s a small independent bookstore on every block. And they’re very good.

And you look at the statistics as to the extent to which the French read French authors. Something like, about 55 to 60 percent of all the bestsellers in France are written by French authors.

MP: I think I’m only part way through your list of proposals. It’s a lot and some of it might not even be in federal jurisdiction which means you have to shop the ideas to provincial premiers. 

RS: Yes, it’s an ambitious proposal. Any one of them is an ambitious proposal, but altogether it’s an ambitious proposal.

MP: I’m thinking, okay, it makes it a lot easier if the federal government can act alone rather than doing anything that the provinces can object to.

RS: So, in Quebec it’s no big deal. They’ve had their book law, their Loi de Livres, since 1981. Quebec publishers of French language domestic books have 51% of sales in their own market.

It’s because their book law requires schools, libraries and universities to source their books from independent Quebec-based bookstores. They can’t source them from Amazon or from anybody else outside the country. That seems to me to be like almost a silver bullet.

To sell books to those key institutional buyers, you have to be an accredited bookstore.

MP: What does it mean to be an accredited bookstore? 

RS: It means that you have to not only be in Quebec, but Canadian owned and operated. It means you have to carry somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 Quebec titles in your store. So when people walk into the store, there’s lots of books to them, select them, some that are local. 

And you can see, this is a big shift because if you went back 30, 40 years, the Quebec book market was in many ways much weaker than the English-Canadian book market.

MP: Do you think you can get the attention of Canadian Heritage with Lament?

RS: The thing that’s so amazing to me is that a lot of these policy models are well-known because they’ve been trialed out elsewhere, whether they’re tax credits or top-ups for distribution or whatever they happen to be. Or, you know, they’ve been tried out for years and years in the TV and film business. And for some reason or another, despite the fact they’re all in the same Department, none of it seems to have penetrated Canadian Heritage’s book people.

MP: Very odd. Well, is it odd? 

RS: I think it’s odd. 

MP: Well, in the real world of politics and influence, is it any surprise that the television industry has had more success in getting Heritage to implement helpful things than the wee little book industry? 

RS: Well, yeah, you’re doubtless right.

***

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.

Defending our cultural sovereignty, down to the last budget cut

March 21, 2026

There was a brief political buzz this week when US Congressman Lloyd Smucker (R-PA) introduced a bill in the House Ways and Means Committee to ask the Trump administration to pronounce Canada’s Online Streaming Act Bill C-11 an unfair trade practice.

The technical term for the congressional request is a “section 301” investigation under the US federal Trade Act that can lead to retaliatory tariffs against other nations, Canada in this case, or it can fizzle out.

On the eve of CUSMA trade negotiations, Smucker’s congressional action is the expected statement of American intent. He and other Congressional representatives have sporadically demanded White House intervention since Parliament passed Bill C-11 in April 2023. In Canada, Smucker’s move was met with a smattering of told-you-sos from the foes of the Online Streaming Act, as was the case when Joe Biden’s White House expressed the same opposition to C-11.

The allegation of “unfair trade practice,” taken seriously, requires the Trump administration to recant its endorsement of CUSMA in 2018, a treaty that Smucker enthusiastically supported.

That’s because the Online Streaming Act, and the CRTC’s implementation of it that includes a 5% cash levy on US streamers to replenish Canadian media funds, almost certainly does not violate CUSMA, which may be why neither the Biden administration nor the Trump White House ever filed a complaint against C-11 that would have gone to a trade arbitrator for final resolution.

It’s not a violation of the CUSMA trade deal to impose financial or regulatory obligations on foreign companies that hurt their bottom line so long as Canadian companies are subject to broadly equivalent regulatory requirements that hurt their’s. That’s clearly the case in the Online Streaming Act and the CRTC levy.

None of that matters a whit, of course.

After plenty of lobbying, the US streamers believe they have the tariff-mad Donald Trump in their corner and they may well be right. With Paramount Plus having swallowed Warner Brothers Discovery under the new ownership of friend-of-Trump Larry Ellison, the streamers are even tighter with the White House than before. So who cares that Canadians obeyed the trade deal that Trump signed?

Netflix is all in for trade action too. This is mostly a case of smash and grab: they will take what they can get from the White House. In Europe, Netflix plays ball with regulators because they have no better option. In Israel, Netflix succeeded in getting streaming regulations scrapped at Trump’s request. As for Canada, Netflix told the CRTC two years ago it could live with a 2% cash levy (Disney seemed to be okay with something closer to 3%) —so quaintly pre-Trump, yes?—but if the new White House administration is willing to go to the mats for Hollywood, why not go for broke?

Meanwhile, the Carney government is sending some mixed messages to the US on how highly we value our culture.

Of course there was last summer’s Carney-cave on the digital services tax, but strictly speaking that was a corporate tax dispute rather than cultural legislation.

Most recently, our federal government’s projection of its own budgetary spending in the next three years suggests that Canadians love culture so much that the Prime Minister is prepared to make the deepest cuts to the CBC, the Canadian Media Fund (CanCon), the Canadian Periodical Fund (news journalism), the Canada Book Fund (Canadian books), and the Canada Music Fund (CanCon) since Stephen Harper took a cleaver to them.

The Main Estimates tabled in the House of Commons by Carney’s treasury board look something like this for 2026-2027:

  • CBC: eliminate $192M from the $1.5B parliamentary grant (13% cut);
  • Canada Media Fund: eliminate $68M from the $203M budget (33%);
  • Canadian Periodical Fund: eliminate $13M from the $86M budget (15%) with a further $14M cut in 2028/29;
  • Canada Book Fund: eliminate $3.4M from the $40M budget (8%);
  • Canada Music Fund: eliminate $16M from the $40M budget (40%);
  • TV5: eliminate $2M from the $13M budget (15%).

Funding for the Canada Council for the Arts, the Indigenous Screen Office, and the Local Journalism Initiative is frozen.

All of this violates the Liberal government’s election platform that left no wiggle room in promising to increase CBC funding by “an initial $150M” —implemented in 2025-26 budget —before moving on to future increases. At least the government hasn’t resorted to blaming Donald Trump’s tariff squeeze, well known to all when these election promises were made.

These cuts require a budget to make them final. But they aren’t a trial balloon. The Main Estimates were approved by cabinet’s treasury board and tabled in the House of Commons on February 26th, citing them as the government’s promised “comprehensive expenditure review.” Two weeks earlier, Heritage minister Marc Miller appeared before the Commons Heritage committee to praise the government’s increased cultural spending in the 2025-26 budget.

If there’s been any public outcry about Carney’s deep cuts to cultural spending, it’s been lost in the din. Somewhere, Stephen Harper is turning purple with indignation at the double standard.

As trade talks loom, it appears that Canada will defend its culture down to the last budget cut.

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.