Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Meta’s “Faustian bargain” – Paramount, so much winning – Millennial beer buddies have at it on ‘Elbows Up’

February 28, 2026

Meta’s ban on Canadian news and the rumour mill about the federal government being interested in fixing it has dragged on for several months. 

It seems that Meta and Ottawa are talking about something that touches upon licensing of news content for Meta’s AI tools, age verification for social media accounts, the Online News Act, and Meta’s news ban on Facebook and Instagram.

Earlier this month, Meta spokesperson Rachel Curran was invited to a ten-minute spot on David Cochrane’s CBC news hour to discuss Meta’s pitch to have the federal government impose age verification responsibilities on app stores (Google and Apple) rather than apps (Meta).

At the eight minute mark they pivot to the news ban and Meta’s recent chats with the Liberal government.

“We would love to have news back,” said Curran, which doesn’t exactly square with her adamant position that as an advertising-driven business they get no commercial value from news content.

Her read-out of Meta’s talks with the Liberals was that the government agreed with Meta’s view.

That’s an astonishing claim —not denied by the government as yet— given that the Online News Act was built on precisely the opposite foundation, the government’s policy conclusion that Facebook monetizes news content and exploits its commanding market position in social media to shortchange news publishers in what would otherwise be a fair market in licensing payments for news snippets and hyperlinks. 

A more nuanced answer from Curran might have been that Meta is willing to pay for news content from some news publishers, but not from most others, and therefore a mandatory licensing regime doesn’t make sense. 

The idea that some news content generates ad revenue for Meta, but some content does not, is a value proposition that could be true but it has never been proven one way or another and Meta has no intention of putting it to the test.

The Online News Act gave Meta a chance to prove such a claim by negotiating different price points for different news outlets. But prevented by the Online News Act from cherry picking news outlets, Meta instead chose the nuclear option of a news ban.

Now we’re back to “Go” on the Monopoly board and Meta wants to cherry pick deals with chosen news outlets for the ingestion of news content into the training of its AI tools.

Curran tried to obscure the cherry picking by making the shamelessly false statement that Online News Act is preventing Meta and news outlets from engaging in negotiations over AI content (the Online News Act only regulates “making news available” to the public and would require amendments to have it apply to content licensing for the training of AI tools). 

Alternatively, Meta wants news content in order to offer AI products that mimic search engines and embed news links in its chat replies. Yes, that might well be covered by the Online News Act and so Curran would be right, the Online News Act is an obstacle to implementing Meta’s evolving global model of monetizing third party content without licensing it.

But the important take-away here is that Meta is pitching a deal to Ottawa: repeal the Online News Act, let Meta cherry pick a few Canadian news outlets for licensing deals, and in return Meta will allow news publishers and their content back onto Facebook and Instagram.

The President of the Canadian Association of Journalists Brent Jolly dubbed this “a Faustian bargain,” but a more descriptive characterization would be “total capitulation by Ottawa.”

Removing the news ban would certainly help some news publishers, especially start-ups, who are still willing to put their business faith in Meta-controlled distribution. But the political value of the Liberals of taking such a lop sided deal seems minimal.

***

The battle to buy Warner Brothers Discovery is over.

This week the WBD board accepted Paramount’s improved $31 per share offer as “superior” to its tentative deal with Netflix, which declined to bid higher. It’s an $111 billion USD deal in the end.

You could spend the rest of your weekend reading analyses of the dramatic bidding war. For something short and punchy, here is Aakash Gupta’s X post. 

The deal is supposed to catapult Paramount into a far better competitive position with the streaming thoroughbreds Netflix, Disney, YouTube and Amazon, improving upon its current also-ran position. With a mountain of debt financing sitting on Paramount’s post-merger balance sheet, major layoffs and studio production cost controls are a good bet. 

Prior to the improved share bid, Paramount tried to satisfy the WBD board and its major shareholders with a key promise to buy its laggard cable assets (including CNN) and other guarantees around break-up fees and the reliability of its debt financing. In the end, it had to pay more.

Netflix didn’t want to pay more and may have been listening to the chorus of critics who thought they were overpaying, even with a lower per share price and Netflix stock swaps for WBD shareholders.

One interesting view was that Netflix might get more bang for its buck buying Spotify instead of a bigger share of the video streaming market through WBD’s prestige HBO content and WBD’s IP brands and massive movie archive.

Paramount is ultimately owned by Larry Ellison, third richest man on the planet and tight-with-Trump. The New York Times has a useful overview of Ellison’s budding media empire in technology, movies, cable news, and TikTok USA. 

There will be at least two story lines for MediaPolicy readers to follow once the deal is closed. 

The first is what happens to CNN News. In less than a year, Ellison has acquired control of CBS News and now CNN. 

CBS News is already being repositioned towards a more conservative audience. 

CNN —disparaged for years by Republicans as the “Clinton News Network”—  seems a good candidate for being starved for cash, stripped for parts or transformed into Fox News 3 unless Ellison is shrewd enough to  hang on to a centre-left audience for advertisers. Certainly his friend in the White House expects a conservative CNN.

On the latter point, Ellison may have jotted down notes on Jeff Bezos’ business misjudgment in humbling the Washington Post to appease Trump.

The other story is Canadian: will Ellison renew or let the HBO  licensing deal with Bell Media expire and offer HBO as a stand-alone streaming service in Canada (in a bundle with Paramount Plus, or separately). 

If Bell loses the profitable HBO content stream, its entire broadcast enterprise becomes very weak, possibly an intolerable drag on its bottom line. 

This merger drama started by WBD CEO David Zaslav isn’t quite over of course. There are anti-trust hurdles for Paramount, even with a friendly government in Washington DC. 

The Attorney-General of California Rob Bonta is talking out loud about challenging the deal. But anti-trust is notoriously a long shot both in timeline and chances of success.

Regardless, the deal may not close for a year, an election year,  and the Congressional Democrats are not going to let this merger go gently into the night.

***

In December I wrote about the book Elbows Up, an anthology of centre-left English Canadian and Indigenous voices responding to Donald Trump’s annexation threats.

I wasn’t deeply impressed by the book and said so. But I recommend an entertaining follow up: The Hub’s Harrison Lowman video interview of the book’s editor, CBC Radio host Elamin Abdelmahmoud.

Lowman had the same problem with the book that I did: no conservative voices and more than a generous dose of settler-state vocabulary that seems at odds with forging the ecumenical political bonds and links required for resisting US hegemony.

His guest had no good answer for the parochial exclusion of conservative perspectives on a common Canadian challenge, the threat of annexation: he weakly implied a lack of interest from conservatives to meet his time sensitive call-out for contributions. 

But Abdelmahmoud is quick-witted to say the least, and he did a good job of explaining the importance of Canada and Canadians integrating the Indigenous perspective of dispossession, domination and death into our national consciousness of who we are, what we want to be, and, as pointed out in the book, why Trump’s threats provide a perfect opportunity to advance our reconciliation project.

Lowman and Abdelmahmoud, conservative and progressive bookends, are good friends in their private lives and listening to the interview is like sitting back and appreciating a robust argument over beers. That makes it an almost perfect metaphor for the national conversation we might have. 

***

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; 

or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;

or follow @howardalaw on X or Howard Law on LinkedIn.

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved. 

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

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

Federal action on online harms is now a political no brainer

February 26, 2026

The most casual observer of public opinion on Ottawa taking action against harmful online content will have long concluded, this ain’t no battle.

