“Success is based on trusting our artists”: culture reporter Kate Taylor on CanCon then and now.

March 19, 2025

Two years ago I was mulling over deep thoughts about the “why” and “what is” of Canadian culture when I noticed that the Globe and Mail reporter Kate Taylor had just published a column on precisely that topic.

Upon reading Taylor I thought to myself, “yeah, like she said.”

Taylor is unusual in that her day job since 1995 has been writing about Canadian media, arts and culture for the Globe, while her side gig has been authoring award-winning novels. You write about what you know.

Another side-gig she had was in 2009 —the year before Netflix began streaming in Canada—- when she took a year’s leave to accept an Atkinson Fellowship, the published output was titled “Northern Lights: Keeping Canadian Culture Ablaze,” available as a download here.

She grappled with the eternal challenges of making popular Canadian culture and the broadcasting regulation that we rely on to solve the riddle of keeping our culture blazing in spite of the American cultural giant that threatens to block out our sun.

Here are just a few timeless headlines in Northern Lights:

“Is a national Canadian culture important?“

“Digital Waterloo for Cancon rules“

“How to make the CBC viable in the digital age“

MediaPolicy asked Taylor what she thinks now.

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MediaPolicy: I was re-reading your 2010 Atkinson series and found it remarkable not only how accurately you foresaw the challenges faced by Canadian mass media in the decade to follow but how fresh the discussion seems in 2025. Fifteen years is a long time. What do you make of how Canadian media policy has used its time in the intervening years?

Kate Taylor: The Stephen Harper Conservatives wouldn’t touch these issues. Their Heritage minister James Moore used to say they are important to the broadcasting industry but not to the public. Harper himself poisoned the file by labelling cultural levies a “Netflix tax.”

Then, when they had the opportunity, the Liberals moved but too slowly. Sometimes you don’t want to be first out of the gate, and the Europeans have now set precedents.  For example, content quotas on Netflix’s European catalogue, that would be useful to Canada. But it took the Liberals a long time to find a minister who could politically champion the ideals behind cultural protections. They did not get it done and dusted before we were faced with the current situation, a trade war just as the CRTC is trying to implement a long-overdue update of the Canadian content regime to include the foreign streaming services.

I note that in the intervening years, the idea of a cash levy on Internet service providers, an obvious update on the levy on cable providers, has been abandoned. That’s too bad. That would have been one way to raise production funds from Canadian-owned sources, especially to support local news which has suffered badly from the collapse of local newspapers.

MP: There’s been a flurry of activity by the CRTC since the Online Streaming Act was enacted in April 2023. What do you make of some of their rulings? The good, the bad, the intriguing?

KT: I agree that the foreign streamers should be asked to contribute to production funds. I leave others to figure out whether the CRTC’s five per cent is fair or not, but I do note that the $200-million total is chicken feed for these companies. I don’t agree with asking them to help pay for local news; that seems opportunistic since it’s not news content with which they have flooded the Canadian market.

The CRTC has yet to deal with any quota on Canadian content in the streamers’ catalogues or for music services, and promotion and discoverability are as important as any content quota. It’s possible that if you got a healthy co-production relationship going, all this would be unnecessary because the streamers would want to promote programs in which they have a stake, but if you look to Europe, especially France, you can see how an insistence on quotas is producing some excellent programming.

The stumbling block is who owns the intellectual property in the show, since historically the Canadian system has insisted that the intellectual property for programming that benefits from the levies remains with Canadians. I would imagine that can be solved by some kind of negotiation on sharing percentages of intellectual property. 

The CRTC is now also beginning to address the definition of Canadian content. Many players want it loosened; makes it less cumbersome for them. These debates are usually about economic self-interest. Others argue we should switch from our industrial model –– Canadian content is content made by Canadian citizens in Canada– – to a cultural model: Canadian content tells identifiably Canadian stories and is set in Canada. I disagree. The United Kingdom uses the cultural model but we are a much less culturally homogenous place, and I think attempts to dictate or define Canadian-ness are bound to fail.

