CanCon Corks bobbing on the ocean: the CRTC’s new ruling on Hollywood streamers in Canada

May 24, 2026

The other shoe dropped this week when the CRTC delivered two rulings that nearly complete its new regulatory framework for Netflix and the rest of the Hollywood streamers, as well as Canadian television broadcasters. 

The reaction to the rulings from the Hollywood streamers and their Canadian enablers offered more heat than light. Media reports played them as a trade story and some breathlessly speculated on Culture & Identity minister Marc Miller’s inscrutable comments on X. 

Across the border, a steady stream of ominous threats and faux outrage from American trade officials is expected soon.

In the interest of a more cool-blooded debate, let me offer some analysis of the CRTC’s new rulings on direct streamer investments in Canadian content  (“Canadian Programming Expenditures,” or CPE) and the distribution and prominence of that content on streaming platforms, made “discoverable” so that shows made by Canadians don’t end up as wine corks bobbing on an ocean of global content.

The bottom line is that the CRTC’s expected ruling on those direct CPE investments came in at 15% of the revenues that streamers earn in the Canadian market.

That 15% includes a 5% subset of the (still unpaid) cash levy in favour of Canadian media financing funds imposed by the Commission in June 2024 as an “initial” CPE contribution, thus the feverish cries of “tripled contributions.” 

While the bar for streamers was set at 15%, the Commission lowered the parallel CPE contributions of Canadian broadcasters from 30% (or more) of their Canadian revenues down to 25%. The broadcasters have been fuming about their CPE obligations for years since cable subscriptions and Canadian television revenues began their downward descent around 2017 while the Hollywood streamers surged in growth and remained unregulated until the Online Streaming Act was finally legislated in 2023. 

The gap separating Hollywood streamer and Canadian broadcaster CPE is now reduced but still a substantial 10% of revenues (although it’s probably less than 10% when you take into account that more than a third of the streamer CPE consists of their cash dollars going out the door to media funds). 

Whatever number you ascribe to the remaining gap between streamer and broadcaster CPE contributions to CanCon, the Commission excuses this remaining favouritism shown to the streamers as being “equitable” as opposed to “equal” contributions. You be the judge if it’s equitable. The streamers insist it’s “discriminatory.”

The CRTC’s companion ruling on discoverability is poised to be a genuine victory for Canadian content and a vindication of the federal Liberals’ crawl-over-broken-glass efforts to legislate the Online Streaming Act. How big a victory depends on how soon and firmly the CRTC follows up on the key regulatory principles in the ruling:

  • The Commission states an expansive definition of “discoverability”: “Canadian content and services are discoverable if they are made available and visible to audiences, including when an audience is not actively seeking such content and services.” The emphasis is on the streamers making their Canadian content highly visible on their platforms, irrespective of whether Canadians are patriotically seeking it out through keyword searches or on the streamers’ ghettoized “Canada” tabs.
  • To make this happen, the CRTC tasks each streamer to offer the Commission “measurable outcomes” in making Canadian shows prominent with transparent and annual measurements using standardized data. The Commission has told streamers that Canadian content should be “presented consistently when audiences browse landing pages, recommendations, categories, carousels and playlists” and not just “dedicated spotlight categories” for Canadian content.  And just in case the streamers don’t get the message, the Commission says it expects “equitable” platform exposure of Canadian content in Canada, a deliciously vague objective that should keep entertainment lawyers well employed. 
  • And the Commission expects streamers “to facilitate the installation, integration and/or promotion of [Canadian broadcasting services of exceptional importance] and local streaming apps and stations on Smart TVs, set top boxes or other devices so that they are easily visible to consumers.” This is bold stuff. It’s not clear how the Commission is going to implement this in cases where screen interfaces are installed by television manufacturers: the Québec provincial government says it’s going to legislate it.
Source: CRTC

Taking these Commission pronouncements on discoverability at face value, this is good news for Canadian content. As television broadcaster Brad Danks wrote in his recent series of articles in Cartt.ca, we are overdue to pivot from our singular focus on regulatory support for production financing in favour of supporting distribution, prominence and the cultivation of loyal audiences at home and abroad. 