Canadians categorically support government action against online harms.

The leading policy proposals focus on harms to kids with the prescribed remedies of bans on youth accounts and regulatory take-down laws to shield tweens and teens from porn, self-harm content and predators.

The only roadblocks to federal action in Canada —and they should not be underestimated— are the potential for Trump-induced trade chaos and on the other hand the possibility that the Official Opposition will keep a Liberal online harms bill, once tabled, bottled up in Parliamentary committee.

The Safer Online Spaces Coalition, a Canadian campaign group headed by the mother of the late Amanda Todd, just released a Léger poll making it clear how popular federal action on online harms will be. The thirst for government action is even higher than similar poll results from two years ago.

The poll shows extremely high levels of concern about addictive and otherwise harmful content, and similarly high support for regulation (90%) delivered by an independent regulator (79%). Significantly the support for regulating AI tools, in addition to social apps, is also strong (75%).

Broken down by the genre of harmful content, the Léger poll suggests Canadians are “very concerned” about fake news (76%), harms to kids (74%), incitement to violence (67%), and hate speech (66%). The responses by parents versus non-parents were not very different.

There is a high degree of support for core of online harms policy contemplated in the Liberals’ earlier draft of online harms Bill C-63, which is the legal expectation that platforms will design safer algorithms and content controls and effectively take legal responsibility for content.

Perhaps counterintuitively, polled support for mandatory safety controls prescribed by government ran at a much lower level of approval, a narrow majority. As well, 65% agreed with the statement that “parents, not government, should make decisions about their children’s social media or online activity.” 

The Liberal vs Conservative disagreement over how to deliver enforcement of online safety —through a civil regulation scheme versus judges sitting in criminal courts— may be resolved in the Liberals’ favour: 76% of Canadians are good with federal regulation and even 61% of Conservative voters support it.

The poll didn’t solicit opinions on the wisdom of relying more heavily upon criminal charges, but demonstrated a high support (87%) for government launching criminal investigations and prosecutions of corporate executives in “severe cases” of online harm.

The poll was conducted before the tragic shootings in Tumbler Ridge and the revelation that OpenAI flagged concerning Internet activity by the shooter but elected not to notify the police.

And in a final point of opinion punctuation, the Léger poll also demonstrated high public support for the general notion that some level of collateral damage to freedom of expression was acceptable.

While 85% agreed to the statement that “my right to freedom of expression be maintained,” the principle of “freedom of expression online should not come at the expense of other people’s safety” won the same 85% level of high support.

As for joining the budding global movement to ban youth accounts, the support for different age cut-offs ranged from 12 to 17: but only 3% supported no minimum age at all.

As for the scenario of the US President coming to the rescue of Big Tech platforms in some kind of trade-related intimidation of Canadian government, 53% supported the federal government going ahead anyway with another 27% saying “it depends on the situation.” Those figures were heavily skewed by political allegiances, with Conservative voters more likely to be doing the hedging.

10015020_Safer Online Spaces Coalition_Online Safety Survey Report_11.03.26.pdfDownload

***

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; 

or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;

or follow @howardalaw on X or Howard Law on LinkedIn.

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved. 

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

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

Canada’s Paul McGrath on the YouTube juggernaut and the creator supply chain

February 24, 2026

I am going to introduce this interview with Paul McGrath, the former flagbearer for CBC’s YouTube strategy, by thanking LinkedIn.

That’s where I first noticed McGrath and his Tigger-bouncing enthusiasm for YouTube’s creative universe.

Post after post, he diarized his journey at CBC bringing its content to YouTube. (Last week MediaPolicy published news of the historic partnership —-no other words for it— between the BBC and YouTube).

As for McGrath, here was a guy on a mission to make our CBC more relevant to millennials and Zeds. I was glued to his feed.

Then he quit. Or rather moved on to something new. I’ve done that myself a couple of times, so I could relate, even forgive.

Given the noise of apocalyptic foreboding we hear about legacy media, or about how AI is going to obliterate everything, Paul’s brimming optimism is just the thing.

MediaPolicy: I see you have a new job?

Paul McGrath: Yes, I do! I’ve joined Underknown as the Senior Vice President of Content & Operations. It’s a Canadian company and a modern creator studio headquartered in Toronto. We’re a creator-led digital media company behind popular brands like What If, How to Survive, and Animalogic. We manage more than 100 owned-and-operated programmatic channels. We’re a growing studio, employing about 100 to 150 people.

In my new role, I’m working to drive innovation and identify operational efficiencies across the organization. The core of the business is creating original content for digital platforms. We distribute across dozens of platforms, including 25 YouTube channels, social accounts like Facebook, Snapchat, and MSN, and through distribution to FAST and also recently some linear television. My focus is really on making the most out of our YouTube operations, and growing YouTube channels, which I did for years at CBC, so now I’m bringing that knowledge here. 

I’m also setting up our services division, where we consult with traditional media companies and creators, leveraging my background in broadcast and digital transformation to help them thrive and make more money on digital platforms.

MP: What’s the difference between distributing on YouTube as a creator studio versus doing it as mainstream broadcasting, like Crave or Gem?

PM: That’s the question everyone asks, and after twenty years in traditional media and now just completing my first month at a creator studio, I’ve noticed two major differences that drive everything we do.

The first, and biggest, difference is how we view the platform itself: Is YouTube a Cost Centre or a Profit Centre?

For traditional media—where I came from—YouTube is generally viewed as a cost center. Its content is usually repurposed, derivative, or repackaged from the main line of business, like TV shows or films. It exists to support the core revenue through promotion, reach, or awareness, and it operates under a lot of pressure to justify its impacts as an expense.

For creator studios, YouTube is the main business. It pays the bills, and creators and creator studios live and die off of moneymaking on original content. There is no safety net—if we don’t grow, we don’t succeed. This forces us to be lean, mean, scrappy, agile, and profitable. This competition is fierce. We’re the junkyard dogs of the media world.

The second difference lies in how we use technology, specifically AI, to drive the workflow.

While traditional media is certainly adopting AI, creator media is using it to tool the entire workflow: leading, enabling, supporting, and automating. At a company like Underknown, we build AI agents to growth hack our own channels—data-nerding to analyze, diagnose, benchmark, and pinpoint growth opportunities. We use these agents as tools for everything from scripting to thumbnail ideation, and we connect them to platforms like YouTube Studio AI, VidIQ AI, and BigQuery.

This extensive and continuous use of AI is always overseen by people—the masters of the craft with a deep history on YouTube. That’s crucial. This combination of “Art plus Science,” creative plus data, and being totally audience-obsessed is what positions creator studios to excel in a highly fragmented audience environment.

MP: You were the face of the creator economy at the CBC. Did you leave CBC feeling that you had moved the yardsticks?

PM: Yes, for sure. The results speak for themselves, I helped manage teams to their highest ever views, highest ever watch time and highest revenue, year over year, for multiple years. This was really hockey stick-style growth. I think I left with 1.8 billion views in 2025, which was another all-time record high. 

A case in point, at CBC, when I left our YouTube operations were reaching 1.5 billion impressions a month. That’s 1.5 billion screens we landed on every month. It’s a massive amount of audience reach that CBC wasn’t exploiting previously. To me that’s the remit of public service broadcasting, service audience where they consume. 

I’ve always been interested in helping organizations work more effectively on digital platforms, and work together to scale success. [Former EVP] Barb Williams and [GM Entertainment] Sally Catto and others were always very supportive and encouraging to drive more collaboration and digital transformation.

