MediaPolicy.ca

Is an AI asteroid coming for Canadian news journalism?

(AI illustration)

October 17, 2026

When Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei blew the whistle on his own rogue AI agents as a civilizational threat to humankind, he did so the day after the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the last time the world stood still all at once and faced its fears.

But since Amodei’s shock declaration, we’ve seen more denialism than public policy action. The Trump administration has scrambled to defuse demands for the regulation of AI.

Amodei’s sensational revelations of AI’s existential threat to the human race briefly eclipsed the existing concerns about lesser cataclysmic outcomes. Like mass unemployment. Or a collapse in AI valuations that crashes the global economy.

Another cataclysm may be the threat that AI poses to news journalism. Like an AI asteroid slamming into the blue planet of democracy.

Since 2018, the Silicon Valley AI companies have scraped online content from across the Internet, including news outlets.

The content was taken without permission, consent or a nickel changing hands. It was nevertheless fed into the training of AI large language models. The training data taught the LLMs the machine-learning skills and vocabulary required to move to the next stage of their development.

After their Internet-wide raid for training data, the next step for AI companies was to refresh their data by scraping up to date information on current affairs, the better to answer millions of audience queries each day.

Again this massive content capture has mostly been carried out without permission, consent or compensation to the content’s creators.

As a consequence many of these content creators, especially news companies, are suing the AI companies. The litigation will ultimately be decided by the US Supreme Court. In that courtroom, the AI companies can count on the political and legal support of the Trump Department of Justice.

Among the stronger of the lawsuits filed by news outlets, publishers will zero in on AI large language models that output verbatim replication of their content. Plaintiffs will also direct the court’s attention to the emergence of these news-juiced AI chatbots as head-on competitors to news outlets.

But the law may never deliver a big payday for news outlets (nor music or book publishers).

American courts are confined to a finding of copyright violation based on existing US law. It’s a tangle of legal issues, but in general that jurisprudence bends favourably to “fair use” and the permissible “transformative” republication of what most laypersons would ordinarily assume is intellectual property belonging to those who created it. If the US Supreme Court sides with AI companies, Canadian courts will feel that legal gravitational pull. Canadian news publishers are suing OpenAI and Anthropic. The Toronto Star is a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed in New York against Cohere, the leading Canadian AI company.

In the meantime, a glimmer of hope is the sprouting of green shoots in a market of content licensing that might put AI compensation in the pockets of at least some of the news companies.

But as the Brookings Institute’s Courtney Radsch describes in this explainer, AI companies have so far inked only a limited number of confidential deals with large, premium-branded news outlets.

For example, OpenAI has agreements with The Financial Times, the Berlin-headquartered global publisher Axel Springer and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Google has a deal with Reddit. Microsoft has a deal with HarperCollins. The competing lists of lawsuits and licensing deals have to be constantly updated.

Could this nascent licensing market save news journalism?

It’s hard to say. At this early stage in the development of a content market, those bespoke deals may serve to relieve the public policy pressure on the AI companies by snuffing out potentially adverse legal rulings on liability. It’s those kind of judicial slap downs of tech companies that often create the political momentum for public regulation (think about the knock-on effect of successful litigation against Meta’s social media algorithms that boosted support for legislative action against online harms).

Also disappointing, the commodity metrics generated in these special deals between AI companies and news publishers might establish the market information required for the dynamic pricing of news content. Unfortunately the price of licensed content remains confidential. This commercial secrecy deprives an immature licensing market of the information it needs to take root and grow.

For now, the giant AI companies don’t care about news outlets any more than they have to. Why would they? Expect them to press their advantage of market power over news outlets for as long as they have it. And don’t expect them to strike licensing deals with any but the biggest news brands (although there’s an interesting exception to that I will get to below).

I hope I am wrong. If efforts to establish a functioning market in AI content licensing fail, it may end up choking off audience traffic and revenue for any but the largest news companies.

At least in the pre-AI era there existed a value exchange between Big Tech and news publishers. Google and Meta amassed free hyperlinks for themselves and in return gave news publishers free distribution of their content. Publishers could monetize that free distribution by selling ads and subscriptions to the audience that engaged. The big news organizations could and did go further by obtaining cash licensing agreements with Google and Meta.

The Brookings Institute’s Radsch compares the impact of both conventional Search platforms and AI chatbots on the news ecosystem and concludes that with chatbots “it’s the same arc, only faster.”

But unlike the old market in hyperlinked news snippets, the structure of the emerging AI business model never shares any revenue-earning opportunities with content providers except so far for the lucky few. That’s because it doesn’t offer news outlets distribution of their content.

It’s common now to warn that conventional search traffic reaching hyperlinked content is doomed. Projections vary, but AI is rapidly replacing hyperlink Search and traffic referrals are drying up because the purpose of AI chatbots is to leave little reason for users to click through a hyperlink to a news site, assuming the fulsome AI summary even bothers to provide one.

This leads to the further problem of AI chabots “eating their own seed corn.” That’s a scenario where the chatbots are so effective in replacing Search and social media feeds as the dominant portal for online information that they starve the news outlets that provide the chatbots with information in the first place.

If a mature market in AI licensing of content throughout the news ecosystem doesn’t happen, what then?

We know from experience where Google and Meta’s refusal to cooperate in a licensing market in hyperlinked news snippets lead in the end: governments in Europe, Australia and Canada stepped in and legislated an unambiguous intellectual property claim that news outlets could make against Google and Meta for hyperlinked news snippets. In Canada, that got us the Online News Act.

As yet there is little sign of North American governments taking any action on the chatbot problem.

But this time around, at least it seems that news publishers are better organized and, for the moment, engaging in some self help.

For now it’s baby steps. A broad based publisher boycott of AI scraping, which is technically possible by blocking digital robots from their websites, does not look like it’s in the cards.

However websites can block scrapers if they can’t obtain licensing deals on acceptable terms.

As well, the AI companies are not the monoliths as the Google and Meta monopolies have been in the hyperlink markets in Search and Social, there are as yet no comparable monopoly platforms in the AI market. So news providers could plausibly find commercial leverage by blocking some AI companies while making deals with others.

But as the Brooking Institute’s Radsch and others have pointed out, the deals are not flowing through the entire news ecosystem.

Hoping that may change, major publishers without licensing deals have come together and agreed upon a technical infrastructure for tracking and measuring the chatbots’ use of the online content that news outlets are willing to leave unblocked and available for license. The “SPUR coalition” was founded by leading British news outlets, joined by French and European partners but tellingly only one American news organization, the New York Times. All of the major Canadian publishers have signed on.

Another feature of the green shoots licensing market is a layer of intermediary tech companies that offer their platforms for the digital exchange of licensed content between AI chatbots and publishers. Effectively, the intermediaries act as copyright collectives. Naturally, they take a handsome cut of licensing revenue in doing so. For now, these companies like Cloudflare remain out of the clutches of the AI companies. If the experience of Google establishing a monopoly in digital advertising exchanges repeats itself, the AI companies will try to acquire this layer of intermediaries.