From here, the streamers’ do-it-yourself discoverability strategies will have to pass muster before the Commission in the final phase of the legislation’s implementation, the application of “tailored conditions of service.” That will likely take another year to complete, assuming a light-speed effort by the Commission. Beyond that, the Commission is allowing the streamers three years to meet these higher expectations of CanCon discoverability. That will put us seven years from Royal Assent to full implementation of the Online Streaming Act.

Of course, the streamers want no part of any of this, neither CPE nor discoverability, judging from their cede-no-quarter opposition to any regulatory obligations, court appeals and weaponization of American trade power over the last three years.

The streamer fury is highly performative. But let me speculate on at least four things about the Commission’s latest rulings that might genuinely stick in their collective craw. 

The first is copyright. The streamers notched a big win last November when the Commission announced its new rule about whether non-Canadian services could hold copyright ownership in the Canadian shows eligible for its CPE quota for direct CanCon investments (as opposed to paying copyright-owning Canadian producers to license their shows for Canadian release or global distribution). 

It’s a complex issue that I wrote about here. In brief, in any production partnership the owner of majority copyright in a show holds an advantage in negotiations over return on investment, revenue sharing and the long-term commercial exploitation of the intellectual property flowing from a successful production. 

During parliamentary hearings in October 2022, Netflix identified copyright ownership as its number one priority. But despite the clear language in the Online Streaming Act favouring copyright remaining vested in independent Canadian producers, the Commission sided with Netflix and the other Hollywood streamers. Incensed by that ruling, I wrote about it here.

Alas I incensed too soon. The Commission evidently had more to say about copyright. In this most recent ruling, the Commission claws back some of that apparent streamer victory. Under the heading “enhanced partnerships,” the CRTC directs the streamers to earmark about a third of their 15% CPE for co-ventures with independent Canadian producers in which the Canadians retain majority copyright. 

By my figuring, the streamers will have to cede majority copyright to independent Canadian producers in Canadian shows in its programming budget amounting to a 4.5% envelope of Canadian revenues within its 15% overall CPE. That leaves the streamers contributing 6.55% of revenues in media fund cash payments (see below) and 4% for direct content investments in shows where they can retain majority copyright. 

Another unwelcome surprise for the streamers was the CRTC rethinking the mulligan it gave the streamers back in June 2024 when it extended an option for streamers to shave off 1.5% of their initial 5% cash levy to media funds to 3.5%. The deal was that the streamers could withhold that 1.5% (of a total 2%) contribution to the Canada Media Fund provided they invested the money directly in Canadian shows. It was essentially a downpayment on their yet-to-be-determined CPE. In setting a final CPE number of 15% the Commission eliminated the 1.5% opt-out. That leaves the streamers paying out of pocket to media funds at the full “initial” 5%. 

The Commission then tacked on to that 5% an additional cash levy of 1.55% of revenues to feed a new Services of Exceptional Importance Fund —more or less demanded by federal cabinet and Parliament— to replace the per subscriber “wholesale rates” that Canadian cable operators pay to vital services such as CPAC, the Weather Network, APTN, Uvagut TV, Omni, TV5, and CBC/Radio-Canada news in official minority language regions. The major Canadian broadcasters will pay the 1.55% levy too.

The last of the craw-stickers is probably the Commission’s rejection of the streamer proposal to count their marketing expenses towards their fulfillment of CPE spends. The Commission reaffirmed its existing policy that only small and medium sized Canadian broadcasters get that break. The streamers and the big Canadian broadcasters will not get it, in the name of maximizing contributions to production financing. On the other hand, the Commission told the streamers it remains open to them pitching a detailed plan on whether their financial sponsorship of creator training and development ought to count in CPE calculations. 

That’s the impact of the rulings on the streamers. There were some controversial results for Canadian media companies too, not limited to the “equitable” 10% CPE gap with streamers.