So yes, I think we definitely moved the yardsticks. 

MP: The BBC has got attention for its formal partnership with YouTube, announcing a digital first strategy. There is some hand wringing over it though. What did you think of it?

PM: I loved the move, and I think it was incredibly smart. The hand-wringing is understandable, but I see it as a sign of humility from the BBC. They acknowledged that to succeed in operating and creating original content on YouTube, which they hadn’t done before, they needed to partner with studios that already know how to do it, instead of trying to build that expertise completely on their own.

The CBC has not been far behind. They’ve been doing original content on YouTube for years, like with Street Cents. I helped set up a program where CBC worked with creators and licensed their content to distribute on CBC YouTube channels. 

However, you have to imagine the blowback, not to mention the political reaction, if the CBC made a similar formal partnership and announcement to the BBC’s.

This is difficult to balance for a public broadcaster. You have to balance serving audiences on the platforms they consume, while also not getting too cosy with big Tech and maintaining ownership of your own platforms. 

There’s no single, right answer. Ultimately, the digital strategy doesn’t have to be binary—it shouldn’t be YouTube First or proprietary platforms. Given the fragmented audience, you need multiple bets, it’s more of a “Yes, and…” scenario.

MP: Some media commentators talk about YouTube, and the creator supply chain that feeds it, as the juggernaut that will rule the media world. What do you think?

PM: I don’t think that’s the case at all—the need to relax with a comedy movie or get lost in a world of drama doesn’t disappear just because YouTube is growing. YouTube fulfills specific audience needs like how-to videos, parasocial updates, music, and podcasting extremely well. Its growth is a direct result of being highly effective at listening to its audience and fulfilling those specific needs. 

That said, from a business perspective, the platform and the creator supply chain are certainly dominating the growth story. YouTube’s market share continues to increase, and almost all growth from the last few years is coming from the creator economy. Meanwhile, traditional media is not growing, and the audience age for a lot of linear channels is 60-plus. I expect this trend to continue, partly because traditional media is nowhere close to being as highly attuned to their audiences as creators or tech platforms are. 

MP: What’s driving the growth? 

PM: The reason the creator space is growing so much is because creators excel at making content more cheaply, that is more personal and relevant to smaller audience fragments than traditional media can. Creators are simply more attuned and more efficient in a highly fragmented audience environment.

Looking ahead, the AI is going to accelerate and amplify this dynamic. AI already enables a more efficient workflow in terms of production, so creators will get even more efficient. But, I feel like  its true potential lies in versioning net new content that is micro-targeted to smaller and smaller fragments, allowing it to get more and more personally relevant. Think about your favourite YouTube generating a workout just for you, or your favourite band singing you Happy Birthday and having it get DM’d to you. 

You’re already seeing this play out with dubbing and localization, next we’ll see this with versioning of the content themes and topics themselves, where AI generated content will be versioned and formatted to be personally more and more relevant to you, and your personal interests.

MP: That sounds less like art as a community experience, and more like a very different audience experience. What does that kind of art look like?

PM: Well, first off, I don’t know if it’s necessarily art. I don’t consider most things AI generates art. But either way, it’s most definitely a more fragmented experience, which comes with its own concerns of further fragmentation, isolation and diminishing shared experiences. This is the kind of stuff that Yuval Harari —Google it— warns about as the largest risk of media fragmentation.

***

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; 

or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;

or follow @howardalaw on X or Howard Law on LinkedIn.

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved. 

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 – “we the people:” influencers, activists and journalists – is this microdrama’s punk rock moment ?

February 22, 2026

Prior to last year’s federal election campaign, a cadre of protesters gathered on my block in a highly successful effort to disrupt Chrystia Freeland’s nomination meeting. The image that stuck in my mind was the young man in the thick of it who was wearing a “Press” ball cap.  

I was reminded of that last week when reading Stephanie Taylor’s analysis and profile in the National Post of three high-profile conservative “influencers”: ‘The Pleb Reporter’ (Nick Belanger), Mario Zelaya, and Jasmin Laine. The Post article charts their informal relationships with Pierre Poilievre’s campaign team and their own ambitions.

At the most recent Conservative convention in Calgary, the Party granted influencers “content creator” status, waiving the $1000 observer fee and putting them on par (or with better access) than mainstream media journalists covering the same event.

The right wing influencers —-don’t worry, they have plenty of counterparts across the partisan aisle—- offer no apologies for their boostership of Poilievre or the CPC. They’ll point to their likes and ‘Ks of followers.

If you got it, flaunt it.

What sometimes galls the old schoolers is when influencers and activist reporters mooch off of the credibility and trust of capital-J journalism, hard earned by thousands of serious journalists over decades.

Or perhaps it’s the nihilism that’s most disturbing: “everyone lies, mine are true if they get lots of clicks.”

It’s discouraging of course, but journalism is a profession (or a craft, or a vocation, whatever) that holds no entrance examinations. 

On this point, I commend a second piece of reading to you —Peter Klein’s op-ed in the weekend Globe & Mail—-that probes these questions. He begins with the well known case of award-winning photographer Amber Bracken being arrested by the RCMP for her presence (or extra-professional participation, according to the cops) in an injunction-defying land protest. 

Then Klein observes that “today as a journalism professor, I’ve watched a generational shift: More students arrive without a clear sense of where reporting ends and advocacy begins, and some have no interest in drawing that line.”

If you meet or listen to journalists from war torn countries or despotic regimes, you will often hear a clear message: ‘we are for the people, we are of the people.’ You would be pitiless to deny them.

Here in a liberal democracy, there are also those who reject journalistic detachment and take sides, convinced of their moral certainty. 

There is a line, says Klein, but the question is where and who gets to decide. The contempt charges against photojournalist Bracken (for allegedly violating the court’s injunction) were dropped, but she is suing the RCMP for damages. Legal arguments are scheduled for April. 

***

If there’s a buzz in the world of entertainment programming, it’s the rise of short-form video and micro-dramas, often shot in portrait mode for better “vertical” viewing on phones.

Platformed by YouTube and newly powered by AI tools, short form is changing video production before our eyes.

It’s disruptive. But is it premium entertainment?

Premium, schmemium. As media guru Doug Shapiro likes to say about this phenomenon, quality is what the audience consumes.

How viral will short-form go? Is it just a punk rock wave of a new entertainment niche or is it something bigger?

The other guru Shapiro, Evan, just posted this:

***

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; 

or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;

or follow @howardalaw on X or Howard Law on LinkedIn.

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved. 

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

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

BBC and YouTube get married – Social Media on trial in L.A. – MediaPolicy’s glitches

AI illustration

February 14, 2025

Today’s post is a mash-up (remember those?).

MediaPolicy follows a number of themes and story lines in Canadian media. One of them is our public broadcaster, CBC Radio-Canada. Another is the surging audience growth of YouTube. 

The travails of the CBC always beg comparisons to the British Broadcasting Corporation. Earlier this month, the BBC announced a formal partnership with YouTube that, if the BBC follows through over the long term, will make it a YouTube-first broadcaster. 

So happy Valentine’s Day.

The BBC’s idea is to fish where the fish are, at least when it comes to the younger demographic whose media consumption leans very much into short-form video content on YouTube and social media apps. 

The BBC says it’s going all in on micro-drama series and verticals (so called because video clips are shot in portrait mode, the better to consume on phones).