If you look at music, it’s obvious the only way to define a Canadian song is through the MAPL system or some equivalent. You are hardly going to tell songwriters their lyrics must feature Canadian references!

All systems produce the odd wacko anomaly that critics love to trumpet, but the main thing is to trust the creators. If they are Canadian, living and working in Canada, they will make Canadian content. Some of it will be bad; some of it will be great. That is the reality of cultural production. 

MP: Yes, defining Canadian content seems like pinning jelly to the wall. Canadian culture is characterized by both local expression and nationally emblematic totems and stories. You’ve written about this. Care to update your views?

KT: There’s an old line from a Broadway producer: if I knew what was going to be hit, I would only do those. Cultural production is a highly risky, unpredictable business and the Hollywood model is based on huge investments spread across global markets. In trade terms, one could accuse the United States of dumping cultural product in foreign markets. Historically, it cost a Canadian broadcaster far less to buy rights to a U.S. show then to produce a Canadian one.

Canada is actually very successful in international markets – we export both English-language television and music – and I think that success is based on trusting our artists. The more freedom you have to tell your own story or sing your own song, the more likely you are to produce something that will resonate universally.

I often point to the success of Letterkenny as an example. When it first appeared I thought its satire of a particular rural Canadian culture was so specific it might not translate abroad, but it did very well in the States.

I also think audiences like to see themselves in their culture and do hunger for specific local content. Look at the success with Toronto theatre audiences of The Master Plan, a satire about planning issues in the city of Toronto. 

A more powerful and ad-free CBC Gem could capitalize on this local-to-universal phenomenon.

MP: Yes that observation about the CBC was one of the take-aways I got from your Atkinson piece in 2010. You talked about the central role the CBC played in Canadian cultural production. So here we are in 2025. Let’s suppose I made you ship’s captain of English-Canadian CBC services. What are your orders?

KT: We all want the CBC to better, by which we really mean English-language television. CBC video content is a missed opportunity. We need an ad-free Canadian streaming service that offers the best of Canadian comedy, drama and documentary to viewers at home and abroad, a Brand Canada niche alternative to American streaming services. 

Of course, that costs money, and if CBC managers cling to advertising it is because they don’t trust government to fill the gap consistently. To escape the politics, the CBC needs stable steady funding on a minimum of a five-year basis in return for fulfilling agreed-upon goals – rather like the Charter that governs the BBC. 

Still, we need to be cautious about removing ads from the CBC so that it is not reduced to some kind of PBS North. Ratings do matter. They keep you honest and connected. There is a strong desire amongst some English-Canadian elites for the PBS model, a high-end public broadcaster fleshing out a talk-heavy news-dominated schedule with the occasional big-budget drama (always imported from the U.K. in the PBS case.) That works for the U.S. because it has a healthy private market delivering American content. In Canada, it would sideline the CBC even further, making it irrelevant to a majority of Canadians.

Also, the CBC needs to rebuild its local news capacity because of the collapse of local newspapers. That’s an example of market failure, where you want the public broadcaster to step in and provide a public good — but you need to fund it accordingly.

MP: Back to the trade war. Canada is having a nationalist moment right now and it might well be our biggest one. For sure it will last several years, so long as Trump is doing his 51st state thing. Do you see implications for Canadian attitudes towards mass media and culture? 

KT: As Canadians remember that we are a separate country, perhaps that will help citizens understand why we need cultural levies and cultural protections in the face of a neighbour now exposed as a bully.

Not many citizens, including some prominent media commentators, understand how the cultural industries work, the amount of investment it takes in multiple projects to generate one hit and the way Hollywood money can buy quality and promotion in a way that is impossible to match without some kind of Canadian content system. 

For decades that system produced Canadian programs and music that many Canadians enjoyed. It just needs to be updated for the streaming era.

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2025.