Book Review: Tera Henley’s The Trust Spiral

June 23, 2026

The 2026 Reuters Oxford Digital News report says we’ve hit a new low in public trust in Canadian journalism at 37%. Only ten years ago it was 55%.

That number might leave you with a lump in your throat. Canadian journalist Tara Henley is just as alarmed. She is about to publish The Trust Spiral: Why the Media Needs Objectivity on July 28th.

Henley sees a problematic spread of woke progressive culture in US and Canadian newsrooms over the last decade or so, careening out of control during the Covid Pandemic years that were marked in the United States by the popular outrage at the police murder of George Floyd and in Canada by the Convoy Occupation of downtown Ottawa.

Her 90-page book will draw comparisons to the American writer Batya Ungar-Sargon’s Bad News: How the Woke Media is Undermining Democracy (2023). That book is a wide-ranging indictment of the US “liberal elite,” the Democratic Party, and the class privileged members of the national media. As an English lit PhD born into a privileged class position herself, Ungar-Sargon describes herself as a “MAGA leftist” and is particularly scathing in her disdain for the New York Times which she portrays as something like the media anti-Christ. 

Henley not so much. Unlike Ungar-Sargon, she’s a career working journalist who has practised the discipline: gathering and reporting the facts of what has happened in public life. Listen to her podcasts on Lean Out or Full Press and you’ll form an impression of her, and it won’t be that of a MAGA leftist.

There are no Bad Guys in The Trust Spiral and no demonized news institutions. How grounded. How Canadian.

But there’s a problem, says Henley. It’s the steady drop, nay a nose-dive spiral, in the public’s trust in “mainstream” news journalism (keeping mind that “mainstream” is a label affixed indiscriminately by others to a diverse assembly of established news outlets and it’s usually not a complement).

And while Henley is careful not to lay all of the blame at the door of newsrooms and journalists —she offers nuance and context about the complex roots of this decline in trust–  she is calling for mainstream journalism to serve its audience better, with more accurate news reporting and fewer manipulative story narratives. 

I will say parenthetically that the dreadful 37% figure for public trust is from a polling response to the question “how much do you trust the news as a whole within your country?” The related figures for “trust in brands” of leading Canadian news sources are a great deal higher, in the 50% to 60% range (higher in Quebec), while the “don’t trust” percentages are in the teens (and lower in Quebec).

This gap between 37% trust in overall news and the higher ratings for specific news outlets suggests Canadians are worrying a bit too much about untrusted news that other people are consuming. As well, the meagre 37% thumbs up for “news as a whole” is likely weighed down by the dim view Canadians take of news accessed on social media, search engines, and AI chatbots.

To close the bracket on this parenthetic thought, whether or not we are living in an existential moment for public trust in mainstream media is something you can decide for yourself at the end of the book. But I do share Henley’s alarm.

The mainstream media leans left, says Henley, continuing the analysis.  When American journalists confronted Donald Trump’s upset victory in the 2016 election they grappled with a crucial choice between sticking to the classic role of detached reporting of facts or becoming activist-journalists in countervail to the new President’s MAGA agenda, his vilification of the media, and his peerless ability to by-pass journalists and project his message directly to Americans through social media.

Journalism leaders like New York University’s Jay Rosen endorsed a departure from the sedate rules of detachment reporting on Trump in favour of “resistance” to “the erosion of democratic institutions and a common world of fact,” stopping short of recommending political “opposition.” Others like the Washington Post’s Marty Baron advised reporters to just “go to work” and report facts. 

Even though Trump lost the November 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden, activist journalism didn’t release its grip on newsrooms, says Henley. 

A cultural cocktail brewed from a concoction of controversial public health measures, the April 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, the reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement and the street violence associated with BLM protests. Together they provided US and Canadian journalism with one opportunity after another to choose between old-school detachment and the moral certainty of activist reporting. 

In US newsrooms, the most notorious incident was the newsroom revolt at the New York Times after Opinion Editor James Bennet green-lit a guest column “Send in the Troops” written by Senator Tom Cotton. The Republican legislator advocated domestic deployment of the military to suppress street violence and looting associated with BLM protests. 

The Times newsroom roiled. A rank-and-file petition demanded editorial management’s disavowal of Cotton’s op ed (promptly delivered by publisher A.G. Sulzberger). The heated environment caused staff editor Barri Weiss to opine that “showing up as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.” (An aside: Weiss thinks she was a centrist?)

Accused of enabling racism and the reckless endangerment of his African-American colleagues reporting on the protests, editor Bennet was drummed out of the New York Times by the end of June.

Henley brings the focus back to Canada, recounting an incident the same month in which one of the country’s most famous journalists Wendy Mesley was suspended by the public broadcaster CBC from her host duties (and retired a year later) after a complaint that she used the N-word during a prep meeting for a segment focussed on a news subject who also spoke the slur. 

June 2020 was perhaps the high point of “the great awokening” or (Henley’s alternative descriptive) “identitarian moralism” over issues of race and gender. My own view is that the accelerant to this moralizing was the Covid lockdown that fuelled intemperate statements on social media, unrestrained by the grounding of a common workplace and face to face engagement between long time colleagues.

But all of that is just flavour for the central narrative. Henley has a bigger issue and that is the mainstream media’s coverage of public health measures such as mandatory masking and vaccine mandates during the pandemic and, related, the convoy occupation of downtown Ottawa in February 2022.

Not alone in this view, Henley maintains that mainstream Canadian media fell well short of its duty to report on public health measures, and the science behind it, with the required professional skepticism. 

When the Convoy protest entrenched itself for three weeks in protest of the same public health measures, Henley says that mainstream media unfairly and inaccurately portrayed those Canadians as kooks, dangerous insurrectionists, and trailer-park riff raff. Henley suggests a class bias on the part of the better educated, urban-dwelling, and affluent national press corps, something she sees as evidence of a fundamental issue to be addressed by Canadian news organizations throughout their news coverage of current affairs. 

This is the same point made by Ungar-Sargon in Bad News where the focus is on the demographic profile of an urban, secular and affluent US national media (alas, there is very little Canadian data available to confirm or refute that profile. Both class status and class-viewpoint would require a great many data markers).

Whether or not we can lay the accusation of class bias at the feet of the press corps may not be as important as resolving the question of the mainstream media having internalized a deep-seeded ideological agenda, call it left-wing, progressive or woke (presumably the National Post and the Western Standard are excused).

The activist retort to that accusation is either (a) it’s a right-wing smear of honest journalists, or (b) it’s an appeal to the false god of “objective reporting” when there is no such thing as “objectivity,” either as an epistemological truth or a journalistic practice. 

What has been set up rhetorically as a binary choice between “objectivity” in news reporting versus “activism journalism” is a false dualism that does not serve us well.

As Henley and many others point out, journalistic objectivity is a straw man and an euphemism for the pursuit of truth, both as a human aspiration and a professional discipline. 

Writes Henley, historically “the journalistic method of objectivity —a set of practices designed to separate facts from value judgments —arose in distinction to a press dominated by both commercial and political interests.” 