That means the Beeb will invest more heavily in developing its supply chain into the digital “creator community” of video artists and studios. It also plans to launch far more BBC YouTube channels built around popular genres and local communities and feed them with digital-first content. 

The BBC isn’t completely reinventing itself. It’s going to keep using the YouTube platform as a marketing strategy to push audiences back to its main streaming services BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds. It would be reckless to do otherwise lest it put the BBC’s audience growth entirely within the grasp of a big US tech company that controls the discoverability of content through its algorithms (I mean, what could go wrong?).

A recent report in Britain marked the occasion of YouTube overtaking the once-dominant BBC as the UK’s market leader in video consumption. The early commentary on the YouTube-BBC partnership has been a mix of optimism and dread, here’s one insightful view. 

***

A big trial just started in Los Angeles where a 20-year old woman is suing YouTube and Meta’s Instagram for degrading her mental health by feeding her harmful content through addictive content algorithms.

The plaintiff KGM’s lawsuit is hardly frivolous: TikTok and Snap already settled to escape trial.

Her lawyer found his Johnny Cochran stride when he told the jury that his case was “easy as ABC…addicting the brains of children.”

The US maintains a Congressional exemption of Internet companies, especially social media apps, from liability for content uploaded by third parties (incidentally that litigation shield pops up in the digital chapter of the CUSMA trade agreement but Canadian courts have interpreted it narrowly). Given the exemption, KGM has to prove that YouTube and Meta are liable for creating addictive algorithms that push unhealthy content rather than paying a price for accepting the content in the first place. 

The US is a more litigious society than we are and lawsuits don’t create legislation: KGM may claim damages but it’s highly unlikely she will force Big Tech to do anything differently. 

***

I’m concluding this weekend’s post with something boring: weird publishing things happening with this blog.

Last weekend’s post included a three paragraph quote of the European Union’s regulatory indictment of TikTok for addictive algorithms pushing harmful content with inadequate safety features. Due to a WordPress software glitch, the e-mailed version to subscribers dropped out two of the paragraphs, which made for a strange narrative flow. If you found it jarring, you can go back and read the more fulsome EU statement.

The other oddity was an unprecedented two-day surge in MediaPolicy viewing in the US which puzzled me given the Canadian focus of MediaPolicy posts. It coincided with a MediaPolicy reader receiving a scam e-mail with an embedded link to MediaPolicy.ca (offering a marketing opportunity). The e-mail was associated with the digital marketing website Blogger Tuesday and I have nothing to do with it.

Please let me know if you received one. 

***

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; 

or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;

or follow @howardalaw on X or Howard Law on LinkedIn.

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved. 

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 – Europe indicts TikTok – Age verification bill S-209 clears Senate committee – Bezos and the WAPO layoffs – CPC frenzy over “the Canadian media summit”

February 8, 2026

The European Commission has fired a shot across the bow of TikTok, and by implication other social media, by finding the social media giant culpable of addictive algorithm design and inadequate safety measures.

The Commission explained its  preliminary ruling, which TikTok can either appeal or fix, as follows:

TikTok seems to fail to implement reasonable, proportionate and effective measures to mitigate risks stemming from its addictive design.

For example, the current measures on TikTok, particularly the screentime management tools and parental control tools, do not seem to effectively reduce the risks stemming from TikTok’s addictive design. The time management tools do not seem to be effective in enabling users to reduce and control their use of TikTok because they are easy to dismiss and introduce limited friction. Similarly, parental controls may not be effective because they require additional time and skills from parents to introduce the controls.

At this stage, the Commission considers that TikTok needs to change the basic design of its service. For instance, by disabling key addictive features such as ‘infinite scroll’ over time, implementing effective ‘screen time breaks’, including during the night, and adapting its recommender system.

The EU finding is made against the Chinese-owned app in the European market, not the American-owned TikTok across the Atlantic. But it will heat up the tension between the US and the EU over the regulation of online harms impacting US-owned apps operating in Europe.

The momentum of regulatory intervention around the globe picked up more steam when Spain indicated its intention to follow Australia and France in banning underage social media accounts. 

As for Canada, Heritage Minister Marc Miller isn’t saying yet if a ban on underage access is part of the online harms bill he is preparing.

Last Monday, the influential Taylor Owen and his McGill colleague Helen Hayes called for a moratorium on underage access to social media while online harms legislation gets tabled, works its way through Parliament, and gets implemented.

Judging from Canada’s last two pieces of media legislation, the Online Streaming Act and the Online News Act, the length of the entire process might be measured in years.

What might advance the timetable at the front end is Senate Bill S-209 that would require age verification for porn sites and possibly any social media site that permits porn. The bill passed committee last week and will likely get approved by the full Senate in the next few weeks, putting the governing Liberals on the spot.

Last week Senatrice Julie Miville-Dechêne, the bill’s sponsor, obtained committee approval for a series of technical amendments as well as a change that defined porn more narrowly to get at “X-rated” content and scope out the nudity and implied sexual activity common in mainstream drama. The new definition requires the exhibition of explicit sexual activity and exposed genitalia for the purpose of sexual excitement.

As drafted, S-209 still leaves the decision on whether to scope in porn-permissive social media apps to the federal government, either in a House vote on the bill or afterwards. 

***

Last weekend MediaPolicy noted the diverging fortunes of the New York Times and the Washington Post with the Times getting the Trump-bump in digital views and the Post sagging in the other direction. 

Then on Tuesday the Washington Post announced a breathtaking round of newsroom layoffs, 300 of 800 staff. By Saturday, publisher Will Lewis had resigned.

The public reaction was what you might expect: a mix of shock and anger. Former Post Editor-in-Chief Marty Baron posted his condemnation of the layoffs and put at least part of the blame on multi-billionaire proprietor Jeff Bezos’ decision to ingratiate himself to Donald Trump. That included Bezos killing a planned editorial board endorsement of Kamala Harris’ presidential candidacy, which reputedly cost the Post 200,000 subscriptions, as well as vocal support for Trump’s demolition of the White House east wing and making a donation to the ballroom project to be built on its foundations. Recently, Bezos’ Amazon Prime reputedly overpaid the Trump family for the streaming rights to the documentary Melania.

Then American anti-monopoly advocate Matt Stoller published a long Substack post where he suggested that Bezos bought the Post in 2013 as political insurance against the Obama administration taking anti-trust action against his Amazon e-commerce business. The insurance policy, Stoller suggested, has become unnecessary or overpriced as Bezos literally put his money on Trump. 

One piece of context is that while the Post’s declining audience numbers may be attributable to anti-Trump readers voting with their feet, the conservative and pro-Trump Wall Street Journal is experiencing the same decline, although not as steep as the Post.

There were also layoffs in Canadian journalism, suitably smaller in number. Bell Media CTV laid off 60, including 11 television journalists. 

***

The gong show otherwise known as the right-wing frenzy over mainstream media went viral last week when a video clip surfaced of Reynolds Mastin publicly thanking Prime Minister Mark Carney for “having our backs” and gushing that “we have your back too.” 

There it was, proof of the blood pact between the federal Liberal Party and the mainstream news media.

But who the heck is Reynolds Mastin?

Mastin is the President of the Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA), the industry group representing independent Canadian production companies that make entertainment programming. He was chairing the CMPA’s annual Prime Time conference in Ottawa when he made the remarks.