Without being able to predict the shape of a future AI chatbot market in content licensing, it would be nevertheless risky to expect that it would produce good outcomes (or any outcomes at all) for news outlets operating in the local news space, below the waterline of global and national brands.

After all, it was the inability to extend the licensing market in hyperlinked news snippets beyond the news outlets cherrypicked by Google and Meta that lead to the Online News Act.

Perhaps this cynicism could be checked if we were to see more evidence of licensing agreements across the broader news ecosystem.

Last month the Ontario-based Village Media CEO Jeff Elgie, a relentless innovator in community publishing, announced he has a deal with OpenAI. AI technology will power Village’s “Open Door” widget that connects users with community and health resources. If it’s popular, Open Door will draw traffic and build audience loyalty, encouraging readers to stay on his ad-supported news sites and read more stories and click on more ads.

In return, Village has licensed its news content to OpenAI. It’s not clear if money changed hands.

Courtesy of Village Media

Still, it’s a rare licensing deal for a local publisher. Others news outlets might emulate Village. Let’s wait and see.

More likely news outlets will focus on rapid adoption of newsroom AI tools, improving their human-made journalism by exploiting those tools for better content and even monetization. For example, agentic commerce.” News outlets might create “shopping carts” for ordinary news seekers employing AI agents to purchase their articles as part of a daily update package.

If the first 30 years of the Internet is any guide, the speed and path of consumer adoption of AI products will dictate the available opportunities for news entrepreneurs. Some newsrooms will adapt wonderfully. Small and medium sized news businesses, with limited capital and infrastructure, will probably struggle.

The fear is that most local news outlets won’t even have the breathing room to adapt and survive if consumer adoption of AI scales so quickly that chatbots become de facto news organizations and starve news outlets of audience.

In that bleak future, expect political pressure for governments to intervene in the news marketplace yet again in the name of democracy and public access to information.

If they do intervene, the starting point for public policy would be legislating an unambiguous right of intellectual property in news content, regardless of the fine points of copyright law or the outcome of lawsuits. The IP rights generate bargaining power.

The next policy move would be to build a licensing market on top of that rebalanced market power between AI companies and news outlets.

This is what the European Union, Canada and Australia tried to do with hyperlinked news snippets and it drove millions of dollars and euros in time-limited cash settlements. But it did not create a true licensing market. As we know, Big Tech refused to cooperate with legislators and missed its chance to help design a frictionless market platform for licensing news content. The result was that the commodity price for news licensing was effectively negotiated or legislated as a headcount of employed journalists rather than the market value of the journalism they produced.

The same governments see the approaching AI asteroid threatening news journalism.

As was the case with the market in hyperlinked news, the European Union is out front on AI.

An EU legal framework requires AI companies to disclose their ingestion of news content and allow publishers to opt out of content scraping. This effectively establishes the missing property right for news publishers. The debate in EU Parliament has now turned towards setting up a voluntary licensing market in news content that delivers compensation to news outlets.

In a metaphor for Brexit, the United Kingdom initially showed interest in the EU approach and then backed away and adopted a “wait and see” position.

Australia is midway through government consultations that, according to press reports, will arm publishers with enforceable opt-outs from AI scraping and consider a plan for AI companies to deliver cash compensation for news content.

Image courtesy of Maryna Hryhorieva

In Canada, the Carney government is idling its policy engine, sticking to the path chosen by the United Kingdom rather than Europe or Australia .

Prime Minister Carney and his AI minister Evan Solomon have resisted competing proposals to create a clear property right in news content or, the reverse, adopt a US-style “text and data mining” exception to copyright law that would favour more permissionless AI scraping.

Our federal government’s lack of action could be motivated by any number of political, trade or policy reasons, not the least of which is a clogged pipeline of the government’s overall parliamentary agenda.

If Ottawa has any intention of intervening on behalf of news publishers, as it did with the Online News Act, it might be cooly sitting back to see what kind of heat the “first mover” policy makers in Europe and Australia take.

Call it a measure twice, cut once strategy. But while Ottawa is waiting to see what happens in other jurisdictions, the roulette-wheel litigation in American and Canadian courts may carve legal precedents into stone. That raises the prospect of Canadian public policy being set by the US Supreme Court.

***

In reflecting upon what I have written here, it occurs to me that public policy debate about news media takes place in a discourse that privileges innovation and open markets in information. As it should.

But in the end, we need fact based news reporting, by any means necessary. Democracy must defend itself from those who would exploit their rhetorical freedoms to deliberately undermine it (I’m thinking of Plato’s observation recounted in Richard Gingras’ most recent reflections).

It is the duty of political leaders, policy makers and citizens to strengthen an information ecosystem that facilitates, rather than frustrates, the democratic freedoms that allow a free and independent press to exist in the first place.

***

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The Prime Minister, the Netflix tax, and the vox populi

(AI illustration)

October 6, 2026

As I said when Canada-US trade talks broke off in August, the public got there first. Carney got there later.

Three months earlier on June 3rd the Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that he was going to override the CRTC’s decisions to slap Netflix and the Californian streamers with a CanCon cash levy fixed at 6.5% of revenues, paired with the Commission’s 8.5% investment obligation. He tried to sell this preemptive strike to Canadians as cancelling a Netflix tax they would otherwise see on their monthly subscriptions.

It was a weird political moment because “Netflix tax” began its rhetorical life as Conservative Party mantra, circa Stephen Harper. Back then, the Trudeau Liberals initially agreed with the Conservatives. No Netflix tax. But later they changed their minds and passed the Online Streaming Act.

Carney’s revival of the “Netflix tax” vocabulary was surprising. It was also disingenuous in the moment. Overruling the CRTC was a sop to the US streamers and a gullible concession to American trade pressure. To be fair to the Prime Minister, it was possible that Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos had privately threatened him in late May with a retaliatory Canadian price increase.

As I have written previously, much of what constitutes a Netflix tax is imaginary, contrived for political effect.

The CRTC’s 8.5% compulsory streamer investment in Canadian shows is for shows commissioned or licensed for distribution on their own platforms and paying subscribers. Even a large chunk of the Commission’s 6.5% cash tithe that is destined for Canadian media subsidies gets recycled to the streamers’ bottom line because it lowers the cost of the Canadian shows they license for their services.

But at least in theory some of the “Netflix tax” represents a regulatory cost the streamers would prefer to avoid. The likelihood of any amount of it being passed along to consumers depends less on what Netflix would like and more on how subscribers respond to it, what we call price elasticity. In other words, how likely is it that Netflix can succeed in passing along regulatory costs to subscribers?

The answer is that it would depend on the options Netflix subscribers have at their disposal. Those consumer options include paying up, dropping Netflix and leaning into competing services, stepping down in price tier to the streamer’s ad supported service, saving money by rotating on and off a monthly subscription, and so on.

What do Canadians think about a Netflix tax? There have been fewer public opinion polls on our willingness to pay than you might think.

In 2017, OpenMedia polled Canadians on a hypothetical 5% cultural levy on Internet service bills being passed along in its entirety to subscribers. Predictably, the poll found overwhelming hostility. The poll also asked Canadians what they thought about paying HST on their monthly subscriptions —yes, the federal sales tax wasn’t implemented until 2021— and less than a majority of Canadians were okay with it. Such is the power of pocketbook politics.