She delves into a brief account of the 19th century partisan press, the robber baron press, the populist penny press, and the supine wartime press of the next century. 

In reaction, says Henley, the “pursuit of truth” philosophy that is operationalized by a professional standard of journalistic detachment was the news industry’s dialectical evolution from the bought-and-paid-for press dominated by partisan political parties and the rich. 

Still, you can find plenty of evidence of left-leaning activist journalists portraying “objectivity” as ideological cover for the stranglehold of the rich and privileged, including the racially privileged, over news reporting. As a kind of bookend, the right-leaning activist press thinks professional standards only obscure a different chokepoint over news reporting, one that favours the Big State and the suppression of liberty. 

A plague on both your houses, I say. 

What doesn’t get much oxygen in this debate is the dominant ideology of news journalism. And no, this ideology’s name is neither Woke nor Right.

It’s the creed of “Watchdog” journalism founded on a moral certainty that powerful people in government and big business are presumed to be up to no good, or at least seriously considering it, and it is the vocational calling of journalists to fearlessly expose it with factual reporting even if the underlying assumption of the unchecked abuse of power is itself a bias. The point is, it’s a consensus bias both in journalism and society at large (except among the powerful I suppose). This watchdog journalism has a long and venerable history. You could even label it activist. 

Once journalists of all stripes acknowledge they share something very important, reversing the downward spiral of public trust should just be a matter of being fastidious in their devotion to professional standards, not wedging the moral of the story into news reports, and leaving moral certainty to the opinion writers. 

No matter the best efforts of journalists, if the social currents that batter public trust in all public institutions continue to drag down the media, journalists can take pride in having worked hard to earn it back.

***

(An earlier version of this review inaccurately identified Wesley Lowery as a leader of the newsroom petition at the New York Times in the Cotton incident. Lowery was not employed by the Times or involved in the petition).

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

Miller has no idea what Carney and Sarandos discussed – will Montreal voters punish the Netflix bailout? – Senate publishes CBC report – US media giants continue to merge

June 20, 2026

After getting challenged by CTV’s Vassy Kapelos for his government’s June 3rd “capitulation” on the Online Streaming Act, culture and identity minister Marc Miller travelled to the Banff World Media Festival this week where the Globe and Mail’s Barry Hertz put the same proposition to him.

“Look, well, it’s wrong,” said Miller rejecting the “capitulation” label. The minister is preparing to issue new instructions to the CRTC on foreign streamer contributions to Canadian content.

“There isn’t a chance that we won’t stand up and make sure that Canadian culture gets supported. I certainly do understand the frustration, because there’s been a lot of blood shed and battles fought on these grounds. … But you can have all the aspirations in the world to make sure that people are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, but if that doesn’t work, we have to act. And this reflects my impatience, and the Prime Minister’s impatience, to make sure that we are creating some stability in the system.”

Hertz also asked Miller if Netflix and the other US streamers would ever pay anything into Canadian media funds that subsidize Canadian content, given that Netflix had volunteered to the CRTC in 2023 that a two per cent levy was acceptable.

Miller responded that “we have to have that conversation with streamers, which has yet to occur in any developed form. My colleagues in the Bloc Québécois assume that it will go down to zero. That isn’t the case. We want people to pay what they would on a fair basis, and you can compare it to some other jurisdictions. It may be a staggered process of policy directions. I want to get it set out quickly, so we can get the ball rolling.”

Miller’s answer appears to contradict a government source in an earlier Globe and Mail story who said the government would direct the CRTC to levy no cash contributions on streamers at all. 

Next, Miller was asked if the government is confident in its assumption that streamers can successfully pass along the CRTC’s 6.55% cash levy to Canadian subscribers given the aggressive price increases of the past years in an industry notorious for subscriber churn. Research from the EU suggests regulatory charges don’t necessarily get passed along. 

“Not to minimize the counterpoint that you’re making,” he responded, “but we have seen in some of those jurisdictions an increase in production costs, which is an affordability issue from another angle.”

In other words, the government’s assumption of a subscriber paid “Netflix tax” is based not only on the CRTC’s order of 6.55% streamer cash contributions to media funds but also an assumed increase in streamer production costs arising from the CRTC order for streamers to spend 8.5% of Canadian revenues on making Canadian shows for their own platforms. (The EU study did however take that into account).

Finally, Hertz got to the salacious stuff and asked Miller what he knew about the private meeting that the Prime Minister had with Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos a week before his June 3rd announcement of the government bailout.

The minister said he didn’t know.

“I don’t know what was discussed, to be honest I know they met, and he meets with a lot of people in the industry. I don’t think that anyone meeting would shape policy in any way that’s material.”

Meanwhile according to Hertz’s further reporting, the Canadian producers attending the Banff festival were generally in a state of disorientation following the government striking down the Netflix levies and promising to replace the CanCon production money from a $600 million increase in federal cultural spending. 

Like any entrepreneurs investing in multi-year projects, Canadian film producers need to know where their financing is coming from before they start taking out loans and passing on other projects. More than half of their production budgets come from government tax credits, media funds, and direct investments by broadcasters and, until June 3rd, foreign streamers too. 

The government promised to replace the streamer money with taxpayer cash but for now no one knows when, how much, or what the program rules might be.

Yet despite all appearances to be making it up as they go along, there are signs that the federal Liberals know what they are doing but are keeping their cards close to their vest.

One clue is the special industry committee that Miller created in April to advise on the future of Canadian video production. In a press release, the government offered no details on the committee’s mandate. Neither did officials for the Canada Media Fund, the public-private subsidy fund central to any changes in the bundle of financing sources that consists of investments from independent Canadian producers, Canadian broadcasters, foreign streamers, and federal and provincial governments.

Now we have a second clue: a document obtained by veteran journalist Dean Beeby (who was kind enough to share it with me) written in October 2025 by former deputy heritage minister Isabelle Mondou for then-minister Steven Guilbeault. Commissioned immediately after the Carney government was elected in April 2025, the lightly redacted report appears to have three major recommendations:

  • Identify efficiencies by combining the program administration of Canada Media Fund, the National Film Board and Telefilm Canada. 
  • Formulate an “integrated vision of audio-visual production.” 
  • Align the funding mandates of federal subsidies (i.e. the Canada Media Fund and the CPTC tax subsidies) with that vision.

One of the salient points made by the deputy minister is that government CanCon subsidy is overwhelmingly dedicated to production financing and is underwhelming in its support of pre-production development and post-production distribution and export strategies. Although the final recommendations are redacted in the document, the deputy minister’s observation correlates with advice from some Canadian commentators that a policy shift is overdue (and see the item on the Fox-Roku merger, below). 

The Mondou memo was signed off eight months ago by Guilbeault, so it may be that since then civil servants in the Department of Heritage have fleshed out a plan they want to run past the industry volunteers on the minister’s new committee. 

It’s unknown if the new vision that emerges will dovetail with the minister’s other big files: rewriting instructions to the CRTC on streamer contributions, figuring out what that means for “equitable” contributions from Canadian broadcasters, and then replacing any shortfall from the $600 million bank account for federal cultural subsidies, also announced on June 3rd.