Readers may know, Mastin is not a journalist and he (and the CMPA) has nothing to do with news journalism. He was encouraging Carney to resist American trade pressure on the Online Streaming Act which requires US streamers to contribute to the Canada Media Fund.

Independent movie and television producers draw CanCon subsidies from the Canada Media Fund to make dramas and comedies. The CMF doesn’t spend a dime on news, although some make the mistake of thinking it does.

Nevertheless, the timing was was perfect for frenzy: the Conservative Party was in the midst of its annual convention in Calgary.

Here is Conservative Heritage critic Rachael Thomas MP describing “the Canadian media summit” as a news journalism event:

Thomas’ falsehoods then found their way into Conservative fund raising e-mails.

At that point, some conservative pundits urged Conservatives to do a fact check. The managing editor of The Hub, Harrison Lowman, was as brave as he was blunt:

Now speaking of Mr. Lowman and The Hub, I can recommend an excellent podcast he did in January with ex-New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet. 

In June 2020, Bennet (whose brother is a Democratic Senator) cleared for publication an opinion column from Republican Senator Tom Cotton arguing that Donald Trump ought to deploy the military if necessary to deal with rioting and looting that flared in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd. 

Bennet’s employment did not survive the newsroom uprising that followed. 

A similar newsroom conflagration occurred the same month at Canada’s National Post when columnist Rex Murphy opined that Canada “is not a racist country.” 

In any event, I found myself gripped by the full 35 minutes of Lowman’s interview of Bennet and you may find it worth the time as well.

***

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; 

or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;

or follow @howardalaw on X or Howard Law on LinkedIn.

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved. 

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 – Miller is flexible on CanCon – WAPO sunk by Trump – CRTC is stil-l-l-l deliberating – ready for Digital Media@Crossroads 2026

AI illustration

January 31, 2026

Last week Heritage Minister Marc Miller walked back the tough talk of his predecessor Steven Guilbeault: cultural issues are no longer “off the table” in the upcoming trade talks with the US and Mexico.

In an interview with The Logic, Miller said Canada would have to be “flexible” in dealing with the US demands that Canada repeal the Online Streaming Act and the Online News Act although there are “lines that can’t be crossed.”

There will be no Davos speeches for Canadian culture. At least not in English. It probably escaped nobody’s notice that Guilbeault’s ultimatum was never repeated by the Prime Minister.

Miller also suggested that Canada needs to design its online harms bill with a clear eyed acknowledgement of Big Tech’s influence in the Trump administration. Miller said “we’re not oblivious to the fact that large American companies do have access to the administration, and colour a lot of the views coming out of the White House when it comes to the way they’re behaving.”

Despite an earlier news story that Miller was considering Australian and French bans on social media accounts for minors, he was quoted by The Logic as undecided about a Canadian ban.

“A simple ban, with doing nothing else, would be overly simplistic and probably wouldn’t achieve the goal that we’re trying to achieve, which is to make sure kids are safe, physically, emotionally and mentally,” he said. In a separate interview with the Globe & Mail, Miller said he was considering online harms legislation that would govern how AI chatbots impacted children.

That sounds very much in line with a new LinkedIn post from McGill University’s Taylor Owen, the most influential voice on online harms in Canada:

The core problem is that tech companies have failed to build safe products, and governments have failed to hold them accountable. Parents and teachers are rightly frustrated and so the impulse toward radical action is understandable.


But a ban treats exclusion as the end goal. It punishes users rather than the products causing harm. It restricts children’s rights rather than enhancing their safety. And when a kid turns 15, they enter an online ecosystem with no protections whatsoever.

Every jurisdiction that has studied this seriously—Australia, the UK, the EU—arrives at the same place: an enforcement body that can hold platforms accountable through risk assessments, mitigation plans, and transparency requirements. Age-appropriate design standards that eliminate targeted ads, auto-scrolling, data harvesting, and stranger contact for minors.

Canada had a bill [C-63] that did much of this. It should be retabled—and updated to include AI chatbots, which are now one of the main sources of consumer safety risk for young people.

(Update 2/2/26: The Globe & Mail published an op-ed by Owen and his colleague Helen Hayes recommending Ottawa proceed with an online harms bill based on a duty to protect children that obliges social media apps and AI chatbots to implement safety procedures. They recommend a moratorium, a temporary ban on underage access until such time that the bill is passed and tech companies have complied).

However, the challenges in legislating an online harms bill in a minority Parliament are considerable.

The Conservatives have a different vision of legislating online safety, preferring to criminalize online harms so the law is enforced by judges and not government regulators.

Unlike the last minority Parliament, the Liberals can’t just make a deal with the NDP to form a House majority to pass an online harms bill. The NDP’s loss of official party status in the 2025 election means they aren’t on Parliamentary committees and can’t team up with the Liberals to break filibusters that bottle up legislation in committee hearings.

The Liberals would need the Bloc Québécois to get them out of that jam.

***

I said there would be no Davos speeches for Canadian culture.

There almost was: Prime Minister Carney’s seven-minute hit at this week’s Prime Time conference sponsored by the Canadian Media Producers Association was funny and spontaneous and, by pointedly celebrating great home grown shows like Heated Rivalry “at this moment,” comes close enough to a bold statement of cultural sovereignty.

***

It would be easy to write a blog about the pyrotechnics going off inside American media so long as one was prepared to post, oh, about every fifteen minutes.

That’s not a segue into an update on the Netflix vs. Paramount bidding for Warner Brothers (although the latest is that Netflix is now making an all-cash bid).

What I am finding interesting is Bari Weiss’ ascendancy at CBS News as the new CEO appointed by Paramount owners David and Larry Ellison (after bagging $150M US for her news website The Free Press).

Unsurprisingly, Weiss is moving CBS news coverage to the right. How far to the right, and how deep into Donald Trump’s embrace, we shall see. There’s a fair amount of moral panic that CBS will just be a Fox News Two, as if the centre and left is not adequately populated by ABC, NBC, CNN and MSNBC. There’s an illuminating NPR story on Weiss’ shake up at CBS, here.

Speaking of NPR, the New York Times published a story noting that the Congressional revocation of federal funding of the now-dissolved Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which provided 15% of NPR and PBS funding) has not resulted in station closings, at least not immediately. For now, donations are filling the gap.

And speaking of the New York Times (and The Washington Post too), data-cruncher extraordinaire Nate Silver posted the following graph on his Substack that measures the news cycle buzz of political coverage:

It seems that the Jeff Bezos-owned WAPO did not get an attention-boosting “Trump bump” after the 2024 US Election but rather is experiencing something more like a “Trump sunk” effect.

Possibly that’s because Bezos alienated some readers by nixing a newsroom editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris and then, after Trump won, cuddled up to the White House. The eyeballs appear to be marching off to the Times.

All of it a damn shame: WAPO is replete with good watchdog journalism.

***

In November, the CRTC issued a major decision about on-screen Canadian content. Two biggies began with a revised point system to define the “Canadian” in Canadian programs under the Online Streaming Act, C-11.

The other opened the door for the first time to foreign streamers owning majority copyright rights in Canadian programs.

The Commission’s November ruling was the first of a two-part decision on video streaming: the crucial issue of streamer expenditures on Canadian programs remains outstanding.

Well, don’t hold your breath.

In a speech to the Canadian Media Producers Association on January 29th, the CRTC’s Broadcasting Vice-Chair said the Commission was not ready to issue new rulings.