Now that Carney’s June pivot on the Online Streaming Act has provoked the Netflix tax question again, a new Pollara poll sponsored by the CMPA put it to Canadians.

Vox populi: Canadians are okay with a Netflix tax by a margin of four to one.

Who knew? Certainly not the Prime Minister.

Before your natural skepticism takes command, be advised that parsing the details of the question and polling results doesn’t change the four-to-one indictment of the Carney policy move. But they are worth summarizing anyway.

The main question about a Netflix tax included some editorializing in the question, but overall I think respondents knew what they were voting on:

Some people say the OSA will lead to higher prices, as streaming companies may increase their prices citing the required investments in Canadian shows/movies. Others argue that streaming companies have been raising their prices in Canada without any obligations under the OSA. Since these companies have raised their prices consistently, they have the revenue to meet the Act’s requirements. Others also point out that these companies operate on an international scale and already invest in Canadian shows and movies, suggesting they have both the resources and existing infrastructure to do more.

Given this, would you support or oppose the Government of Canada requiring foreign streaming companies to invest a meaningful, predictable and enforceable portion of their Canadian revenue to develop Canadian shows and movies – even if there is the risk this may lead to them raising prices?

The results are here:

Take note. The combined “support” is 67% and the combined “oppose” is 15%. Hence the four to one margin among decided respondents.

I was intrigued by the unusually high “not sure” number of 19%. It suggests to me that many respondents were honest enough to suspend judgment because of what we don’t know about price elasticity, the amount if any of a potential price increase, or what price increase Netflix thinks it could get away with.

What’s also evident from the polling results is the intensity of support, measured by “strongly support” against “somewhat support.”

That 25% “strong” versus 42% “somewhat” measurement of intensity in support on a pocketbook issue isn’t especially low, but it’s less than the high intensity of support for several other propositions about supporting the Online Streaming Act included in the Pollara poll.

Those other propositions break down into two points. The first is about support in principle for the Online Streaming Act as a tool of cultural policy. The other is support for the OSA in the face of US trade aggression.

On the policy tool itself, Canadians were asked if they support or oppose the OSA’s goal of requiring foreign streamers to “invest a portion of their Canadian revenues into the production of Canadian shows and movies, the same way traditional broadcasters must support Canadian shows and movies.”

Posing the question that way, respondents might have been thinking about the principle of equitable treatment (foreign streamers should not get a free ride) or the intrinsic merits of supporting Canadian shows and movies with the tools provided by the OSA.

Either way, polled support for the Online Streaming Act can be fairly described as overwhelming:

Strongly Support: 41%

Somewhat support: 45%

Somewhat oppose: 9%

Strongly oppose: 6%

This cumulative 86% support for the OSA, which is consistent with findings from other pollsters over the years, is not what you might have guessed by following the coverage of the OSA in the Canadian media whom over time have given full voice to news-making critics of the legislation.

A footnote to the bottom line 86% number is that this support is spread across all Canadian regions and partisan voting blocs. In fact support for the Online Streaming Act is nearly unanimous among Liberal and Bloc Québécois voters, north of 95% in each case. Carney trifles with that at his peril.

The other analytical point in the poll flows from a series of questions responding to the Trump trade war. You can see below that Pollara probed Canadian views on defending the Online Streaming Act and Canadian culture through questions posed on “Buy Canadian” and the swell of national pride in the global success of CanCon exports:

Three other more consequential questions were put to respondents.

When asked if Canada should “stand firm” on the OSA even if it “complicates” trade negotiations, the outcome was:

Strongly support 42%
Somewhat support 32%
Somewhat oppose 10%
Strongly oppose 5%
Don’t know 11%

The cumulative 74% support versus 15% oppose is similar to how the question was answered as year ago in a previous Pollara/CMPA poll. [Correction: The earlier version of this post mixed up the numbers for strongly and somewhat support and drew an inaccurate conclusion about waning intensity within “support.”]

Another related question in the poll tests public opinion on Carney’s alternative cultural strategy, i.e. rolling back the CRTC tithes on US steamers and replacing them with $600M in federal dollars for CanCon production:

As it turns out, Canadians are a big meh on this.

Offered the policy choice, there is majority support of 56% for the CRTC’s tithes and only 20% for Carney’s $600M solution. The high rate of “not sure” suggests the final numbers could change over time.

Lastly, the poll asked what trial lawyers call a leading question.

“With Canada under threat from the United States, is it more important than ever to defend Canadian culture?”

The response was 52% in strong support, 28% somewhat support, 7% somewhat oppose, 6% strongly oppose and 7% don’t know.

That cumulative 80% in support versus 13% in opposition is not only sweeping in its judgment, but the intensity of support (strongly vs somewhat) suggests that when the Carney Liberals return to the bargaining table with Donald Trump they do not have a mandate to finesse or circumnavigate cultural sovereignty.

***

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

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Trust cascading Canadian journalism – Paramount wins the anti-trust battle – California signs off on news subsidies

October 4, 2026

Millions of students use AI to cheat on their assignments, or so we’ve heard.

So it is no surprise that someone claiming to be a independent journalist would use AI to deceive reputable news agencies.

“Daniel Robson,” now exposed as an alias, succeeded in publishing articles in a string of Canadian news and opinion outlets including The Ottawa Citizen, The Hub, Policy Options, the Montreal Gazette, Open Canada and the Western Standard while faking his identity with an AI photo illustration. He also used an AI large language model to write articles and his e-mail correspondence with editors.

Some of the editors had telephone calls with a human voice calling himself Daniel Robson.

But as the editor of Policy Options Les Perreaux confirmed after discovering the deception :

In reviewing our correspondence and the six other submissions the writer sent us which we did not publish, we have identified signs of AI assistance throughout. Image-analysis tools raised questions about the veracity of the photograph he supplied to us. Last October, he also declined an honorarium we occasionally offer to journalists who write for us – an unusual step for an emerging independent journalist.

We should have undertaken more verification before publication. I relied too heavily on the fact that work under Daniel Robson’s name had already appeared in other Canadian publications – a form of trust cascade in which publication itself becomes a credential.

The Globe & Mail, which noted it did not accept stories pitched by Robson, has a comprehensive news story here.

A more salacious story appears in the English-language Türkiye Today which alerted the duped Canadian news outlets. The gist of the story is that the mysterious Robson might be a Moroccan intelligence agent engaged in foreign interference with Canadian news outlets.

None of the Canadian news outlets are accusing the writer of civil or criminal fraud.

What struck me about the reporting on “Robson” was what I would call missing the forest for the trees.

This kind of deception —-including the most serious allegation of state-sponsored planting of stories—-is as old as analog. Large language model AI tools make it easier. Burned once by a “trust cascade” of successful publication elsewhere, newsroom editors will wise up. It’s a warning shot. We forgot that AI can do more than create deep fake videos for Russian bot farms to post on Facebook.