On another front, there is the policy storm moving in from a different direction: what to do about federal funding of news journalism. 

Miller announced in May that the Carney government plans to extend federal QCJO journalism salary subsidies to broadcasting companies. The public consultation was also announced on June 3rd, the same day as the CRTC’s streamer levies were struck down. Those QCJO subsidies are scheduled to drop from 35% to 25% of journalist salary rates in 2027. 

As well, the Netflix bailout scotched the annual $45 million in expected streamer contributions to the Independent Local Television News Fund earmarked as relief for the financially distressed Global News network and 19 other independent television stations. 

The quashed streamer cash levies were also expected to put $40 million in annual radio news funding.

On yet another funding front, the federal government is cutting $10 million of the funding for weekly newspapers in the $85M Canada Periodical Fund . 

With all of those funding cuts in the wind comes the news that Heritage is continuing its five-year review of the Periodical Fund but now also the $20M Local Journalism Initiative which was only recently reviewed.

Something’s up.

***

Another potential outcome of the Netflix bailout is whether the Liberals pay the price for their decision in Québec where electors rank cultural issues —-deeply intertwined with language issues—- near the top of their list. The Carney government’s shredding of the Trudeau-Guilbeault environmental policies is also on the list. 

Not only is there a provincial election in October that could produce a separatist government spoiling for a fight with Ottawa, but the Bloc Québécois is gearing up for three federal by-elections in the greater Montréal area triggered by pending resignations from the House of Commons by Liberal Steven Guilbeault, the Bloc’s Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, and NDP MP Alexander Boulerice. Two of the three ridings are sufficiently progressive to have elected Québec Solidaire provincially. 

The Carney Liberals currently hold majority government by a three-seat margin. 

***

The Senate Transportation & Communications Committee has released its report on the CBC. 

The report made only seven recommendations, three of which can be summed up as arguing for a major pivot of the public broadcaster into local news. 

What grabbed headlines of course was the recommendation of a regular audit of CBC News content by an external consultant to assess for bias in news reporting. 

Source: Reuters Oxford Digital News Report, 2026

***

Media merger activity in the US is getting frothy.

After the US Department of Justice announced it had no anti-trust concerns about the Paramount $110 USD billion takeover of Warner Brothers Discovery, the Wall Street Journal published a story with sources from “people familiar with the matter.”

The story was that DOJ staff lawyers were “leaning towards recommending” a DOJ anti-trust lawsuit blocking the merger when senior DOJ officials unexpectedly announced the green light for a “pro-competitive” merger. The focus of the staff investigation had been whether Paramount CEO David Ellison can deliver on a promise to increase, not decrease, the number of feature film productions given the extraordinary debt load incurred to buy Warner Brothers. 

In an unrelated announcement, the Murdoch-owned and content-rich Fox Corporation is paying $22 USD billion to buy streaming distribution giant Roku. 

Fox already runs its own free advertising streaming television (FAST) platform Tubi that engages 100 million active users each month. Fox will consolidate Tubi with the Roku’s industry-leading 80 million accounts that are integrated into its streaming hardware and content launch screens.

***

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

MediaPolicy’s First Explainer on the Safe Social Media Act

2024 Opinion Poll, The Dais

June 16, 2026

I will make a confession. I was at first overwhelmed by the breadth and detail of the federal government’s new Safe Social Media Act Bill C-34. The dense legalese of the bill is a terrific sleep aid. 

But of course both the good and bad vibes in the legislation deserve a hearing if you are keen to follow the ups and downs of the bill’s parliamentary journey, soon to unfold. 

In sorting all of that out, you really need to know: what does the proposed statute actually say and do?

Read the bill. But if I’ve discouraged you, here’s an explainer. 

The top of line summary is that the bill creates a Digital Safety Commission to shepherd in a regulatory regime to protect children from online harm and reduce harms for adults.

Some of the harms, like child porn, hate and some forms of the online incitement of violence, are already illegal. The bill is intended to supplement the state’s formidable powers of criminal investigation, arrest and prosecution. 

Other harms like revenge porn (my shorthand for posting intimate content without consent), bullying or inducing kids to self-harm, or the hate or incitement falling short of illegality is often called “awful but lawful” content because the speech embedded in the online content is free speech.

But free speech, like the banana peel on the sidewalk, has never been free of consequences or civil liability. 

Awful but lawful online content has been the subject of years and years of civil lawsuits launched against US-headquartered social media platforms around the world, slow walking towards a day of reckoning before the US Supreme Court. This Canadian bill is about making the awful unlawful in Canada if it’s harmful enough.

The legal breakthrough is that the bill creates a legal duty of care ——the one that an American or Canadian court may or may not create in some distant future—- that social media platforms, AI chatbots, and porn sites must live up to.

If you read the bill, you will see that it is organized by codifying those legal duties for social media, AI chatbots, and “other” regulated services. Then for each of those categories, the statute describes the content of those duties and how the online services can stay out of legal trouble for hosting it. 

Most of the action in the bill is for social media apps. I’ll get to that below.

As for AI chatbots, regulation is narrowed down to the AI companies doing or not doing a few simple things:

  • Not posing as a human, especially a lawyer or medical professional.
  • Not using emotionally manipulative techniques or being deceptive about being an AI agent.
  • Ending interactions with users by refusing to provide information on self-harm or harm to others and instead directing the user to health services. 

Interestingly, the bill does not require AI companies to report these dangerous or self-harming users to the police, something that took no small measure of political forbearance after the Tumbler Ridge shooting. Calling the cops will still be up to the AI company. 

Also as an overall safety measure, the bill requires AI chatbots to submit a Digital Safety Plan to the new Digital Safety Commission. The Plan must assess the potential harms in their services, the measures they take to mitigate those risks, and how effective those measures are. 

As for porn sites (just one of the potential members of the third “other” class of regulated online services) the main obligation is to protect children from viewing porn by setting up age verification or age estimation technology. 

This age gating raises concerns about the secure storage of private data, meaning the risk that porn viewers will be publicly embarrassed or blackmailed. A key provision in the bill, picked up from Bill S-209, is that online age verification services are supposed to delete the personal data the moment they have confirmed the age of majority. 

As for social media apps, they will be age gated for all users if they carry porn (sorry, not sorry Elon). 

Even if they don’t carry porn, social media apps will be temporarily age gated (below age 16) until such time their proprietors satisfy the Digital Safety Commission that they have a Digital Safety Plan that assesses harms to children and adults, puts online design features and measures in place that reduce harms, and then documents how effective they were. “Temporary” age gating may last months or years, although the mere requirement will light a fire under the social media platforms to submit their Digital Safety Plans to the Commission on day one.  

But any age verification requirement for social media apps, even if temporary, suggests that all adult users will be subject to it, or at very least those adults who don’t get through the gate with a minimum of fuss and information. For example, your social media platform may be satisfied by a quick scan of your social media profile and activity.