“There is still more work to be done, and I cannot tell you exactly what to expect as we continue deliberating,” Nathalie Théberge told the crowd, who might have noted that the Commissioners are still deliberating seven months after hearings concluded.

“What I can tell you, however, is that there will be follow-up decisions in the coming months. This includes decisions to address spending on Canadian programs, distribution rules for services, measures to ensure discoverability of Canadian content, dispute resolution and audio policy.”

The coming months catches the attention. The Commission owes Canadians and the industry the aforementioned Part Two (“spending on Canadian programs”) as well as two separate files on the other topics Théberge mentioned.

All of this after the Commission was ordered, not asked, by federal cabinet in November 2023 to get the job done of implementing a new regulatory framework under Bill C-11 in two years.

***

This coming weekend February 6th-7th in Toronto the cultural nationalists and fellow travellers get together at Digital Media at the Crossroads. This is not to plug the panel I’m on; in fact there’s something for everyone and two of the boxes I’ve ticked on my dance card are the Nordicity report (Friday 2:15 PM) on the state of Canadian media and Globe & Mail reporters Angela Murphy and Mark Rendell speaking about news coverage of US/Canada relations (Saturday 10 AM).

And on Wednesday February 11th the Coalition for the Diversity of Cultural Expressions is holding a one day event in Ottawa to discuss the impact of AI on cultural production, a lead in to the federal government’s invitation-only policy summit, March 16th-17th in Banff.

***

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; 

or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;

or follow @howardalaw on X or Howard Law on LinkedIn.

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved. 

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 – CanCon and trade talks – ban on teenager social media accounts – TikTok prohibition repeal

January 27, 2026

Hola from the centre of the universe, Toronto, where the biggest snowfall since 1999 (50 cm) has everyone on the watch for the army to be deployed, shovels in hand.

Here are a few things happening in Canadian media policy:

Canadian culture and the 2026 CUSMA trade talks

I’m going to be giving a ten-minute explainer on this topic at the Digital Media at the Crossroads annual conference on February 6-7 in snow-bound Toronto. The program and registration link is here.

No foolish predictions from me other than taking note that the US trade agenda goes far, far beyond Canadian cultural legislation such as the Online Streaming Act, the Online News Act or a potential online harms bill. 

US chief negotiator Jamison Greer is floating the idea of a North American customs union which sounds a lot like double-digit Trump tariffs in exchange for Washington blocking Canadian trade diversification. 

Regarding the Canadian streaming legislation that Netflix wants Greer to kill, last week MediaPolicy published a guest column from Peter Grant on how the CRTC might extend an olive branch to Netflix by allowing foreign streamers (and Canadian broadcasters) a CanCon credit for licensing and distributing Canadian shows abroad. 

MediaPolicy also posted a book review of Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature, a call to revive the nearly dead Canadian-owned book publishing industry. The Globe’s John Ibbitson also reviewed it. Stursberg’s “what is to be done” menu of policy action requires CUSMA’s “cultural exemption” of CanCon to survive the trade talks.

Another cultural trade issue that might pop up during CUSMA talks is Trump’s previous threats to tariff movies made in Canada for the US market.

The context of this is the retrenchment of streamer spending on new productions since 2022. The Hollywood Reporter has fresh data about where US shows are being made and the only thing that is indisputable is that California is hurting and in an incremental way non-US foreign location shooting is taking a bigger share of a reduced production market . Canada’s volume is steady over time; UK and Irish shooting has gone up.

Within the United States, a game of musical chairs has resulted in New Jersey and New York gaining business, while Georgia and California have lost work. 

Social Media Ban for Youth

Australia’s ban on social media accounts for youth under 16 has its detractors.

But it has its admirers too. The Globe & Mail reported that the Carney government is thinking about it for under 14s.

The French government just passed an under 15 ban.

Canadian TikTok “ban” repealed

Ottawa has repealed the TikTok “ban.”

The Trudeau government’s 2024 ban on the TikTok’s business activity in Canada (but not the app itself) followed a bipartisan Congressional ban in the United States on the grounds of national security.

Now that the Trump administration has completed the transition of the Chinese-owned TikTok into a separate US company, controlled by American interests with a minority Chinese ownership stake, the national security concern has evaporated in both the US and Canada.

Our federal government has agreed to a judicial consent order that reinstates TikTok’s right to carry on business in Canada (and presumably jump starts its investments in Canadian creators). 

The odd thing: it’s the Chinese TikTok company, not the American-Chinese joint venture, that will operate in Canada. But the national security concern, which was never revealed by the federal government, has disappeared. 

***

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; 

or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;

or follow @howardalaw on X or Howard Law on LinkedIn.

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved. 

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

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

Of books, sovereignty and morons. A review of Stursberg’s ‘Lament for a Literature’

AI illustration by Perplexity

January 24, 2026

Richard Stursberg, Lament for a Literature: The Collapse of Canadian Book Publishing (Sutherland House).

If we ever were, Canadians are no longer happy to be cultural North Americans. 

The current US administration’s plan is to reduce Canada to a vassal state, like Russia’s Belarus.

Canadians have responded with fear, anger and pride. We are, the vast majority of us, resolved to defend our cultural sovereignty by any means necessary or available.

Enter stage right, Richard Stursberg’s history and policy statement on Canadian book publishing, Lament for a Literature. It’s more of an essay than a book at 96 pages with no footnotes to slow you down and, somewhat irritatingly, no index. It’s published by Sutherland House, one of the small and feisty Canadian publishing houses that are the objects of the author’s cultural affection. 

The melodramatic book title is a riff on George Grant’s 1965 classic Lament for a Nation. Long before Canada bet big on North American integration, Grant meditated upon the death of Canadian sovereignty. He described a withering away of the Canadian identity and questioned our resolve to resist the black-holed gravity of the United States. 

Stursberg articulates the essence of the matter in his first paragraph (inviting Kim Mitchell’s great compliment: “damn, I wish I wrote that”):

A country’s identity is forged from its political, military, and social history as interpreted and communicated through its arts. The stories that emerge define how a country thinks about itself, what it values, and how it perceives others. The stories can come in the form of epic poems, TV shows, magazine articles or oral traditions. The Ur medium is books. They provide the most thorough and immersive explorations of identity and often underpin all the other media.

You can pick a bone with any of that if you like, including the claim that books are our cultural supercode, or as Margaret Atwood once described that literary universe, “the geography of our Canadian mind.” (Alas, Atwood’s acerbic wit got the better of her when she playfully designated those uninterested in Canadian books as “cultural morons.”)

Despite long form narrative having to compete for attention with the Internet, we are still a nation of book readers with the time and patience for that immersive wonder.

The trouble is, Stursberg writes, the Canadian book business has largely collapsed over the last 20 years. We have the weakest domestically-owned publishing sector in the industrialized world (a measly five per cent of book revenues in its own market); we prefer celebrity memoirs and self improvement books to Canadian biography and politics; we’re mostly reading American fiction and non fiction distributed by the foreign publishing houses and their Canadian subsidiaries that have the other 95% of sales in the Canadian market; and our tight cohort of prominent Canadian novelists are increasingly setting their narratives outside of Canada, whether out of artistic vision or with an eye on foreign distribution.

For all of this, Stursberg puts the blame on public policy failure, going back decades.

The public policy for supporting the arts and media in our small Canadian market is always a variation on a theme: government subsidies underwrite the cost of Canadian culture so that art which is truly local and authentic will earn enough money that the Canadian media companies making a business of selling and distributing Canadiana can make a go of it. 