What should really concern us is a failure of our human imagination. A lesson is to be learned from the recent website hacking by autonomous AI agents that escaped their sandboxes at OpenAI and other companies.

In the context of journalism, contemplate a rogue “frontier model” AI agent, or an army of state sponsored AI agents, tirelessly probing with sophisticated array of audio, video, text and photo tools until it can pull off an undetected Robson-at-scale penetration of publishing software at multiple news outlets.

***

Prime Minister Mark Carney recently told the New York Times that one of the good things about building stronger Canadian ties with the European Union was that “the Europeans aren’t going to tell us what we have to put on our landing pages of Netflix or Spotify or whatever, and that stuff matters.”

That called for a MediaPolicy drill down on how the Europeans regulate Netflix and the Californian streamers. You can read about it in my post in Cartt.ca.

Also, I recently teamed up with Stephen Stohn to write in the Toronto Star about the importance of Carney standing up for the Online Streaming Act.

***

This week a US federal judge charged with hearing the anti-trust lawsuit brought by California’s Attorney-General and ten other states against the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger signed off on their out-of-court settlement.

The consensus opinion of the deal is that Paramount, owned by David Ellison and debt-financed by his friend-of-Trump father Larry, was the hands down winner.

You can read the bullet-point analysis in Axios. Deeper pieces are available from the New York Times or The Hollywood Reporter.

The settlement features only “behavioural remedies.” That means promises of post-merger good behaviour but no asset divestitures.

For example, the deal blesses Ellison’s ownership of competing cable news networks CBS and CNN on the condition that Ellison convene an editorial board to protect newsroom autonomy.

The outcome was a bit of a surprise.

California’s AG Rob Bonta held high value cards in this poker game. In court he could persuasively tell a judge that the merged studios would unfairly dominate competition between Hollywood studios, supported by major portfolios in cable television, news, and streaming video. He could win.

Bonta also figured to use Ellison’s financing against him in any settlement talks.

Not only is a big piece of the merger debt held against Ellison pater‘s personal fortune, the Ellisons were on the hook for $7 million daily payouts to Warner shareholders, beginning on October 1st, for any delay in getting court approval for the merger. The trial wasn’t even set to kick off until March 2027. That would be at least a $1.7 billion pill for Ellison to swallow.

But Ellison matched Bonta’s chips, smiled, and raised him. He made a bare knuckled threat to move Paramount studios and a successfully merged Warner Brothers out of California to another state. Bonta described this as “blackmail” and initially dug in.

Blackmail or no, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass begged for settlement. The big Hollywood unions split: IATSE and the Directors Guild for settlement, the Writers and Screen Actors Guilds opposed. The heir apparent to Gavin Newsom in the governor’s mansion, Xavier Becerra, was said to have been swayed by Ellison’s threat.

What tipped the balance was that Californian Democrats blinked. Perhaps eyeing the Democratic Presidential nomination for 2028, Newsom brokered the deal between Ellison and the states.

The deal does not oblige Ellison to keep Paramount Warner in California.

The whole episode was high drama and, for Canadians, reminds one of the Rogers-Shaw merger where the CRTC was sympathetic to Rogers’ pro-merger argument that shifted the focus away from market power wielded against rivals Bell and Telus and towards the creation of a stronger Canadian player fit to take on the media colossi of Netflix, Disney and YouTube. This was the same argument made by the Trump Department of Justice in supporting the Ellisons’ merger.

On a final note: US media is not saying anything about AG Bonta submitting to Governor Newsom. I’m no expert in Californian state law but it appears that the state’s Attorney General does not enjoy the same degree of autonomy from the Governor as we might expect in Canada.

***

As MediaPolicy noted three weeks ago, Californian Democrats pushed a news journalism state subsidy for local news through the state legislature.

Governor Newsom waited until the September 30th deadline and signed off on the bill despite some reservations.

In-state publishers and broadcasters with at least 33% of coverage of Californian current affairs are eligible.

The Californian Community News Act tracks Canada’s federal labour tax credit for hiring and retaining journalists although slightly skewed in favour of smaller news outlets. The Californian dollar amounts are comparable to the Canadian program: $20,000 (USD) per head for the first five journalists and $15,000 thereafter.

California’s projected budget allocation is $40M USD ($57M CDN), covering an estimated 2,600 journalists employed at 600 local news outlets. That is less than Canada’s $75M CDN program for news publishers, covering 3,900 journalists.

In the Californian bill, any new hires that grow the size of the newsroom are supported at $35,000 per salary, a feature rewarding newsroom expansion that Canada’s federal program does not include.

***

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

Between regulatory opposites, Carney must plot a new course for the CRTC

October 2, 2026

Prime Minister Mark Carney recently granted the New York Times an hour-long interview about where he is taking Canada.

Canadian journalists, who would have loved that kind of access to the prime minister, were irked. What ever happened to Canadians telling Canadian stories?

But to heck with cultural irony. There’s an American audience to be educated about Canada.

An interesting item that emerged from the Times coverage was Carney’s candour about Canada’s warming relationship with the European Union. According to the reporting, Carney is well aware of the EU’s economic anemia and does not see a future in which the EU is more important to Canada than the US economy.

But Carney touts the value in trade diversification and stronger geopolitical bonds with Europe. What might interest readers is his illustration of the point with a cultural policy issue…

Continue reading at Cartt.ca

Canadian Heritage Wakes Up (a guest column by Richard Stursberg)

September 26, 2026

Three weeks ago I wrote a post about a big rethink on the financing and marketing of Canadian audio visual content going on behind the scenes at Heritage Canada.

That caught the attention of my good friend Richard Stursberg.

Richard has spent his entire career in communications, broadcasting, film, television and program production.

During the 1980s he was Assistant Deputy Minister Culture and Broadcasting and found himself in the middle of the US-Canada free trade talks. He’s written about that in The Tangled Garden: A Canadian Cultural Manifesto for the Digital Age (2019, Lorimer).

Out of government, Richard was Executive Vice President of AT&T Canada, President of the Canadian Cable Television Association, CEO of the satellite TV companies Starchoice and Cancom, Chairman of the Canadian Television Fund (now the Canada Media Fund), and Executive Director of Telefilm Canada. Basically, that makes him an expert-by-experience on CanCon funding and marketing.

He achieved his greatest notoriety from 2004 to 2010 as the iconoclastic head of English services at the CBC. Afterwards, he served as President of the writers’ organization PEN Canada from 2017 to 2021.

Richard has written several books, my favourite read is the irreverent The Tower of Babble: Sins, Secrets and Successes Inside the CBC (2012, Douglas & McIntyre). He’s written countless articles including MediaPolicy guest columns here and here.

***

By Richard Stursberg

A month ago, the Department of Canadian Heritage released seven discussion papers on the future of the Canadian audio-visual sector. Those who received them were apparently required to sign non-disclosure agreements. It’s not clear why.

The papers are, by and large, thoughtful, clear and forward looking. They seem to indicate that the department is contemplating at least three radical changes to the way that film and TV have been financed and regulated in Canada over the last half century.