As for protecting kids from the proliferating harms on social media apps, the federal cabinet will have the power to set regulations (that first get published in the Canada Gazette for debate) detailing at least some of what is expected in a Digital Safety Plan. 

At the very least, the Carney government might see this regulation-making opportunity to take credit for some high level principles of child safety —- perhaps a command to “do something about addictive design”—- while leaving the fine points of implementation to the platforms drafting their Digital Safety Plans and the Commission that has to approve those Plans. 

In fact it will be important to hear the presentations made at parliamentary committees considering Bill C-34 as to how much of the line by line of the Digital Safety Plans will be left to the social media companies to conceptualize and design versus how much will be effectively dictated by cabinet regulation and the Commission’s own views of how tough the Plans must be. 

On that score, the bill already includes clear measures expected of the social media apps:

  • There must be blocking tools for users to shut out noxious harassers and child predators. 
  • There must be user tools for flagging harmful content to bring to the attention of platform. 
  • The social media companies must label “synthetic” content (deep fakes). 
  • Bot-driven content must be labelled once it is discovered. 
  • And there must be a public facing “resource person” to deal with user concerns. 

As for actual content take-downs by the social media platforms, they are only required in limited circumstances, i.e. child porn, revenge porn and terrorist material. 

These content take-downs are required on at least an interim basis within 24 hours of being flagged. But a final platform decision on the take-down is only due “as soon as feasible.” Since it’s likely there will be some contested judgments on making these difficult take-down calls, the social media companies must provide an internal appeal process (for both content viewer and content poster) and then ultimately a complaint can be made to the Commission. 

All of this will be superintended by the five commissioners appointed by cabinet to the Digital Safety Commission. 

The Commission’s powers are broadly similar to most federal administrative tribunals. After all, the whole point of the bill is to take the law and liability out of the hands of civil law and the civil courts and transfer them to a body capable of holding tech platforms accountable for harmful content on offer to 40 million Canadians.

Three Commission powers pop out already as notable.

The first is the ladder of substantial fines and “administrative monetary penalties” that the Commission can use, or threaten to use, to keep the Big Tech platforms in line. Depending on the circumstances, the fines can range from $5 million to $20 million, or from 1.5% to 5% of the tech platform’s global revenues.

The second is the possibility of secret Commission hearings that can be invoked when there a privacy concerns (for example revenge porn or anything concerning children).

The third is the Commission’s power to compel platforms to give data access to independent (but government-vetted) research academics. This will hopefully give the public interest independent information about how well the platforms are meeting their obligations.

This summary will have to do for now.

There’s enough in this lengthy and detailed bill to attract scrutiny and that has already begun.

As I wrote in my last post, this bill sits on at least two powder keg issues. One is protecting children and adults from poisonous content. The other is the possibility of creating a slippery slope of the state interfering with free speech through the proxy of platform accountability.

It would be easy to dismiss either policy perspective as being motivated by either nanny statism or, on the other hand, a dogged resistance to regulating any Internet content any time out of a fear for digital privacy, especially where porn is concerned. 

From what I have already read, and from my own observations, here is a short list of issues that will and should get attention during the parliamentary debate:

  • Flag-a-mania. The statute contemplates ordinary Canadians flagging harmful content, even if it is not about them. They (and those that posted the content) get due process from both the platform and the Commission.  It’s not hard to see that devolving into a new form of “lawfare.”
  • Age gating. This is going to happen no matter what because of the ban on children accessing porn. The question is not the digital security of personal data — leaks and hacks are always possible — but whether technology can reduce that unlikely event to something next to impossible. Social media platforms can make this easier by simply banning pornography from their platforms and leave that business to the porn sites. 
  • The statute gives the platforms a get-out-jail-free card by relieving them of any obligation to pro-actively search for harmful content. I am sure they already do this voluntarily and may even incorporate that into a Digital Safety Plan, but enshrining this grant of platform immunity into law could be controversial.
  • The statute leaves a lot of digital rule-making to be determined by a combination of cabinet regulations, Commission guidelines, and platform Digital Safety Plans. That is a lot of regulatory power held in reserve and without fulsome debate in Parliament. On the other hand, it may be practically unavoidable.

***

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 explains the Netflix bailout – Federal ad vouchers to support Canadian media? – US DOJ approves the Paramount/ Warner Bros merger

June 14, 2026

There are few things more refreshing than CTV’s Vassy Kapelos grilling cabinet ministers.

The host of Question Period had culture and identity minister Marc Miller in the dock on Saturday to ask him bluntly why Canadians would expect that his new Safe Social Media Act Bill C-34 won’t be given away upon President Donald Trump’s insistence, as were the Digital Services Tax and the CRTC’s assessment of cash and investment contributions to Canadian content by US streaming services.

Miller’s answer: there will be no surrender by the Liberals on his new bill. Protecting kids is not on the table, he said, “hard stop.” The minister thinks that similar legislative efforts being passed or proposed in Washington and various US state houses to protect children from online harms bodes well for Canada pursuing the same strategy.

Also, he said protecting children is more important than “redistributing money within an industry,” a reference to the CRTC ruling. (Public polling on conceding ground on the Online Streaming Act under US trade pressure is here.)

As for overruling the CRTC on streamer contributions, Miller said he wouldn’t comment publicly. That lasted about ten seconds once Kapelos went after him for “capitulation” to US trade pressure and American companies.

Kapelos asked Miller what Canada got, or might get, in CUSMA trade talks for coughing up the Digital Services Tax and the CRTC ruling.

“I’m not going to tell you,” replied the minister.

The minister then gave up some fresh talking points on the CRTC ruling and the $600M in federal funds that includes replacement of the streamer contributions:

  • The CRTC “is not the final arbiter” on implementing the Online Streaming Act, the government is.
  • The Prime Minister may have overruled the CRTC’s 15%-of-revenues assessment on foreign streamers but it is only because the 15% number wasn’t the right one. When the minister formally instructs the CRTC “in a few months” on the make-over of the overturned decision, there will be “a number.”
  • The annual $600M in federal funds announced on June 3rd will compensate for giving away the $200M in annual streamer contributions ordered two years ago by the CRTC in part because that streamer money is “tied up in court.” (The escrowed streamer funds from 2025-26 will have to be refunded to the streamers).
  • The federal $600M will include money for “independent journalism.”

***

There was an unexpected media policy post from Narcity publisher Chuck Lapointe last week that is worth reading.

Narcity is a Canadian news outlet with a heavy bent towards travel content. But it also publishes conventional news content and on a daily basis it re-posts Canadian Press news stories on Facebook in order to draw traffic to Narcity’s websites.

Lapointe can get away with this despite the Meta banishment of news from its Canadian platforms because he signed off a Meta waiver saying his news product is not the kind of content that triggers financial compensation from Meta under the Online News Act, Bill C-18.

Speaking of Meta, Lapointe’s policy post points out how foreign platforms now completely dominate the Canadian market in digital advertising with the well known impact on the ability of Canadian media to monetize their content.