The Commission followed through with its preliminary view expressed in the notice of consultation by abolishing the mandatory spending category of “programs of national interest,” (PNI) a subset of CPE spending quotas to support feature films, drama series, comedy shows and documentaries. The notice of consultation didn’t elaborate much on the Commission’s thinking except to wonder aloud if the US streamers were going to flood the market with so many Canadian movies and serials that the Commission could relieve Canadian broadcasters of their PNI spending obligation. 

The major Canadian broadcasters had been begging for this for years because shows in those PNI genres are difficult to make profitably (a foundational point made in 2020 by the federal government’s Yale Committee that recommended legislating the Online Streaming Act). For example, Corus Entertainment has been quite vocal that its survival depends on making more lifestyle programming at a higher profit and getting out of Commission-directed expenditures on dramas.  On the flip side, Canadian independent producers and creative guilds warned that when the Commission previously experimented by repealing special funding requirements for programs of national interest it backfired spectacularly with declining production investments, prompting the Commission reinstate the priority spending a few years later.

Citing no evidence for its 180-degree reversal from the Yale Report, the Commission nevertheless decided that while news, children’s programming, and French language content is unprofitable and “at risk,” English-language drama and documentaries are not.

I do not exaggerate when I say this is a repudiation of a half century of Canadian media policy built on a comprehensive regime of CRTC regulation and government subsidies that puts dramas at the heart of “at risk” content. The Policy Direction that the federal cabinet issued to the CRTC in June 2023 gave the Commissioners a lot of instructions and priorities on a great many issues, but not one of them deprioritized the historic funding for English language feature films and dramas. 

What Minister Miller thinks of this I cannot say. But his government funds Canadian feature films and drama series to the tune of well over a half billion dollars annually through the Canada Media Fund, Telefilm Canada and the federal CPTC production tax credit. 

There were other issues close to the hearts of Canadian broadcasters that remain unresolved in these new Commission rulings.

News is one. The CRTC elected to maintain its existing policy which is that about 35 independent television stations (including the Global News network) can draw subsidies from the Independent Local News Fund but that Bell CTV, Rogers City-TV and Québecor TVA cannot. In fact, the big three will have to continue underwriting their cash-hemorrhaging network stations at current levels or 15% of their 25% CPE (about $380 million), whichever is more. By doing this the CRTC is confirming its 2016 ruling which was, if you will excuse the vulgarity, that the telcos can suck it up. 

Source: CRTC

The consolation prize for news broadcasters is that the Commission will schedule new hearings on the sustainability of news programming sometime in the future. When we get there, that future may look much different than today, depending on what happens with funding from the Online News Act and the federal government’s new proposal to extend federal journalism tax credits to broadcasters.

As for the much-anticipated production financing for content made by Indigenous producers, and by producers from equity-deserving groups, that has been kicked down the road, but hopefully not too far. The major broadcasters and streamers will be expected to table a plan to improve production financing in those communities in the third and final regulatory phase of “tailored conditions of service.” 

***

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

Catching up on MediaPolicy – media funding in Québec – innovation in news journalism – The Netflix Effect

Québec culture minister Mathieu Lacombe

May 18, 2026

There’s an election upcoming in Québec this fall and the politics of media and culture can be expected to get a lot of attention. 

This past week media titan Pierre-Karl Péladeau delivered his remarks about Québécor’s most recent quarterly report by celebrating the strong growth in his expanding national telco business. He then tacked on a threat to cut more jobs and programming in his money-losing television business unless he gets what he wants.

Péladeau has cut 800 television jobs in the last four years and 20% of original programming. Citing a 14% drop in ad revenues over the last year, he told reporters that he has done his part by cutting jobs and programming, bringing his media division back to break-even after years of losses (owing to his cuts and stronger broadcasting revenues from Montréal Canadians hockey).

Now Péladeau wants to squeeze his suppliers. By that he means price reductions from independent producers who make his TV content and wage concessions from the crews that shoot them.