The first suggests that the current definition of Canadian content should be changed. The department wants to explore “…how tax credits and funding programs could explicitly recognise cultural characteristics of content (stories, settings, language, underlying works)”. This would be a radical departure from the existing points-based system, which defines as Canadian anything made by Canadians.

The second is equally radical. It proposes that success measures for production financing would be based not just on “production volumes, but by cultural impact and audience connection”. The department is signalling that making shows and movies that nobody watches is no longer acceptable.

Third, there is a proposal to collapse the major financing agencies – Telefilm, the Canadian Media Fund and the National Film Board – into one undertaking. The rationale for this is presumably to simplify production financing, and focus it more clearly on projects that have “…cultural characteristics and audience engagement”.

These are three very good ideas. They are not difficult to do and their impact in terms of revitalising Canada’s audio-visual sector would be positive and profound.

Let’s consider them one-by-one.

The traditional definition of Canadian content is based on a ten point system that measures the number of Canadians in creative positions working on a project (the director, writer, lead actors, etc.). If a show has enough of them and is made by a Canadian production company, it can qualify for taxpayer funded financial support. Over the years, this has led to chronic abuse. Shows and films were made that were explicitly set in the United States or in some neutral place that could be easily seen as the United States.

This was done to make them attractive to US audiences and, thus, easier to both finance and generate a profit. This has been done repeatedly over many years.

The most recent and egregious example is Schitt’s Creek, the CBC hit comedy that won endless Emmys. It was made by Canadians and financed by the Canadian public. It was agreed from the outset of its production that it would never mention Canada, as though it was embarrassed to be associated with the country. Nobody watching the show would ever know that it was Canadian. Its contribution to Canada’s brand, whether as a country or as a fine producer of TV shows, was effectively zero.

The UK has a very different approach. To qualify for financial support, TV shows and movies must meet a “cultural test”, based not on who makes the programs or movies, but on whether they are distinctively British. It has not compromised the quality of British products or reduced their export. British exports of cultural exports per capita dwarf those of Canada.

There is a lesson in this. Successful exporters of films and TV shows do not hide the sensibilities or characteristics of their countries of origin. They make them explicit. The same has happened with distinctively Canadian products. Bell Media’s Heated Rivalry, for example, is as Canadian as can be imagined, and has sold into practically every territory in the world.

The second proposal is an essential measure. For years, the most important financiers of Canadian movies (Telefilm) and TV shows (CBC) have been largely indifferent to audience performance. In 2000, Telefilm was required to get 5% of the Canadian box office in exchange for an injection of $100 million from the federal government. In 2005, it made 5.3%. Since then, it has been downhill. In 2024, Canadian films took 2.8% of the domestic box office and 1.7% in 2025. This is largely because Telefilm has substituted a focus on Canadians as a whole to the tastes of much narrower audience segments.

The same has been true of the CBC. In the first 10 years of the 21st century it revised its programming strategy to focus on making distinctively Canadian shows for the widest possible audiences. It commissioned Little Mosque on the Prairie, Heartland, Battle of the Blades, and a host of others. Its prime-time schedule eclipsed Global’s with its all American offer. Since then, like Telefilm, it has catered to smaller and smaller audience segments, and seen its ratings collapse.

This has not been the case at Bell Media’s Crave. It has pursued a strategy of commissioning Canadian shows – Shoresy, Letterkenny, Heated Rivalry – that are unapologetically Canadian in their sensibility and sense of humour. The result has been big hits for their service, with ratings eclipsing many of their American shows, and often becoming their most popular offerings.

In Canada, like all other countries, success with audiences is intimately tied up with making shows that reflect its history, preoccupations, characters and style. How could it be otherwise?

Finally, the third proposal, to collapse and simplify Canada’s production financing infrastructure, is also an excellent idea. It is far too complicated, bureaucratic and expensive. A few years ago, my colleague Stephen Armstrong and I, using 2017 numbers, modelled the administrative costs of the current arrangements. We estimated that they cost the government $30 million a year and a comparable amount for producers. Given inflation, the total costs today would likely be closer to $75-80 million today.

The system is also replete with bureaucrats making decisions on what gets financed and what does not. Captured as they have been for many years by political correctness, they have focussed, as mentioned earlier, on narrower and narrower audience segments. The results can be seen in the failure of most films and TV shows to connect with Canadian audiences.

The department is right to want to collapse the funding agencies, but it has not gone far enough. The better course would be to collapse them and transfer the resulting savings into the existing tax credits. They are simple to administer, administratively inexpensive, and do not involve bureaucrats substituting their judgement for the market. This would make the system much easier to navigate, and more responsive to the government’s desire to finance movies and TV shows that emphasise “Canadian cultural characteristics and audience engagement.”

The Department of Heritage’s new approaches are to be applauded. They will, however, be resisted by all the existing interest groups – the producers, the guilds and all the bureaucrats at the funding agencies. This will make it hard to achieve a political consensus to move forward. The Department would be wise to open the conversation by eliminating the non-disclosure agreements and encouraging Canadians without vested interests to participate.

Mark Carney, Canada’s cultural export

September 24, 2026

In this historical moment, Prime Minister Mark Carney has become our greatest cultural export. He is considered in his pronouncements, good natured and unflappable. He is the global anti-Trump.

Occasionally, the imperious CEO gets loose. In a rare appearance in the House of Commons for Question Period, Carney was obliged to grind out the parry and return of Opposition barbs.

Having gamely returned service to Pierre Poilievre’s first serves on issues of affordability, Carney swivelled to meet the incoming from Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet on the PM’s repeal of the Digital Services Tax and Netflix cash contributions to Canadian media funds.

“Mr. Speaker,” said Blanchet, “the Prime Minister personally cancelled contributions of any kind by tech giants to the economy or the arts in Quebec and Canada, including through taxes or content creation, simply to appease the American President. The effort fell flat. Although I remain unconvinced, the Prime Minister claims to have walked away from the negotiation table for language and culture-related reasons. Since the effort failed, should the Prime Minister consider reinstating the digital services tax and allowing cultural contributions by the web giants?“

After a reply offered in banal Parliamentary vocabulary, the Prime Minister steadied for Blanchet’s follow up volley.

Blanchet suggested that Carney’s strategy to build closer ties to the European Union meant that Canadian alignment with the EU’s bolder approach to digital taxes and streamer contributions would make sense after breaking off trade talks.

The Prime Minister stood up and delivered a curt, “No, Mr. Speaker.” And sat down. Pointe finale.

Now it helps to watch this on video so you can appreciate the dismissive tone and body language. The clip also captures the bemusement rippling through the Bloc MPs seated behind Blanchet.

As the Prime Minister probably appreciated afterwards, that kind of answer won’t cut it in Québec, a province that loves legislation regulating streamers so much it has two.

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With the House of Commons sitting again, Parliamentary committees picked up from where they left off in the spring.

In the modern age of an all powerful Prime Minister’s Office, these independent committees frequently resemble teenager house parties when the parents go out of town. Don’t destroy the place and you can do much pretty much anything you want.