A good policy move, he says, would be for Ottawa to put new federal dollars in the hands of Canadian advertisers on the condition they spend it on Canadian digital platforms. That kind of voucher system might spur innovation by Canadian digital outlets competing for that ad spend.

It’s a smart idea that’s been circulating in various US states for some time now. In Canada, Senator Andrew Cardozo and I included the recommendation of an advertising voucher in our recent report, Making News Media Sustainable.

***

The US Federal Department of Justice has signed off on the blockbuster Paramount-Warner Brothers Discovery merger.

As often happens in government reviews of big mergers, the field of competition is configured to offer a rationale for the thumbs up or down. In this case, the FCC is saying it’s “pro-competitive” for Hollywood studios and streamers to consolidate in order to compete more effectively with Silicon Valley tech/media companies.

The merger story isn’t over. Some US state attorney generals, including California, are banding together to litigate an anti-trust action against it.

The merger also hasn’t been approved by the Canadian Competition Bureau. The European Union and the United Kingdom are also reviewing it: an early approval or the launch of further EU investigations might be announced in July.

***

Back to the Online News Act for a moment and attention all journalists.

An independent researcher from Simon Fraser University is running a survey on newsroom opinions on the consequences of the Online News Act. (She confirmed to me that she isn’t getting funding from foreign platforms. Her research appears to be supported by a federal grants).

English  : The Online News Act and its consequences for Canadian Journalism 

En français : La Loi sur les nouvelles en ligne et ses conséquences pour le journalisme canadien

***

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.

Feds table Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act

June 11, 2026

Even if you haven’t, Prime Minister Mark Carney has moved on from last week’s announcement of a $600 million taxpayer bailout of US streamers who were scheduled to make cash contributions to Canadian media funds.

Within days, federal government announced two other big things that bear heavily upon Canadian media policy. 

The first was the “AI for all” federal policy which focusses mostly on AI investment, AI adoption by businesses and consumers, and some money for safety research. The words “creator copyright” or “content licensing” do not appear in the federal plan. That means that the unlicensed and uncompensated ingestion of online news and information content by AI companies will continue, although the Liberals say we should “stay tuned.”

The other big thing was Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, a reprise and redesign of the old Bill C-63 that sets up a regulatory regime of self-policing against harmful content by social media companies and now AI chatbots too. It effectively overtakes Bill S-209, the Senate bill that targets youth access to online pornography available for free on social media apps.

C-34 was tabled by the Heritage minister Marc Miller for First Reading in the House and will likely go into the theatrical window of Parliamentary committee in October. You’re going to hear a lot about the merits or dismerits of the government’s plan over many months and MediaPolicy.ca will offer updates as we go along. Together I hope we can educate ourselves as the public commentary comes, which will be thick and fast I guarantee you.

What is the Bill?

Social media content can be addictive and harmful, especially to impressionable kids. No one is going to dispute that reality, the arguments over C-34 are going to be over how far the government should intervene. Public polling demonstrates mass popular support for federal regulation of online harms and in particular age bans for kids.

The bill focusses on harm to kids, revenge porn, fomenting hate, inciting violence, and content published by terrorist and extremist cells. Again, all of them consensus picks for government action.

The platforms to be regulated are social media companies and AI chatbots, the latter being a response to and a painful reminder of OpenAI’s culpability in the Tumbler Ridge shootings. 

The core of the bill is to make online platforms liable for harmful content by requiring them to meet a standard of self-policing the addictive and harmful content. Ultimately, a new government digital regulator (not the CRTC, praise be) will be the arbiter of whether the platform’s design features and content curation are good enough. 

There’s lots to dig into there, and more to explain, but later. 

As we go along you can expect that the contested features of the bill, wrapped in fine points of legalese or technological detail, are sitting to two powder kegs. One, is the harm to children. The other, is the fear that the age restrictions embedded in the legislation will usher in the end of anonymous online content consumption and create a treasure trove of personal data for hackers to steal. 

CBC interview with McGill’s Taylor Owen

***

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 – What comes after “No Netflix tax”? – British regulator backs news publishers vs Google AI

“Elbows up, eh?”

June 7, 2026

Eight months is a long time in politics and we have come a long way since former Heritage minister Steven Guilbeault proclaimed that “culture is not on the table” in CUSMA trade talks.

Despite Prime Minister Mark Carney vetoing the core ruling of the CRTC’s application of the Online Streaming Act to Netflix and the Hollywood streamers last Wednesday, a wag might suggest Guilbeault has been vindicated. Culture never even got to the table.

If you have any lingering doubts about my view on all of this, you can go back and read my opinion column published last Friday in Cartt.ca. If on the other hand you would rather just soak your head in some sardonic humour, there’s always Mark Musselman’s satiric piece.

Carney may have made his political calculations shrewdly. His cave on streamer contributions to Canadian content and his embrace of the Conservative Party’s “no Netflix tax” anthem wasn’t much more than a one day story in English Canadian media. The Globe & Mail’s television critic Kelly Nestruck stood out as a dissenter.

In Québec media commentators were critical, but not in the hair-on-fire manner you might have expected. Perhaps everyone is waiting to see where the big fat $600 million in public subsidies, tabbed to replace streamer dollars, is going to land. Brilliant stuff sir, keeping your critics hungry like that.

Nobody in the national media, save one journalist, thought to ask the Prime Minister what transpired in his private meeting with Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos a week before handing him a multi million dollar windfall. If the Prime Minister was ever to attend Question Period, an MP might ask him.

Now perhaps there is reason for optimism, or at least less pessimism.

We know nothing about the $600 million. It could be good news.

Also, we haven’t seen the minister’s new Policy Direction to the CRTC that is supposed to guide the regulator’s reconsideration of its government-vetoed ruling.

The PMO’s lawyers will be hard at it, drafting the new Policy Direction so that it stays on the legal side of the line that separates “advice” from “command.” A PMO dictat to ban streamer cash contributions to Canadian media funds will be tricky. As will any bottom line demands on direct streamer investments in Canadian programming.

As well, we have to wait to see if the new Policy Direction quietly delves into other parts of the CRTC’s ruling that the government may or may not like.

Rethinks of copyright partnerships, priority treatment for English language dramas, and funding for “services of exceptional importance” are possible.

And of course, the biggest conundrum that seems to escape all notice is what to tell the CRTC to do with respect to the yawning gap between foreign streamer contributions to Canadian content and those made by Canadian broadcasters.

After all, the law that Parliament passed requires the regulatory load be spread “equitably” and the first CRTC ruling did that (with fingers crossed behind back) by fixing a 15% (of revenues) CanCon spending quota for streamers and 25% for broadcasters.

You can expect Canadian broadcasters to tell the CRTC that they want the deal that Netflix got.

Well played, Mr.Prime Minister.

[Update: “Ottawa to roll back implementation of the Online Streaming Act, an irritant in US trade talks” – Globe & Mail, June 7, 2026]

***

I like to track below-the-radar stuff for you.