From the provincial government, Péladeau wants more television production tax credits and the removal of tax deductions for Canadian advertisers patronizing foreign tech platforms. His explicit “or else” is more job cuts and replacing original television content shot in Québec with foreign acquisitions.

The new CAQ Premier Christine Fréchette didn’t take the bait from Péladeau, the former leader of her rival Parti Québécois, preferring to reflect that her government “is closely monitoring developments in the cultural sector and in relation to digital media.”

But her culture minister Mathieu Lacombe, not so much. He was annoyed by Péladeau’s ultimatums, reminding the him that the province —which just increased its $50M annual budget to supplement federal contributions to French language television production—won’t overcommit to television programming on a “dying” cable television network. Salting it some more, Lacombe suggested that following Péladeau’s logic the province was being invited to go down the path of “nationalizing” Québécor’s TVA network. 

Also, Lacombe might not appreciate Péladeau’s public demands just two months after his government’s March 2026 budget that delivered on extending Québec’s journalism labour tax credit to licensed television and radio stations at a cost of $40M annually. At the time, Péladeau commented that “while we have been calling for this for many years, the Québec government’s decision represents a major step forward.”

***

The Québec government’s decision in March to extend journalism tax credits beyond print media to include television and radio stations did not get much attention in the English language press. The federal government is now considering the same move.

Under the radar, the Québec budget began its three-year phase out of an eight-year-old $8M/yr spending program for digital transformation of legacy media.

Québec has always been more aggressive than the federal government about supporting digital innovation through subsidies, both as one-of tech projects and the inclusion of IT staff in its labour tax credit.

As Senator Andrew Cardozo and I wrote in our recent report, La Presse credits Québec’s support for digital innovation as making a big contribution to its successful digital transformation as well as its ability to retain software developers who might otherwise abandon their employer for better paying jobs in the tech ecosystem.

But in the March budget, the province eliminated the IT salary subsidy and began the wind down of the digital transformation grants.

***

“Innovation” holds a magical place in media policy. 

Some see innovation and government subsidies as binary: one cancels out the other. The assumption is that the opportunity for innovation to grease the skids of transition from legacy media to a successful new business model will be stymied so long as news outlets can fall back on subsidies.

In our report “Making News Media Sustainable,” Senator Cardozo and I see innovation and subsidies as complimentary. We wrote a longish part of the report on innovation and observed that the nation’s best adapters to digital —the Globe & Mail, La Presse, Village Media— draw journalism subsidies. 

On either view, realizing the potential of innovation probably comes down to corporate leadership, something I think Ariel Freiman described well in this recent piece in J-Source.

It’s possible that if innovation and subsidies can elbow each other out, it will probably depend in part upon the particular market in which news outlets operate. Is that market national, regional, local or hyperlocal? What is the audience demographic? How saturated is the competitive landscape? What are the opportunities for scale? And so on.

We also tend to think about innovation as “tech.” There’s been plenty of that, with the above noted news outlets all hitting it out of the park by developing proprietary publishing software. 

Another innovation theme that keeps emerging in media commentary is “the bundle.” That refers to the digital reimagination of the old newspaper formula of packaging news content together with an array of local information, buy-sell classifieds, pastimes, and invitations to community participation.

Village Media is a constant innovator on this score, as the Senator and I discuss in our report. Last week I stumbled upon a good e-newsletter on news innovation written by a German journalist Ulrike Langer, located in the US. Her latest is an interview with Richard Gingras, the former Google VP who now serves as chair of CEO Jeff Elgie’s board of directors at Village.

After describing the ways in which Village is putting together its content bundle, Gingras is at pains to describe Village as a “community impact platform” (or alternatively a “community operating system”) that includes news publishing in that bigger bundle.

Gingras also thinks that as AI tools automate writing and publishing, the “human element” (journalists?) will increasingly be directed at gathering information and forming the community bonds and sources to provide it. 