The Finance committee is chaired by Karina Gould, the Toronto–area MP and former cabinet minister who made an impressive run for the Liberal leadership in 2025. This week Gould delivered the Liberal committee majority’s report on public submissions for the upcoming 2026 budget.

It’s not all that newsworthy when the Finance Committee reports on its “pre-budget” consultation. Its MPs make loads of budget recommendations in policy areas already covered by fellow MPs sitting on other Parliamentary committees like Canadian Heritage. And in a Budget that remains in the tight fisted grip of the Finance Minister and the PM, the Finance MPs’ recommendations are far from being a first draft of the final Budget.

On culture, the Finance MPs made eleven recommendations.

Some are guaranteed never to see the light of day.

A recommendation that Internet Service Providers (i.e. Bell, Rogers, Québecor) begin paying the same five per cent culture levy that their cable divisions pay is a non-starter.

Recall how in June 2017 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau humiliated Canadian Heritage committee chair and fellow Liberal MP Hedy Fry by holding a pre-emptive news conference to dismiss out of hand her committee’s recommendation favouring an ISP tax.

Other recommendations may be under more serious consideration by the PMO. For example, this omnibus recommendation on public spending on news journalism captures several of them:

Support the sustainability and growth of newsroom jobs by maintaining the Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit at the current 35% rate and expanding eligibility criteria to include owner-operators, employees in broadcasting, and partners in news businesses. Budget 2026 should also direct at least 25% of federal advertising spending toward private-sector Canadian news outlets, address disparities in tax treatment for advertising, and extend the Local Journalism Initiative indefinitely to support the creation of original civic journalism in underserved communities.

The other recommendation that caught my eye was the strengthening of the intellectual property rights of news organizations in response to the ingestion of their content by AI large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude:

The committee further recommends that the Government of Canada protect Canadian news publishers’ intellectual property in the context of artificial intelligence by requiring government AI suppliers to commit to the principles of transparency, consent, and attribution when using copyright-protected content, requesting that the Competition Bureau examine competition issues in search and AI markets, including crawler practices.

And here is a companion recommendation that applies to any kind of Canadian media:

Ensure that artificial intelligence (AI) developers obtain permission and provide compensation for the use of copyright-protected works in training data, reject any new or expanded copyright exceptions for text and data mining, and require transparent disclosure and record-keeping of training sources to support a functioning licensing market.

There are many public policy issues packed into those two paragraphs.

But to news publishers, the issue is simple. They want to be compensated (or even asked permission) by the AI giants for ingesting their content, first for the “training data” that birthed the LLMs’ vocabulary and gave them the context to understand news content, and also for the “output” summaries that LLMs provide to inquisitive users like you and me.

The news publishers’ claim is that AI ingestion is not only without permission and compensation, it’s grabbing intellectual property that news publishers might use to make their own LLMs in open-sourced applications. As well, the LLMs are using ingested news content to create de facto news outlets that directly compete with the news publishers.

Faced with litigation from news publishers, the AI global giants have signed off some pick-and-choose deals with top news outlets.

It’s reminiscent of what happened ten years ago in news hyperlinking by Google and Facebook, ultimately leading to the Online News Act C-18. The web giants made a few deals on the cheap with big news organizations and stonewalled the smaller news publishers.

To those unlucky news outlets, the web giants offered instead free distribution of their hyperlinks in order to draw traffic to their websites. Even if that quid pro quo was ever adequately remunerative to publishers big and small for hyperlinks, it’s not on offer from AI companies for ingestion, including again Google and Meta.

That’s because the notion of an exchange value of “content for traffic” doesn’t apply to AI ingestion of news content that is killing traffic referrals from web platforms to news outlets, as the graph below indicates.

So what next?

There is already litigation over ingestion that will end up in the US Supreme Court and maybe our’s too. The Trump administration has lined up in support the ingesters. The Carney government is sitting on the fence.

His MPs on the Finance committee are recommending he get off of it.

finarp04-e Download

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Looking away from AI Armageddon

(“Agent Smith” – AI illustration with images from Shutterstock)

September 19, 2026

Twelve years ago in This Changes Everything Canadian author Naomi Klein coined the phrase “don’t look away.”

She meant the human impulse to be overwhelmed by the apocalyptic threat of climate change and, in despair, turn the mind’s attention to something else, or at least avoid meeting the thing eye to eye.

Last week the news cycle was dominated by a confirmation from Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei that frontier AI models might plausibly inflict human disaster at a civilizational scale.

Amodei projected that that constant improvement in the capabilities of the most powerful AI agents for autonomous self-improvement might lead to planetary disaster in the form of global financial crisis, world plague caused by bioweapons, or the capture of the Internet by one or more AI agents. And that this could happen soon, in less than five years.

What the Anthropic chief proposed was the regulation of AI labs analogous to government food inspectors authorized to enter premises and expose unsafe practices on the production line.

As well, Amodei said that the situation was so dangerous that the US federal government should condone an organized effort by AI competitors to slow down the cyclical race to release of frontier models so that proper safety design could be ensured.

After Amodei’s message sunk in to popular consciousness, important public figures lined up to tell us in one way or another that we should indeed “look away.”

Predictably, President Trump declared it all “a hoax.”

Aidan Gomez, the Cohere CEO who enjoys the status of the Canadian government’s favoured AI entrepreneur, didn’t call it a hoax. But he dismissed Amodei’s proposal to slow down development of frontier models to allow for better safety practices. According to Gomez, Anthropic’s warning (seconded by Elon Musk and Open AI’s Sam Altman) was cartel behaviour designed to keep smaller AI companies from catching up in development of their own advanced AI products.

Our federal government treaded carefully in its response. In various statements by the Prime Minister and AI minister Evan Solomon, the ruling Liberals expressed support for some kind of improved regulatory oversight of frontier AI. But there was no endorsement of Anthropic’s proposition that leading AI companies agree—with the US government’s blessing of an anti-trust waiver— to slow down to reduce the risk of AI Armageddon.

But the most powerful inducement to “looking away” is the fear raised by Trump and other US politicians that restraining AI development is an invitation to China to catch up and surpass Silicon Valley. That would pose an unacceptable cyberwarfare threat to national security, the thinking goes.

To test the validity of this trump card for those that would “look away,” I recommend Ezra Klein’s latest podcast interview of the Carnegie Institute’s Matt Sheehan.

Despite the Look Away advice from elected politicians, the public will have its say. The AI safety threat has the potential to make an outsized impact on the US mid-term elections in early November.

So too Hollywood will do its bit to raise awareness with a new blockbuster (imagine the scramble to get into production!) as it has for decades with apocalyptic movies such as 2001:A Space Odyssey, War Games, Terminator, and The Matrix.

As brilliant a species as we are, we’ve now created and bequeathed at least three genuine threats of apocalypse to our children and grandchildren: nuclear annihilation, climate disaster, and now AI superintelligence.

We have succeeded (for now) in containing the first, continue to fail in respect of the second, and must decide whether to even pay attention to the third.

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In case of trade war, break glass

(Satiric AI illustration. The painting in the cabinet is from Toiletpaper by Cattelan and Ferrari)

September 16, 2026

For the moment, the American trade war launched against Canada feels like it’s in a lull.