Here’s one: the British Competition and Markets Authority just ruled that Google must reveal to news publishers whether it’s ingesting their content into its AI models and give them a window into who is engaging with their content. According to Press Gazette, the CMA will require Google to:

“– provide publishers with effective controls over the use of their search content in generative AI

“– publish clear, comprehensible and user-friendly information explaining how publishers’ search content is used by Google in its generative AI

“– provide publishers with clear and detailed metrics on user engagement with their search content in search generative AI features

“– take reasonable steps to ensure that search content is attributed clearly and accurately in general search, and that end users have a clear means to access that search content.”

The CMA also says that it plans to force Google to let news publishers opt-out of AI ingestion of their content and —this is a big one— stop Google from forcing news publishers to de-index their linked snippets from appearing in Search as the condition of withholding their content from the maw of Google’s AI models.

Said the regulator, “Publishers will now have effective tools to prevent their content being used to power AI features in search, such as AI Overviews. This will put publishers, like news organisations, in a stronger position to negotiate content deals with Google.”

Keep in mind, the CMA’s move is a competition remedy to an anti-competitive practice by a single monopoly tech player. On another continent. By a public regulator that could be overruled by elected officials. Although as we know, that so rarely happens.

***

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.

Mark Carney’s big pivot on the Online Streaming Act: Elbows Up, this isn’t.

June 5, 2026

This week’s announcement by Culture and Identity minister Marc Miller that the federal government is striking down the CRTC’s ruling on streamer contributions to Canadian content is perhaps more shocking in its timing than its substance.

After all, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has an appetite for jettisoning government policy that he considers unwanted baggage. Recall the climb down from the Digital Services Tax, the carbon tax, and the suite of Trudeau-era environmental policies…

Continue reading at Cartt.ca

***

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.

CanCon’s future is now: a conversation with Brad Danks

June 3, 2026

Brad Danks is the CEO of OUTtv Media Global, based in Vancouver. Most Canadians know OUTtv as the Canadian LGBTQ television channel. I interviewed Danks back in 2022 when the parliamentary debate over the Online Streaming Act was cooking on high heat.

He’s a bit of a unicorn: a broadcaster who is perfectly comfortable talking policy. With his eye cast on the future of Canadian broadcasting, Danks just wrote a 60,000 word, seven-part series Beyond the Walled Garden published in Cartt.ca last month. It’s time we caught up.

MediaPolicy: Brad, instead of a very long introductory paragraph to set up this Q&A, I’m just going to give you my undergrad-level synopsis of your Cartt.ca series. I promise I didn’t use AI. So here goes, this is me channelling you:

We’ve been trying to renovate the current CRTC regulatory model using the tools granted by the Online Streaming Act Bill C-11, but that is just “optimizing for managed decline.” It’s triage. A policy model that is singularly devoted to production financing for a domestic market runs counter to competing in the global supply of content. The regulatory framework must be to make it possible for Canadian content producers to monetize content on a global scale.

And increasingly, it is Canada’s small and medium-sized content producers, not the big three broadcasting companies, Bell, Rogers, and Québecor, that represent Canada’s best hope. That’s because OUTtv and our fellow SME Canadian services can succeed in creating specialized, authentic content that is both relatable and popular with foreign audiences who find affinity with it. It’s effectively the YouTuber creator strategy, scaled up. This distribution strategy is what the CRTC and our funding institutions need to spend more time and resources on supporting. And that means incentivizing and rewarding broadcasters that make and distribute their own proprietary content, don’t partner away their IP for a quick buck, don’t blow the budget on American shows, and grow their businesses by finding audiences around the world.

A crucial part of doing that is AI. The integration of AI tools is the key to success for SMEs seeking loyal audiences scattered across the in-between spaces in foreign markets. But our funding institutions that are CRTC-adjacent, like the Canada Media Fund, take no notice of AI development as worthy of subsidy or support. We need to encourage and reward the sharing of digital and AI infrastructure for Canadian SMEs through regulatory incentives and support. The data-collector Numeris is a salutary example.

At the same time, we can’t neglect SMEs succeeding in the Canadian domestic market. Unfortunately, the CMF’s and CRTC’s performances on this have been awful. The cable companies get away with clogging proper access for SMEs to reach cable audiences and monetize their content.

How did I do?

Danks – Good. The key point is that the system was designed for a different era. In that era, Canada had a technologically walled garden. Foreign content arrived through Canadian services, and in exchange for the licensed right to broadcast that content — at significant profit — the broadcasters were obligated to subsidize Canadian production. It was a cross-subsidy, and it worked. The problem is that the wall is coming down. Gradually at first because of streaming, and now faster because of AI. We have been propping up a structural problem without a long-term plan to replace it. The deeper problem is that we kept funding production without funding the infrastructure that connects that content to audiences. It’s like building cars without roads. The cars get made, but they have nowhere to go.

MediaPolicy – You’ve been writing for years that Canadian broadcasting regulation has been overinvested in the so-called national champions — the big and vertically integrated broadcasters Bell, Rogers and Québecor and at one time Shaw as well— who are supposed to save Canadian content. Do you still think that?

Danks – Yes, the Big 3 were supposed to be exactly that — the CRTC said as much in the Let’s Talk TV decision in 2015. Here’s the quote:

“The Commission expects that vertically integrated companies … will continue to have the opportunity to leverage their resources and audience reach … Their critical mass provides these companies with the financial capital required to succeed both domestically and internationally.”

And later in paragraphs 42 and following: “Canadian programming must seek out and develop international audiences.” That is the Commission acknowledging that domestic demand alone is no longer sufficient and that Canadian programming must increasingly compete in global markets. On paper, the Commission was telling the Big 3 they already had the scale to compete internationally. The bargain was giving them flexibility on where to spend their CanCon dollars.

MP: I think you’re about to tell me the Big 3 have not lived up to that bargain over the last ten years.

Danks – I’ve joked for years about a “MapleBox,” a Canadian BritBox we never built. The Big 3 didn’t step up. But a different group of companies has, Canadian-controlled programming services. I’m calling them the CSPs. They are the small and medium-sized operators that own libraries and reach audiences through their own SVOD, FAST, broadcast, and platform partnerships — OUTtv, Blue Ant, Gusto, Stingray, Anthem, and others. They are not production companies, nor are they cable or online distributors. They are building the MapleBox, one deal at a time. My view is simple. They should be supported by the system, and they are not.

MP: Not supported, in what ways?

Danks – The failure runs in four directions.

The first is the structural disadvantage of independent services in the cable television system. Since the 2011 vertical integration policy and the packaging changes from Let’s Talk TV in 2015, independent specialty services have been progressively marginalized on cable platforms. The large vertically integrated companies control both the pipes and many of the channels that travel through them. They have every commercial incentive to promote their own services and every available tactic to constrain competitors. The upcoming Market Dynamics decision is specifically about whether the Commission will finally address that imbalance.

The second is regulatory speed, and I’ll say more about that in a moment. We have active files before the Commission, so I’ll keep this brief. We have been materially harmed by delays. We have filed urgent applications, with the financial consequences documented and fully understood by Commission staff, and been told decisions may take not just months but years. The delay itself is the injury.

