Quebec’s Bill 109 is the wild card in the Bill C-11 deck

Québec Culture Minister Mathieu Lacombe

May 28, 2025

Last week, Québec’s culture minister Mathieu Lacombe slid a wild card into Prime Minister Mark Carney’s deck by tabling Bill 109 in the National Assembly.

The bill contemplates doing for Quebec exactly what the federal Online Streaming Act, Bill C-11, mandated the CRTC to do two years ago for all of Canada: regulate streaming platforms so that original French-language content reaches more French-speaking Canadians.

The Lacombe bill claims a constitutional jurisdiction it doesn’t have (until the Supreme Court tells us otherwise), a legislative space in broadcasting that belongs entirely to the federal government. It could provoke a direct confrontation with the Québec-anchored federal Liberals.

The clash, if that is what it comes to, has been heading this way slowly but surely.

…..Continue reading at CARTT.ca

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Hugh Stephens: The Online Streaming Act Was Already Complicated and Controversial Enough, But Now Quebec Enters the Fray (No Surprise: It’s Happened Before)

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

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Howard Law

I am retired staff of Unifor, the union representing 300,000 Canadians in twenty different sectors of the economy, including 10,000 journalists and media workers. As the former Director of the Media Sector and as an unapologetic cultural nationalist, I have an abiding passion for public policy in Canadian media.