For books, the largesse is not lavish: the federal funding of the Canada Book Fund ($50M/yr) and the Canada Council book program (another $40M/yr) are rounding errors of a federal budget rounding error.

But the key  thing is that unless we’re going to cut subsidy cheques to foreign book publishers (we don’t), we need a regulatory framework that keeps Canadian media companies strong.

The thinking goes, the foreign book houses are in Canada to make money. But their diminutive Canadian-owned counterparts are in it for both the love and the money. However the small scale of the Canadian-owned houses makes them vulnerable to economic rip tides and the occasional financial crisis. That is why regulatory and government support to grow their business scale, and to build a backlist of great titles and a stable of bestselling authors, can be the key for Canadian publishers to survive the day and live to publish more Canadiana. 

Stursberg recounts the narrative of how peculiar (and fatal) it was that federal policy on Canadian book publishing failed to follow the more successful regulatory model supporting broadcasting. 

Where Pierre Trudeau’s 1968 broadcasting legislation demanded Canadian ownership of all television and radio broadcasting, his corresponding book policy in 1974 grandfathered American publishing houses already here while impeding further foreign takeovers of Canadian publishers. 

When Brian Mulroney’s heritage minister Marcel Masse tried to strengthen the takeover rules in his “Baie Comeau” book policy (named for the location of the cabinet retreat where it was approved), he later ran into the headwinds of the Mulroney cabinet’s natural instincts and eagerness to make a free trade deal with Ronald Reagan. 

At the first real test of Baie Comeau, Mulroney green lit the Gulf & Western conglomerate’s takeover of the Canadian-owned Prentice Hall. Over the next two decades, under Conservatives and Liberals alike, the Baie Comeau policy supporting small Canadian book publishers was enforced poorly and then not at all. Today it is effectively a dead letter. 

Stursberg reminds us of the bestselling and buzzworthy fiction and non-fiction that Canadian owned publishing houses once brought to market: Peter Newman’s Renegade in Power and The Canadian Establishment, Grant’s Lament for a Nation, Pierre Berton’s The National Dream and the Last Spike, Mordecai Richler’s St.Urbain’s Horsemen, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Alice Munro’s Bear, and Atwood’s Surfacing and Survival to name a few; many of them prize winners in Canada and internationally.

Stursberg writes of the tragedy of the Canadian publishing powerhouse McClelland & Stewart, with its dream team backlist of iconic books, falling into financial crisis and, after some serious skullduggery, emerging eleven years later as foreign-owned but not before new owners feasted on $77 million in Canadian subsidies. Plenty of villains in the piece, and not all foreigners. 

Today the Canadian subsidiaries of foreign publishing houses can cherry pick the best Canadian authors and books, while the smaller Canadian-owned houses embrace the commercially challenged mission of mapping the geography of the Canadian mind. As for the authors that Canadian publishers bring to success, they can hardly resist the lure of foreign book houses for their next title, what with their global distribution and Canadian marketing budgets. 

But Lament is a policy treatise and, like Stursberg’s 2019 manifesto on broadcasting The Tangled Garden, he is not shy about providing an answer to the question “what is to be done?”

His answer is a multi-point program of more generous federal book subsidies and regulatory support for Canadian publishers that he would put in the hands of a Canadian crown corporation. As a kind of CBC for book publishing, federal BookCo would be backed by a tougher policy on Canadian ownership (to protect the last five per cent of our market) and supported by a nationalist policy to grow that five per cent through book distribution and publishing rights, as well as leveraging federal money to persuade provincial governments to imitate Québec’s policies supporting French language authors and books. It’s a bold menu that would see powerful enemies queueing up and US trade negotiators at the front of the line.

As we head into the ugly confrontation with the US in upcoming trade talks, it’s an opportunity for Canadians to stake our claim to cultural sovereignty. Better to fight on our feet than become vassals on our knees. 

***

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; 

or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;

or follow @howardalaw on X or Howard Law on LinkedIn.

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved. 

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

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

Why the Online Streaming Act is Crucial for Canada’s Cultural Sovereignty

A Guest MediaPolicy column from Peter S. Grant

January 21, 2026

If you intend to become a student of Canadian broadcasting, the first name you learn is that of Toronto lawyer Peter S. Grant, a son of Kapuskasing, Ontario.

That’s not because he’s the most important figure in Canada’s history of broadcasting, but he may have been the most influential over the last fifty-five years at the CRTC, in private practice, and in public policy. The bio on his website doesn’t really cover it: but his autobiography Changing Channels is like a travel guide of unknown stories, pearls of Canadian telecommunications and media history. His totemic Blockbusters and Trade Wars is still the first book you should read if you want to acquire a deep understanding of Canadian media policy, even though it was published 22 years ago. He was central to the writing of the 2020 Yale Report that provided the blueprint for the Online Streaming Act.

Peter’s the ultimate Canadian cultural nationalist. I’m hearing that’s back in vogue.

Peter’s retired now. He keeps a curated page of legal and policy essays on his website and this timely new piece is the latest addition.

***

Why the Online Streaming Act is Crucial for Canada’s Cultural Sovereignty

by Peter S. Grant

One of Donald Trump’s targets in his war against Canada is the Online Streaming Act.  This Act was enacted less than three years ago.   And in a recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, Peter Menzies has argued that Canada should be prepared to give up the Online Streaming Act in U.S. trade talks to satisfy Trump. 

Which raises the obvious question.  What does the Act do?   Is it important to keep it in place?

What Does the Online Streaming Act Do? 

Prior to 2023, online undertakings in Canada were governed by an Exemption Order for Digital Media Broadcasting Undertakings, which had been issued by the CRTC in various forms since 1999.  In some versions, internet services were referred to as “New Media”.   In 2011, the Commission did a fact-finding inquiry into what were then called “Over-the-Top” programming services.  But it concluded in October 2011 that these services had not reached a stage where regulation was required.   

However, this all changed with the enactment of the Online Streaming Act on April 27, 2023.  That statute amended the existing Broadcasting Act, to implement recommendations of the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel.  Its report in January 2000 was entitled “Canada’s Communications Future: Time to Act”. 

Among its recommendations was for the CRTC to create a registration regime for foreign online undertakings and to ensure that all media content undertakings that benefit from the sector contribute to it in an equitable manner.  The Online Streaming Act implemented these recommendations and added section 3(1)(f.1) to the Broadcasting Act, which reads as follows:

Each foreign online undertaking shall make the greatest practicable use of Canadian creative and other human resources, and shall contribute in an equitable manner to strongly support the creation, production and presentation of Canadian programming, taking into account the linguistic duality of the market they serve.

How the CRTC Is Implementing the Online Streaming Act. 

The CRTC began the process of implementing the Act on September 29, 2023, when it issued Registration Regulations requiring all online streaming services operating in Canada with $10 million or more in annual broadcasting revenue to register by November 28, 2023.

Then, on June 4, 2024, the CRTC issued Broadcasting Regulatory Policy CRTC 2024-121, announcing a policy to require online streaming services that make $25 million or more in annual contributions revenues and that are not affiliated with a Canadian broadcaster to contribute 5% of those revenues to certain Canadian programming funds. The condition was expected to take effect in the 2024-2025 broadcast year, which began on 1 September 2024, and that this would provide an estimated $200 million per year in new funding for Canadian programming.