The third is the Canada Media Fund which provides very crucial programming subsidies. The CMF’s primary financing mechanism, the Broadcaster Envelope, allocates funding based on a broadcaster’s track record of supporting Canadian programming, measured primarily against domestic cable viewership. 

For a service like OUTtv, which has been deliberately building international distribution while domestic cable subscribers decline,  because that is the right long-term strategy, the CMF treats the right strategic choice as underperformance. Our envelope allocation shrinks as our international reach grows, because the system measures what we are moving away from, not what we are building toward.

The fourth is the complete absence of export support. The CMF measures Canadian audience and domestic production output. It does not measure export revenue, international subscriber growth, or the audience relationships being built in foreign markets. A service that invests resources in building global distribution, which the Broadcasting Act itself identifies as a policy objective, is invisible to the performance metrics that determine how much public support it receives. The system rewards businesses focused entirely on the domestic market, which is the market contracting fastest.

The common thread is that the system measures what it was designed to measure in 1985, and those measurements no longer align with the outcomes Canadian content policy is supposed to produce.

MP: You mentioned regulatory speed, or lack thereof. Give me an example.

Danks – The clearest one is the OneSoccer channel. Its owner Timeless complained to the CRTC in 2022 that Rogers was refusing to carry it. The Commission found in OneSoccer’s favour in 2023. Rogers challenged their Canadian ownership. The CRTC rejected that. Rogers appealed to the Federal Court of Appeal, and in May 2026 the court dismissed the appeal. It ruled that Rogers had raised a “forest of issues,” every one of them “without merit.” Four years, wins at every level, and the channel still isn’t on Rogers cable. They’re only now headed into arbitration over terms, just before Canada co-hosts the World Cup. The delay itself was the outcome, regardless of the merits. In a market that moves quarterly, a regulatory cycle measured in years isn’t just inconvenient. It works exactly like a tax. It raises the cost of capital, reduces what companies can reinvest, and pushes them toward lower-risk options. A system that rewards the use of delay is not one that works for independents.

MP: So what does Bill C-11 do, at least hypothetically, for Canadian SMEs like you?

Danks – So far, very little. C-11 gave the CRTC the tools. It didn’t determine how they’d be used. The open question is whether those tools get used to build the CSP layer, the Canadian-controlled services that retain IP and reach audiences directly. Or are the tools used just slow the decline of the existing model with new money from foreign streamers? The second part of the Market Dynamics decision is rumoured to be released in July. It will be the first real test of which way it goes.

MP: What are you hoping to see in that Market Dynamics decision?

Danks – Three things. The first is CSP access to distribution platforms. Canadians should be able to access Canadian services through the online distributors they actually use — Amazon, Apple TV, Roku, smart TV platforms — just as carriage rules ensured access on cable.

Second, prominence. It’s not enough to be available if no one can find you. A separate Canadian shelf that nobody visits is not the answer.

Third, the protections that already exist for independents on the cable side, like the standstill rule, the wholesale framework, a dispute process that resolves things, they all need to be improved and extended into the online world, not dismantled. This is the decision that determines whether there is a domestic foundation left to build on. WildBrain shut down four Canadian children’s channels after disputes with the large distributors. If this decision doesn’t fix access and the dispute process, we’ll keep losing the very companies the system should be building.

MP: You’ve introduced the term “Canadian-controlled programming services” (CSPs). What are they, and why aren’t they just producers?

Danks – A producer makes content. A CSP owns it, distributes it, and builds the audience relationship that compounds in value over time. OUTtv, Blue Ant, Gusto, Stingray, Anthem — these are the companies that actually built what the national champions were supposed to build. They are not production companies, nor are they cable or online distributors. They hold a different position in the value chain. The part that captures the long-term value. Right now, the system doesn’t recognize them as a category at all. That is the gap the Cartt.ca series pointed at.

MP: The independent producers might hear this as an attack on them and their copyright. Is this a zero-sum fight over CanCon IP?

Danks – It shouldn’t be heard that way, and it isn’t zero-sum. Producers are the creative engine. CSPs are the systems that deliver their work to a global audience and return value to them. They are different functions in the same value chain, and both have to be strong. 

But there is a deeper reason why Canadian producers are better off working with Canadian CSPs than with foreign platforms, and it has nothing to do with nationalism. The system can regulate us. The CRTC can attach conditions to our licences, require us to work with Canadian producers in ways that benefit both parties, mandate joint exploitation of IP across international windows, and enforce those conditions if we don’t meet them. It cannot do the same things to a major foreign platform, not in the same way, not with the same reach. When a foreign platform commissions a Canadian production, the producer gets paid and the platform gets the rights. What happens to those rights afterward is largely outside the regulatory system’s reach. When a Canadian CSP is the partner, we are inside the same regulatory structure as the producer. We have structural reasons to maintain relationships that work for both parties. Our licence depends on it. Our CMF access depends on it. Our standing in future proceedings depends on it. That accountability is not a constraint on us. It is exactly what makes us a better long-term partner. 

The major platforms face no equivalent structural incentive to make those relationships work. That is the difference.

MP: Can you elaborate on why retaining IP by Canadian services matters?

Danks – Two reasons. First, all rights and all monetization flow from IP. 

Second, in an AI world, creating derivative versions in different languages, formats, and genres becomes far cheaper, which raises the value of owning the underlying IP. But the real issue is not creation, it’s retention. The current system requires Canadian ownership at the production stage and then lets that ownership leak downstream through financing structures that assign international rights to whoever puts up the money. You can satisfy every ownership rule on paper and still hand the long-term value to a foreign platform. Owning IP on paper is not the same as keeping it, and keeping it is what the system doesn’t protect.

MP: Should the federal government be realigning its support — through the CMF, Telefilm, or the production tax credit — to better support CSPs?

Danks – Yes, and urgently. The CMF was built in 1985 to measure what mattered which was domestic linear audience and production hours. That is not what matters now. A CSP investing in global distribution, building audience relationships in fourteen countries, retaining IP across multiple revenue windows — that is exactly the outcome the system should be rewarding. Instead, that service is penalized because the metrics don’t capture what it’s doing. Comparable support for export capability needs to become a priority. The instruments for these policies already exist. They just need to be redirected.

MP: Do you worry the Commission will never get a chance to address these issues? There’s been anxiety about how much of C-11 will survive CUSMA and trade retaliation.

Danks – Yes, I think we should all be worried about the scope of US retaliation and the trade-offs required. On the contribution obligation itself, the anxiety is mostly misplaced. European jurisdictions impose comparable or higher obligations, and the streamers continue to operate there. The precedent is clear. But here is what I want more people to hear. There is a whole set of policies that carry zero trade risk because they sit entirely outside CUSMA. Building Canadian-controlled services that own IP and reach audiences directly — we can do that regardless of where the trade talks land. The trade conversation has been crowding out the one policy direction that needs no permission from Washington.

MP: Okay, so what’s your elevator speech to the heritage minister?