In the course of the interview, Gingras let the cat out of the bag by revealing that the 27-location Village network is about to expand to 15 locations in the US with an American partner.

When I asked Elgie where and when, he replied in an e-mail that he isn’t ready to announce the move yet.

***

I will plead guilty to the charge of indulging, from time to time, in bitter sarcasm. Most often in response to the hubris of the Big Tech elite. You may have noticed.

Netflix is the object of my disaffections this week. 

The studio-streaming colossus has some claim to my better angels and maybe your’s as well. After all, Netflix isn’t a social media platform that floods the digital airwaves with poisonous content.

Just ask Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos. According to him, Netflix is a benevolent force for good in the world. In a riff on the adage “what’s good for General Motors is good for America,” Sarandos dropped this pearl last week, modestly dubbed “the Netflix Effect”:

Over the last decade, Netflix shows and movies have consistently shaped what people read, buy, listen to, eat, wear and play. We’ve pushed old songs back up the musical charts, helped niche sports go mainstream, and boosted sales…Now we have a responsibility to keep that flywheel going. That’s why, while other entertainment companies pull back, we’re leaning in — spending tens of billions of dollars on content every year, investing in production facilities from Spain to New Jersey, and growing the entertainment industry through training programs that have reached over 90,000 people across more than 75 countries.

***

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

Catching up on MediaPolicy – CBC’s missing $200M – The Six Billion Dollar news subsidy – The Hub says Yes to news subsidies – the nihilism of activist journalism – are paid news subscriptions enough for civic dialogue?

“Six billion dollars”

May 10, 2026

There’s no other way to say it. It was a goofy week for Canadian media policy.

On Tuesday, cabinet minister Marc Miller popped up at the Commons Heritage Committee. MPs wanted to hear from him before voting on the government’s main budget estimates for 2026-2027.

At last someone put him on the spot about the Liberals cutting nearly $200 million from the CBC just a few months after delivering on Prime Minister Carney’s signature election promise of adding $150 million to the $1.4 billion parliamentary grant. 

In response to Conservative MP Bernard Généroux’s sardonic admiration of the government’s sleight of hand, Miller replied (in this Google translation):

“With all due respect, Mr. Généreux, I think one needs to better understand how budget estimates are made. We see an immediate picture of CBC/Radio-Canada’s funding profile, but that doesn’t factor into the subsequent bailout estimates. It’s a flawed equation to say we’re giving 150 to take away 200. This is part of the budget cycle.”

Silly Opposition MPs. Don’t they know about the double-tap of Supplementary budget estimates that often follow the Main Estimates? 

By the way, the French word Miller used was “renflouement,” translated as “bailout” or “refloating.” Or perhaps it means “later, when we can make a favourably timed announcement of more money for the CBC in a Supplementary Estimate .” 

The committee’s attention then turned to the government’s recent announcement in the Spring Economic Update that it will hold public consultations on extending the federal QCJO journalism labour tax credit to broadcasting companies. Making the government’s intentions known, the minister said, “it’s how, not if.”

One salacious policy hint he dropped: the government expects a discussion of a subsidy ceiling on the largest broadcasters in favour of smaller ones. 

Then Miller said an odd thing (twice, so not by accident): the additional cost of the expanded program would be $6 billion dollars. That’s 100 times the cost of the existing QCJO program for print media.

By the time his interlocutor, Bloc MP Martin Champoux, followed up on that eye-popping number, Miller had left the committee room.

As you might expect, the Twittersphere went off like a Roman candle. Six. Billion. Dollars. Try to imagine Mike Myers’ Dr. Evil delivering that line.

Two days later, Miller ‘fessed up in an X post saying he misspoke. He had mixed up the $75M per year journalism labour tax credit for print media with the $1 billion per year budget for federal film and television productions tax credits (over the next six years, ergo the $6 billion figure). 

Okay. Happens all the time.