The affected foreign streamers promptly appealed this order to the Federal Court of Appeal, arguing on various grounds that the order was not properly made.  The matter was heard by the court in June 2025 and we are still awaiting the court’s decision.  If the court overturns the CRTC order, the Commission will likely re-issue it in a way that meets the court’s requirements.

Still to come is a CRTC decision requiring online undertakings to make expenditures on Canadian programs as a percentage of their Canadian advertising or subscription revenues.  Last fall, the CRTC issued a decision redefining what qualifies as a Canadian program, so this will apply to any Cancon expenditure requirements.     

Cultural Sovereignty and Canadian Broadcasting in the Past

Canada has had to deal with foreign intrusion into its broadcasting system in the past.  In the early 1970’s, the border U.S. TV stations carried by Canadian cable systems began garnering revenue from Canadian advertisers for their audience in Canada.  The same US programs were carried by Canadian TV broadcasters but their ad revenue was undermined by the US stations. The CRTC responded by requiring Canadian cable systems to substitute the Canadian version of the program for the US version. This meant that all the ad revenue from these programs stayed in Canada.  Since the CRTC required Canadian TV stations to invest at least 30% of their revenue in Canadian content, this strongly supported cultural sovereignty.  Later, the CRTC imposed a requirement on cable systems in Canada to contribute 5% of their subscription revenue to Canadian program funds.  So cable systems also contributed directly to support Canadian content.

In the 1980s, Canada negotiated a free trade agreement with the United States.  The first version of that agreement was the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement in1989.  This was succeeded by the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA in 1994.  And this was succeeded by the Canada United States Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) in 2018.  CUSMA came into force on July 1, 2020.

In all of these agreements, Canada insisted on an exemption for measures that relate to a cultural industry.  The term “cultural industry” includes any person engaged in “the production, distribution, sale, or exhibition of film or video recordings”.  Thus it is clear that an internet platforms like Netflix or YouTube would qualify as a cultural industry simply because they distribute film or video recordings.

The existence of the cultural exemption has not deterred the United States from threatening retaliation whenever a Canadian cultural policy adversely affects a US company.  Over the last 25  years, the US has complained about a number of Canadian cultural policies, including Canada’s ban on US split run magazines targeting Canada, and the CRTC policy on which US channels can be carried by Canadian broadcast distribution undertakings (BDUs).  In all of these matters, however, Canada managed to negotiate a compromise that maintained Canada’s cultural sovereignty.  

How Are Online Undertakings Regulated in Europe?

In Europe, online undertakings are subject to the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, which was last revised in 2018.  Under the Directive, video-on-demand services like Netflix need to ensure that European content has at least a 30% share in their catalogues and they are required to give prominence to European content in their offers.

The Directive also allows Member States to impose financial contributions on online undertakings to the production and rights acquisition of European works. These can be direct investments or levies payable to a fund.  A number of European countries have done so.  For example, in France foreign streaming services must invest at least 20-25% of their French revenues into European (primarily French) production.   And Italy requires that streaming platforms must invest about 16% of their Italian revenues into European and especially Italian content.

The bottom line is that Europe has recognized the impact of foreign platforms on cultural expression and has taken measures to require them to support European production.  

Why Should Canada Focus on Online Undertakings?

 There is a simple reason why the CRTC needs to focus on online undertakings.  In the last ten years, those undertakings have overtaken the conventional Canadian broadcasting system, eroding cable and TV revenues, and dominating viewing in Canada.

A look at the revenues over time tells the story.  The numbers are shown in “Canada’s Network Media Economy: Growth, Concentration and Upheaval, 1984-2023”, published last year by the Global Media & Internet Concentration Project.   By 2018, the total revenues from online media services in Canada were about C$14 billion, matching the revenue of the traditional media services.  However, by 2023, the revenue for traditional media services had declined to C$12 billion, while online media services revenue had increased to C$27 billion.

In 1997, BDU subscriptions to cable and satellite in Canada were around 77% of households.  But by 2025, BDU penetration has declined to only 54% of Canadian households.  Corus, the Canadian owner of the Global TV network, is under financial distress.  

Who were the beneficiaries?   Leading the pack is Netflix, which by 2025 was watched by close to 20 million Canadians.  But following behind are Disney+, YouTube, Paramount, Apple TV and Amazon Prime, each of which has millions of Canadian viewers.   Yes, there are some Canadian online services like Crave and GEM. But they are dwarfed by the foreign-owned services.      

Simply put, the Canadian broadcasting system is now dominated by online undertakings.  If Canada wants to maintain any form of cultural sovereignty, it must address the role of these undertakings in its cultural policies.

Are Foreign Online Undertakings Discriminated Against?

US trade officials have publicly said that Canada’s cultural laws “discriminate against U.S. tech and media firms.”  A House committee has written urging Canada to suspend what it calls the “discriminatory Online Streaming Act”. 

But do CRTC online policies discriminate against foreign firms.  As noted earlier, the Broadcasting Act does single out foreign online undertakings and states that they are to “make the greatest practicable use of Canadian creative and other human resources”.  But the obligation for Canadian broadcast undertakings is even stronger: “to employ and make maximum use, and in no case less than predominant use, of Canadian creative and other resources in the creation, production and presentation of programming…”

In its initial 2024 decision, the CRTC required foreign online streaming services to contribute 5% of those revenues to certain Canadian programming funds. But was this discriminatory?  Not at all.  In Broadcast Regulatory Policy CRTC 2016-436, the Commission had already imposed a 5% financial obligation to support Canadian content on all Canadian on-demand services.    

So the argument that the foreign online firms are discriminated against is simply wrong.

How Foreign Online Undertakings Can Address Their Cancon Requirements

As we await the CRTC decision on what expenditures on Canadian content will be required of the foreign online services, it may be useful to examine how it might be implemented.   If required to make expenditures on Canadian content, an online service would use the required funding to acquire the rights to exhibit the program in Canada.  But it could also use the funding to acquire the rights to exhibit the program in other territories, like the US or Europe.  

In doing so, the cost of the program to the online service will be much higher, since it would be paying extra to the Canadian producer for the foreign rights.  But that higher cost would come out of the global program budget of the online service.   By taking this approach, the online service can effectively lower the net impact of the expenditure requirement on its Canadian operation.  This approach also has the benefit of exposing Canadian content to a wider global audience.

Canadian producers will be up to the challenge.  Canadian programs like Murdoch Mysteries, produced by Shaftesbury Films Inc., are already seen around the world.  In fact, Netflix itself has acquired the right to run episodes of Murdoch Mysteries on its Canadian service.   And there are dozens of other Canadian producers who have generated popular programs.  Foreign online services required to expend money on Canadian content will have many ways to do so.         

Conclusion

Given the foregoing, it is clear that keeping the Online Streaming Act in place will be crucial to Canada’s cultural sovereignty.  Foreign online services already dominate the broadcasting universe in Canada and must be required to contribute to Canadian audiovisual productions that can speak to Canadians in their own voice.  Europe has led the way in imposing local programming requirements on foreign online services.  Canada needs to follow suit.        

Last September, an online random survey of Canadians was conducted by Pollara, commissioned by the Canadian Media Producers Association.   Based on this survey, Pollara concluded that fully 87% of Canadians supported the Online Streaming Act. 

This is an incredible level of support, but hardly surprising.   In the face of US threats, it is clear that Canadians recognize the importance of cultural sovereignty, including sovereignty over foreign online undertakings.

***

Reprinted by permission