Danks – Turn the policy lens toward what builds the Canadian system. Start at home. Canadian services, whether they ever export or not, need a fair foundation to operate from. That foundation is real access to audiences through the platforms Canadians use, prominence so they can be found, and a dispute process that resolves things in months rather than years. The Market Dynamics decision is the test of whether that foundation gets built. Without it, there is nothing to export.

For those services ready to grow beyond Canada, the Broadcasting Act already calls for an environment that encourages the development and export of Canadian programs globally. Export is not a by-product. It is a core objective and increasingly the only realistic path to replacing the distribution capacity we have lost to streaming over the past 15 years. The companies already doing this have built it without support. That must change.

The job now is to align the CRTC, the CMF, tax policy, and export development behind the same goal. That goal is to support Canadian services that serve Canadians well and can own and distribute what the system produces. No single decision does it alone. But every decision that fails to ask ‘does this build something durable?’ is a decision for managed decline, whether it calls itself that or not.

***

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 – a Netflix tax? – Fawcett defends boss, subsidies – the Online News Act v. 2.0.

The Leader of the Opposition gets his sunglasses stuck in his teeth

May 30, 2026

Last week I published my take on the CRTC’s latest ruling on how much Netflix and the Hollywood streamers will have to invest in Canadian programming and how they will make that content highly visible on their platforms.

As for what the Commission did for Canadian broadcasters, I was harshly critical of the decision to relieve them of minimum investments in English-language dramas and documentaries based on the sanguine hunch that US streamers might do it for them. I wish I could be harsher.

I highly recommend a Substack column by Derrek Lennox who casts cultural sovereignty as a project of building an infrastructure of empathy among Canadian communities. Worth the short read.

***

Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre is calling for the federal government to cancel the CRTC’s Netflix ruling on the grounds that it will cause subscription prices to rise —he’s calling it “a Netflix tax”—and goad the Trump administration into even more trade retaliation. 

As yet, Poilievre isn’t recycling his old accusation that the Online Streaming Act’s promotion of Canadian content is  “government censorship….pro-government, liberal-leaning, boring, statist content that is approved of by the establishment crowd in general and the liberal glitterati in particular.” Ouch!

Indeed according to Poilievre, the legislation is a Liberal tool intended to “favour certain kinds of pro-government content online while discouraging content that the government does not want us to see, in some cases taking that content off the Internet together.”

Sticking to the better messaging point, he says the new CRTC ruling is a consumer tax because the streamers will pass along regulatory charges to the public.

Poilievre isn’t wrong about that being possible, but here’s some context. 

Netflix upped the price on its standard plan from $14 monthly to $15 in 2020. Then to $16.50 in 2022. Then to $19 in 2025. That was twice the rate of inflation. 

As for the CRTC ruling, the cash cost to Netflix and the Hollywood streamers is not the 15% of Canadian revenues set as an overall investment in Canadian content, mostly in their own shows on their own platforms.

The out of pocket cash cost is not the 15% but an included 6.55% of revenues, paid to Canadian media funds supporting news, entertainment, and a short list of public service programming such as APTN, Omni multilingual, Ugavut TV or CPAC. 

The streaming market —the highly concentrated streaming market— will determine how much of this 6.55% cash levy that Netflix can pass along to subscribers.

Still, you would expect at least some of that 6.55% levy to drive the 2028 price increase higher. As much as, I dunno, twice the rate of inflation?

***

Kudos to Max Fawcett, the National Observer columnist who stepped up to take one for his team.

It began with a Blacklock’s Reporter story reporting on the journalism subsidies collected over the last ten years by the Observer from the three major federal programs. That wouldn’t be especially newsworthy except for the fact that Observer publisher Linda Solomon Wood is one of five news publishers sitting on a panel that decides which news outlets get a piece of the Local Journalism Initiative.

A past recipient of the National Newspaper Award for best columnist, Fawcett went on Ryan Jespersen’s Edmonton talk radio show and gave a scorching elevator speech defending the Observer and the federal programs. 

He didn’t address the point raised by Blacklock’s reporting that maybe his boss should not be sitting on the panel that carves up limited funds in the federal Local Journalism Initiative.

Wood and the other members of the judging panel did recuse themselves when their own publications were reviewed. The Observer was awarded two out of the 700 one-year job subsidies this year and three last year.

Still, Canadian Heritage would do well to consider putting academics and retired journalists in charge of the LJI disbursements, as it does for the QCJO program.

On the general topic of journalism subsidies, I came across a parliamentary brief that Torstar just submitted to the Heritage committee’s investigation into the state of news journalism. I confess to a love-hate relationship with Torstar (I was the Unifor union rep at the Toronto Star for many years) but I found this submission has a lot of policy gravitas.

Torstar Submission to CHPC – FINALDownload

***

The Online News Act, directing Google payments for news links, is under threat. But not just from looming CUSMA trade negotiations, rather from AI technology.

This has been known for some time. Google’s Search’s AI Overviews and AI Mode offer comprehensive answers to questions, before you get to the page after page of ten blue links.

Google’s referral traffic to news sites has already plummeted and it will get worse as late adapters get comfortable with AI tools. If the Online News Act was intended to compensate news publishers for populating Google’s blue links, that intention is being steadily eclipsed.

The next AI wave is now hitting Google Search which enjoys a 90% world market share. You can read the long versions at TechCrunch or in Press Gazette, but two of the new features of an overhauled Google AI mode stood out to me.

The first is what you already get on most AI chatbots: Google Search will engage in a conversation with you, deducing your research mission and offering help. Its response will be gussied up by creating multimedia answers to your question. Clicking through hyperlinks to original news sources, even if these are still offered, will be for suckers. I will remain one of those suckers, but I expect most will not look the gift horse in the mouth and let AI mode take over their brains, although maybe not for the more discerning news consumers who still want to check the underlying reporting.

But the truly revolutionary AI feature will be creating autonomous research agents that become your auto piloted research apps for the next days, weeks or years and periodically bring to your attention breaking news and developments relevant to your search query. 

At some point, I may break down and create an AI agent for “what is happening in Canadian media policy.” Just as a science experiment, mind you. Right now, I read e-newsletters offering links to media news.

The point is, the new Google may well kill Search referrals to original news sites. Kill them dead.

That appears to be the goal, anyway. And with that death goes any Google argument that its intermediation of hyperlinks, as they currently argue, makes them a benefactor to the news industry whose content they ingest.

On the other hand, the alternative (and unofficial) government intention behind legislating the Online News Act was not just compensating news outlets for their journalism, but effectively levying an anti-competition fine against Google Search for its oligopoly power over advertising in the absence of any action by the federal Competition Bureau. Google isn’t able to exercise that kind of monopoly power in the AI market, at least not yet.

As for the impact on the Online News Act, any retreat from offering news hyperlinks means Google will certainly buck against renewing its $100M/yr deal to fund news journalism that expires in 2030.

That’s how much time the federal government has to wake up and acknowledge that Google and the other AI bots are ingesting Canadian news by scraping their websites without a license. What is needed are amendments to an Online News Act v.2.0, starting with a new definition of a “digital news intermediary.” 

***

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.

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 its “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’ self-designed 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 ithere.

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.” 

***

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.