So what might be the cost of a program for supporting broadcast news? Grabbing the nearest napkin and pen, I came up with a number somewhere between $82 million and $115 million. Let me show you my math:

To begin, the program cost of the federal labour tax credit is driven by journalist headcount based on 35% of journalist wages on the first $85,000 of salary. 

Going to the best available source for headcounts, the news producer head count for the Google funds distributed under the Online News Act by the Canadian Journalism Collective, expressed as full-time equivalents working a 40-hour week, is 3,549 for broadcasting companies and 4,179 for publishers. Bottom line: the broadcasting headcount is 85% of print journalists, a figure I need for this arithmetic.

As for a hypothetical broadcasting program cost fixed as an 85% percentage of the known costs of federal print media subsidies, you need to first establish the combined cost of labour tax credit for print journalists at daily newspapers ($75M), Aid to Publishers for community weeklies and magazines ($71M), another program for free distribution weeklies ($13M) and the Local Journalism Initiative (LJI) for 700 additional reporters in local media ($20M, although not all in print media). It adds up to $179M for print media journalists. 

But there’s a caveat to that $179M figure: the payout in the Aid to Publishers and LJI subsidies are much higher than the 35% wage subsidy in the labour tax credit, although how much higher is difficult to pin down. 

Rough guess of a final print media subsidy? Calculating the total print journalism program costs at an across-the-board 35% wage subsidy spits out a final number of $135M for print media journalists. 

Next step: the broadcasting headcount is 85% of that $135M, leading to an estimated  program cost of $115M for TV and radio news outlets. 

But there’s one final adjustment to the numbers: the existing labour tax credit  is scheduled to fall back from 35% to its original 25% next year, a 29% reduction. If that goes through, the $115 million for broadcasting support drops to as low as $82M. And if a ceiling is put on subsidies to large broadcasters, even further. 

So, not $6 billion, no. 

***

The next goofy thing is ironic, not funny.

I subscribe to The Hub, a commentary and news reporting website that is cerebral in its writing and conservative in its point of view. I listen religiously to its biweekly Full Press podcast.

On Thursday, publisher Rudyard Griffiths informed subscribers that he was abandoning The Hub’s years long refusal to accept QCJO labour tax credits or distributions of Google money under the Online News Act. I estimate the value of the two income streams to his publication at $60,000 annually. Griffiths cited softening advertising revenues and promised to park the cash in a reserve fund.

As he put it, “We are using that latitude to park any payroll subsidies in a segregated “rainy day” fund—available if we ever truly need it, but walled off from day-to-day operations so our journalism doesn’t become dependent on government money. If we ever draw on these subsidy dollars, we will tell you.”

There’s no need for “I told you so’s” here, although Griffiths has been vocal for years in his opposition to journalism wage subsidies, as well as passing judgement on those news organizations that accept them (“the soft, silent takeover of the nation’s press.”)

The Hub’s walk-back dittos the Western Standard which did it in September 2025, also stating it was doing so reluctantly. 

As far as I know, this leaves just two news organizations who could qualify for the labour tax credits (which require ongoing publication of original news content) but make a point of refusing subsidies. 

One is the hyper partisan Juno News. The other is the watchdog news outlet Blacklock’s Reporter which specializes in access-to-documents news reporting on the federal government and, it’s fair to say, offers no quarter to government and expects none. 

***

Moving on, I was distressed reading journalist Shauna Rae’s winning essay for the Dalton Camp Award, juried by Friends of Canadian Media. I’m a long time member of Friends and a volunteer on its policy committee, but I don’t have any connection to the annual writing award that honours Camp, the veteran political strategist who died in 2002. 

You can read Rae’s short piece and evaluate the message in her own words. To summarize, she is of the view that journalists should feel free to report the news as their truth, rather than the truth.

This is hardly a newly minted journalist creed even though I believe it is very much in the minority. 