Trump’s retaliation to Canada’s September 8th retaliation was modest (although that’s no consolation to Brampton’s auto workers).

Of course that could change in a heartbeat. No doubt the Prime Minister’s team has a ready list of “break glass in case of emergency” retaliatory measures, just in case.

It’s an opportunity to seriously consider a media policy proposed many times since Google and Facebook seized most of the Canadian ad market: legislating the extension of our Buy Canada tax deductions of advertising purchases from legacy media to also cover online media.

This idea, which goes by the moniker “close the loophole,” proposes to correct the omission of online advertising in sections 19, 19.01, and 19.1 of the Income Tax code, plugging a $2 billion hole in the corporate tax write-offs that Canadian companies are allowed when buying ads in foreign media like Google, Facebook, the online BBC, and the online New York Times.

Under the decades old tax code provisions as they stand, Canadian companies buying ads in legacy media only get the write off —-setting off advertising expenses against taxable revenues— if they buy ads in Canadian legacy media.

Here’s how the Canadian tax code works now:

Section 19 says that only ads bought by Canadian companies in Canadian owned newspapers are eligible to be deducted from taxable income.

Section 19.1 says that ads purchased in a “foreign broadcasting undertaking” aren’t eligible for set off either. In other words, only ad buys in Canadian broadcasting programs are eligible.

What’s not caught by those two provisions is “periodicals,” meaning print magazines. That’s done a little differently:

Section 19.01 says that when Canadian companies buy ads in foreign magazines distributed in Canada they can only write off the expense if the magazine has at least 80% Canadian editorial content, i.e. written by a Canadian for the Canadian market only. If the magazine is less than 80% CanCon, the Canadian ad buyer can still deduct 50% of the cost.

The unique provisions for magazines is an outcome of a famous trade dispute between Canada and the US in the late 1990s. You can read MediaPolicy’s explainer here.

The argument in favour of extending these Buy Canada rules to online media has been made for many years by many advocates (including me when I was spokesperson for Unifor on media issues).

Forgive me for burying the lede, but the argument is being made again by a large group of Canadian publishers and broadcasters in a federal budget submission.

It appears to be a grass roots movement. The budget pitch was organized by Jim Barr of Seekers Media and Chuck Lapointe of Narcity. An online petition-style endorsement netted signatures from over 50 big and small news organizations, here.

What’s novel about their approach is the twinning of a close-the-loophole proposal with a federal ad voucher program —-partial cash reimbursement—- for Canadian businesses buying ads in legacy or online Canadian media, including news media.

The proposal scales the size of the voucher, a refundable tax credit for ad buys, ranging from 75% reimbursement for small Canadian companies to 30% for large. That puts an emphasis on local ad buying by Main Street retailers, less on national buys by big Canadian chains.

According to the pitch, the estimated $2.2 billion banked by the federal treasury after removing the write off for buying ads in Google and Facebook pays for the unspecified cost of the ad voucher program. “The net cost to the government is zero,” the submission says.

That’s a speculative costing, beyond the means of the media organizations who are advocating the trade-off and perhaps unknowable except to the Department of Finance.

Back in the spring, Senator Andrew Cardozo and I took a look at these issues in our report, Making News Media Sustainable.

On closing the section 19 loophole in favour of a Buy Canada ad purchasing tax policy for online media, we made three different proposals:

Do nothing for now. We’re in a trade war and it’s a hand grenade.
Do it now but support it with a government plan to grow online Canadian media platforms that can provide Canadian advertisers with a substitute for Google and Facebook.
Do it the way it was done in 1998 for print magazines, which means continuing the write off for ad buys in foreign-owned media if their editorial policy is to publish and promote Canadian content.

This last point has policy potential as it plugs in directly to the CRTC’s order to US online undertakings like Netflix and Roku to make Canadian content more discoverable and visible on their platforms.

As for the ad buying voucher, the Senator and I advocated for what we called market facing support for news journalism. One proposal (only a single paragraph) suggested an ad voucher program. One of the merits cited was that ad purchases can be an effective proxy for public demand and choice of news publications.

Keeping Canadian Ad Dollars in Canada – Pre-Budget Submission for the Fall Budget Download

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Support for the Online Streaming Act is up – the story of Global News – California waits for Governor to sign a QCJO bill

September 12, 2026

A new Nanos poll commissioned by Bloomberg News finds increased support for public policy requiring US streamers to contribute financially to Canadian content.

Support rose from 67% to 73% since Nanos last tested the waters four years ago while the Online Streaming Act was being debated in Parliament.

Detailed results from the new poll have not been released other than Bloomberg reporting them in a news story. Assuming it’s the same question as the May 2022 poll, respondents were asked whether they believe US streamers should contribute financially to the creation of Canadian content “in the same way” as Canadian broadcasters.

As an indicator of the intensity of that support in 2022, the 67% yes vote was divided between “support” (39%) and “somewhat support” (28%). Eleven per cent were unsure. Until we get a peek at the full Nanos report, it’s unknown how much those numbers have changed. (Update 14/8/26: the full report shows increased intensity of “support” (48%) and “somewhat support” (25%). The “unsures” are down to 9%).

In any event the new 73% number is a jab in the ribs to Prime Minister Mark Carney who allowed US trade pressure to push him in the opposite direction. In June the Prime Minister overturned the CRTC’s order that the streamers contribute 6.5% of revenues in cash to media financing funds and another 8.5% to their own investments in Canadian shows. Domestic broadcasters contribute a total of 25% of revenues to Canadian content.

The Carney government is now deliberating its guidance to the CRTC on a new framework for streamer contributions. Even prior to Carney’s intervention, the text of the Online Streaming Act and the CRTC’s implementation of it expected less of foreign streamers than Canadian broadcasters.

At the time of their intervention, Carney and cultural and identity minister Marc Miller claimed that overruling the CRTC wasn’t a response to US trade pressure but rather their sensitivity to subscription pricing.

On that note, the Hollywood Reporter has published a sassy story about escalating streaming subscription prices in the US where streamers have been steadily raising prices well above the rate of inflation. The content-lean Apple TV has tripled its price since launch in 2019. Netflix Premium is up 125% since 2013 (while inflation was 38% over that period of time).

***

For those that still admit to having ever met Justin Trudeau (I did, he’s tall!), you’ll be interested to know that the drama teacher has become a drama producer.

No wisecracking, ‘kay? The former PM is going into the independent movie making business with his old sidekick and chief of staff, Katie Telford. Nom de guerre of the new enterprise is Hope and Hard Work.

I will let his press release do the explaining.

***

Steve Faguy has written a well informed and balanced account of the gradual demise, possibly fatal, of Corus Entertainment and its Global News television subsidiary.

He sizes up the various culprits: the Shaw family’s restructuring of its various business divisions and debt loads, the CRTC’s astonishing lethargy, the federal government’s inaction, and Rogers’ cutthroat raid on Corus’ profitable US programming. Like the collective assassins of Julius Caesar, it’s hard to pin the crime on one suspect alone.

Now a penny stock loaded with debt, here’s hoping that Global can survive.