It’s a call for “openly activist and participatory” (Rae’s words) journalism in the fight against privilege and power, in a binary world of oppressor and oppressed. It feeds directly into identity politics of racial and gender inequality and the dispossession and gross mistreatment of Indigenous peoples; identity politics in the sense that individuals are ascribed membership status as either oppressor or oppressed. Taken to the global stage, it underpins an anti-Israel news narrative. 

Rae’s justification for activist journalists throwing off the shackles of objectivity is that no such thing as objectivity exists. 

Objectivity may be the world’s biggest straw man. Outside of university seminars dwelling upon political theory I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone, let alone a journalist, who posits the existence of objective truth. The overwhelming majority of journalists (that I’ve ever met) adhere to the journalist creed of “pursuing the truth” while practicing professional norms of fairness and accuracy in fact gathering.

But, fill your boots with openly activist and participatory journalism if you wish. It’s a free and independent press that allows Rae and any other journalists to wear the activist mantle if they choose. Their work will be judged on its merits.

What disturbs me so deeply—and I know this will sound harsh— is the intellectual nihilism behind the activist creed. It’s the idea that in the absence of indisputable objectivity that anything goes. It’s the idea that you can defend any news reporting narrative as fair and deserving of credibility no matter how closely it operationalizes the writer’s agenda for making change in the world. 

Mostly it disappoints me because that’s not how change happens. And do we ever need change.

***

At the risk of making this weekly update too long, there is another item that I didn’t want to go stale.

It’s a survey conducted by the Media Insights Project on where Americans get their news and whether they pay for it. That has implications for how much emphasis we Canadians might put on public policy subsidizing paid news subscriptions as a reliable delivery vehicle for reporting on current events to a broad based democratic polity. It’s an issue that Senator Andrew Cardozo and I raised in our recent report, “Making News Media Sustainable.”

A key conclusion in the survey was “the majority of Americans — 7 in 10 — access a paid media service of some kind, even if they don’t pay for it themselves.”

We already knew that Americans pay for digital news subscriptions at a slightly higher rate than Canadians, which tends to fluctuate between 15% and 20%.

The public policy consequence is that such a low uptake on paid news subscriptions makes it hard to rely on the subscription business model as a comprehensive way of delivering news when so many Canadians are stuck on getting free news (there is data suggesting lower prices of digital news subscriptions don’t tempt people much).

The low uptake on digital news is mitigated by the fact that half of Canadians live in a household with access to a cable TV package that includes news channels (alas, news is a serious money loser for television networks).

The Media Insights survey’s conclusion that “7 in 10” Americans have access to “a paid media service” even if they don’t pay for it suggests that young people are watching cable TV or else making liberal use of a streaming password shared by someone else who paid for it. Thanks Mom and Dad.

The asterisk to that “7 in 10” statistic, and the limitation of the survey question’s relevance to news policy, is that it was about paid media services, not paid news media services. There’s this thing called Netflix, you know.

Still, it’s an encouraging set of public policy data on news consumption. Which reminds me to refer you again to the Cardozo-Law study where we recommend the federal government experiment with a generous news voucher program for news subscriptions.

***

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

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

AI Image

May 2, 2026

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

One of the not so surprising options we propose is to extend the federal QCJO  journalism labour tax credits to news websites operated by broadcasting companies. The Québec provincial government did it in March with their labour tax credit that parallels the federal QCJO. (A correction: the Québec labour credit directly supports news broadcasting on television and radio).

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

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

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

***

AI Image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there are self-help strategies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the way that all came together is this:

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

Lastly, a magnetic documentary to watch.

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

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

***

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

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

April 29, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

When you’re the last to know.

AI Photo Illustration

April 25, 2026

We, the people, were the last to know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

As I retweeted at the time, oh my.

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

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

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

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

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

CPAC CRTC Statement July 2 2025Download

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Slide from Profile 2025

April 21, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Karyn Pugliese has the story here.

***

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

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

April 18, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

April 4, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

graphic from the Hollywood Reporter

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

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

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

Impacting News:

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

Impacting Culture:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final CMF budget cut: unknown.

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

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

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

April 2, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about in Canada?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.