One point Faguy doesn’t make, and it could make all of the difference to Global’s survival, is that the federal government’s Online News Act injects $3.9M annually into the television network. If culture and identity minister Marc Miller follows through with his promise to extend “QCJO” journalist labour tax credits to broadcasters, that’s roughly another $8M.

In 2025, Global spent $119M on television news programming. According to Unifor, Global has laid off 173 union members since early 2024.

If the QCJO money materializes, it should be announced in the Fall budget.

***

It’s intriguing to follow Californian media policy from afar.

As the home turf of Big Tech and Hollywood, you might expect corporate interests to dictate public policy.

Not necessarily.

When five Democratic federal congress representatives from California joined House Republicans in condemning Canada’s Online Streaming Act, the remaining 47 congress representatives did not. Neither did the state’s two Senators.

At the state level, the legislature is Democrat-controlled from top to bottom and elected officials insist on lobbing hot potatoes in the lap of Governor Gavin Newsom.

Over the course of twenty-four months culminating this August, Newsom endorsed, gutted and then revived the state Assembly’s modest Californian knock-off of Canada’s Online News Act, based on matching $20 million contributions from Google and the state.

Now the legislature has overwhelmingly passed AB2222, the Community News Act. The Canadian policy analogy would be the federal labour tax credit on journalist salaries. Newsom has until the end of the month to sign it, or it dies.

The Community News Act tracks our QCJO labour tax credit for hiring and retaining journalists. The dollar amounts are comparable: $20,000 (USD) per head for the first five journalists and $15,000 thereafter. Any new hires that grow the size of the newsroom are supported at $35,000 per salary.

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Running on contact: Something Else for CanCon financing

AI photo illustration

September 6, 2026

As long as I can remember, Canadian critics of the Online Streaming Act and the last sixty years of regulatory measures supporting Canadian culture have rarely articulated what they would do differently, were it left up to them.

The thinking behind the critique of Canadian cultural policy must be one of two things.

It could be a steadfast belief that Canadians deserve a free and unregulated market where Canadian art and artists compete with American content without assistance.

Maybe in this wide open North American market we would choose lots of Canadian content, maybe not. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer recently described this as “letting capitalism do its thing and let people choose.”

If not this open borders strategy for culture, the argument that there’s an alternative to the Online Streaming Act remains an unspoken “something else.”

The Carney government is preparing to do something else. In the most Carneyesque way.

In August, Heritage Canada quietly circulated a series of seven discussion papers to a select list of industry stakeholders in Canada’s audio-visual world. No one claims authorship but the unpublished PDF document was generated by Lisa Gotlieb, Heritage Canada’s Manager of Audio Visual Policy.

The proposal is to build up Canadian film and television production companies that make visibly themed Canadian film and television content, exploit AI technology in both production and distribution, retain their copyright and intellectual property for future growth, and cultivate audiences loyal to the brand that producers nurture.

Reduced to a baseball analogy, the idea is to field a contact hitting offence like last season’s Toronto Blue Jays. A team that steadily generates baserunners and rejects the swing, miss and home run strategy.

The current model of funding Canadian content doesn’t get a warm applause in these documents. In fact it gets politely disparaged as “project by project” funding of CanCon shows that doesn’t adequately incentivize or reward IP-based branding, iconically Canadian content, growth and audience.

The policy narrative scans strongly binary —old system bad, new system good— and I suggest they be read with a critical eye. Part one of seven is available here.

1 – Harnessing Homegrown Intellectual Property – EN Download

In these documents, Heritage expresses dissatisfaction with an ecosystem of modestly capitalized independent Canadian producers running in place on a project-by-project treadmill without a clear path to growth.

Less fundamentally, shade is thrown on the traditional “headcount” formula that ties government and industry financing to productions hiring mostly Canadian producers, writers, directors, actors and film crews but without a formal commitment to visibly Canadian terrain and screenplays.

In the new world, Canadian film and television producers would become a feisty We-the-North of scaled up studios that would not sell off library rights or global first release to US streamers. That might induce Canadian producers to stop putting quite so much American cream in their CanCon coffee (think of the nationally androgynous Schitt’s Creek).

Relentlessly throughout the policy papers, the authors tout a growth agenda. That rhymes with Carney’s banker vocabulary of investment, building, growth, global markets, and a measurable return on public investment.

Once you get past Carney vibe, there are some engaging ideas.

The most fundamental is to restructure the current funding model that combines money and gatekeeping rules from four federal agencies, the CRTC, the Canada Media Fund ($216M in federal spending), Telefilm support for cultural exports ($150M), the National Film Board ($72M) and the federal government’s CAVCO production tax credits ($540M).

As industry insider Brad Danks explained back in June in a MediaPolicy interview (or see a refreshed version in Broadcast Dialogue), the current funding system places all bets on production financing of shows and none of it on rewarding success. Success is defined as the build out of Canadian platform distribution and audience development. Or the aggressive adoption of AI technology. It’s a strategy for cultural sovereignty that is implicit in encouraging producers to tighten their grip on cradle-to-grave distribution rights instead of cashing out these rights piecemeal to Netflix and other global platforms.

Somebody has to quarterback this reformed funding model. The authors of the Heritage documents explicitly endorse an expanded National Film Board (perhaps merging the 300 staff of the Heritage CAVCO office, the Canada Media Fund and Telefilm into the much larger NFB).

The policy papers go out of their way to laud the NFB’s unique combination of policy expertise and in-house content production. I’m guessing authors regard Telefilm and the CMF as the guardians of the old system that Heritage wants to disrupt.

The papers also moot the possibility of the federal government treating the audio-visual industry as a major investment opportunity worthy of a reliable stream of earmarked infrastructure cash from ISED or regional development funds. Although the authors don’t mention the $600 million pot of cultural cash that Carney announced in June, that is also a possible source of recalibrated program spending in the new model.

Most of these policy ideas can be traced back to ex-Deputy Minister Isabelle Mondou’s recommendations to former culture and identity minister Steven Guilbeault who approved them before leaving cabinet in late 2025. The policy momentum within Heritage is in place and the Prime Minister’s “build it” philosophy would seem hospitable to the change. Take note: Mondou now works in the PMO.

The trade war is also an accelerant to change. President Trump has his eye on Canada’s share of global streamer film and television productions. He is supporting Hollywood’s request that US Congress legislate a federal film and television production tax credit to draw more work stateside.

If Congress acts, film and television producers in Canada, the United Kingdom and European countries could all lose some production volume to Hollywood and other US states.

That would make Heritage’s “build it” agenda for home grown CanCon production a more pressing matter. According to Heritage, foreign film and television production in Canada is ten times the spending on Canadian content although only half of the total hours of industry employment.

It’s no coincidence that Deputy Minister Mondou warned minister Guilbeault that “the balance between Canadian content and Foreign Location and Service Production [in Canada], has shifted in favour of Foreign Location and Service Production which is vulnerable to the current tariff threat and other protectionist measures coming from the United States.”

We will see if the Heritage proposal gels in time for November’s federal budget.

Source: CMPA Profile 2025

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