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What did the CRTC just do to CanCon?

November 22, 2025

Earlier this week the CRTC released a major ruling on Canadian content. MediaPolicy provided a quick bottom line reaction but you could do just as well with any of the many media reports.

More depth of analysis is called for but I’m going to do that over two posts.

Today I was going to go on a rant. But I will save that for the next post, because I think those interested in policy supporting Canadian television drama often find themselves in a situation not unlike a novice driver raising the hood of a car engine to gape at a maze of parts. An explainer might help, so here goes, with the opinionating to follow.

The important thing to get about the CanCon engine is that the interconnected parts include Canadian broadcasters, government agencies, Hollywood streamers and independent Canadian filmmakers who collectively follow CRTC regulations that put Canadian television dramas on a screen to be enjoyed by a Canadian audience whose dollars rarely cover the costs of those shows.

As a general rule CanCon is unprofitable in our modestly populated country. If we had a population of 340 million, we wouldn’t need a CanCon policy.

That’s why as a matter of Canadian cultural policy we offer production subsidies bankrolled by Canadian cable companies as well as federal and provincial governments. It’s the feds and the provinces that put up most of the money.

At the heart of the CanCon engine are the “independent” Canadian TV and filmmakers—by law, independently-owned at arms length from Canadian broadcasters— who make Canadian drama and comedy and sell it to broadcasters and, coming soon, to Hollywood streamers too.

As a matter of Canadian cultural policy it’s the Canadian producers, and only them, who get the subsidies that make up half of filming budgets (though eligible for these subsidies, the broadcasters rarely make their own dramas in-house). Federal policy aptly describes the independents as the vital cog in the broadcasting machine.

Living hand to mouth in relative anonymity, these modestly capitalized enterprises have been the creative force behind CanCon for decades, at least as important as the big broadcasters whom the public knows better. As far as television drama is concerned, the broadcasting engine runs on the content the independents make.

Until now, we haven’t had a Hollywood-style system for making Canadian television dramas. No wannabe studio giants here. The Canadian independents are many and mostly small, moving from project to project, slowly building a sustainable business, locked into frenemy relationships with the Canadian broadcasters who buy their stuff.

But those Canadian broadcasters, big and small, are on their way down, if not out (watch this space).

Netflix and the streamers are increasingly on top. The federal Liberals’ Online Streaming Act, Bill C-11, was the engine overhaul necessary if the ascendant streamers are to be recruited to finance and distribute Canadian drama, filling the growing void for that programming that results from Canadian broadcasters steadily losing cable subscribers and advertising revenue.

The streamers are not willing conscripts to the cause. Just ask them. They despise the mandatory cash contributions to Canadian media funds that subsidize television dramas and local news.

But making their own Canadian content might be something the streamers could live with. This recent CRTC ruling was about setting the conditions for that.

From their point of view, the streamers would like total freedom of action to make Canadian content on their own terms. Those terms include hiring the creative talent they want and dictating commercial terms to the independent Canadian production houses they engage to make the content. The CRTC is trying to bend to the streamers’ desires without the regulatory engine seizing up.

On hiring the top creative talent that drive a production, the CRTC has long sponsored the famous ten-point headcount that certifies dramas as CanCon, a certification that the broadcasters need in order to meet the CRTC’s quotas for CanCon spending.

Until this week, that headcount system was straightforward enough. The idea is that in the long run Canadian talent will make Canadian content, without a need for a state-arbitrated test of “what is Canadian.”

The ten points recognize up to eight talent roles: Director (2 points), Screenwriter (2 points), first and second lead actors, cinematographer, art director, music composer and picture editor.

If a production house hires enough Canadians to rack up at least six points, the CRTC certifies their program. In addition to the six-point talent, the CRTC requires the producer —the quarterback of the entire production who does the hiring and approves the scripts— to be a Canadian and demonstrably in charge of the creative team without interference from investors. As well, 75% of the set production and post-production payroll must be paid to Canadian workers.

There are equally compelling cultural arguments to leave this system alone, or to change it up. Last week, the CRTC changed it up, although much of it might seem mundane at first glance.

There’s a new category of Showrunner (2 points), a recognition of the Hollywood practice of a putting a hybrid writer/producer in charge of a production. The screenwriter’s guild ain’t thrilled, but the CRTC is just adapting to reality.

There’s an ecumenical nod towards giving points for hiring a Canadian behind-the-screen team of hair, make-up and costume designers. Collectively, a Canadian team can earn one point.

Ditto, the CRTC is now adding the special effects director to its approved list.

In a move towards critics who believe that certification of Canadian content ought to be less about the nationality of talent and more about the Canadian narrative, look and feel of the story, the Commission is giving points for visibly Canadian locales, landscapes, and characters.

It’s also giving credit for dramas based on Canadian novels as well as soundtracks featuring a majority of previously recorded Canadian songs.

All of this Canadianography earns “bonus” points, shorthand for saying that a more effusively Canadian drama can be certified as CanCon with less Canadian talent.

This was an unexpected development, as the Commission’s preliminary view published last year was that it wasn’t going to do this. However the Commission cites the feedback from a public opinion poll it commissioned and interprets as supporting a popular desire for more classically Canadian stories.

With a longer list of roles into which Canadian hires are credited towards CanCon certification, the Commission expanded the 10 point test to as much as a 14 point test, but made it scaleable (smaller productions might combine roles) up or down: so long as 60% of the roles are filled by Canadians, the spirit of the old six out of ten test is met.

But crucially the importance of Canadian directors, writers and actors has been diluted. This will please the Hollywood streamers who can be expected to tell the Canadian independent producers that if they want the commission they will hire more of the streamers’ key Hollywood people.

There are however more seismic changes afoot and let me draw the connection between those big moves and the incremental amendments to the point system.

First, the all-powerful producer who pilots the production, approves the script, and hires the six-point creative team might not have to be Canadian after all.

In this newest CRTC ruling, when Netflix commissions a CanCon project and insists upon taking a majority copyright position in the production, which it will do routinely, the lead producer can be an American so long as two of the three junior producers are Canadian.

That brings us to the second big change: the Canadian ownership of copyright and intellectual property in a drama production.

This is a bit of long winded explanation but stick with me and follow the money.

Until now the Commission has never bothered with any rules regulating ownership of copyright in a production.

In the past the Commission didn’t need to impose Canadian ownership on the control of copyright in a CanCon program because all the financing partners were Canadian: the independent producer selling the show, the broadcaster commissioning the show, the federal and provincial governments providing the first layers of subsidy for the show and the public-private Canada Media Fund providing the second layer.

The Media Fund and Canadian governments that control the CanCon subsidies want to support the capitalization and long term viability of the independents. They insist that the independent producer —not its broadcast partner— must own 100% of the copyright and intellectual property flowing from the production.

The Media Fund supercharges that by green-lighting its subsidy only if hiring of Canadians on a production is a full ten points out of ten. Since the Media Fund subsidy is crucial to CanCon financing, ten points becomes the norm even if the CRTC and federal subsidies only require six.

But since the CRTC has never been in charge of subsidies and is only concerned with getting Canadian content to broadcasting screens, its thinking was that one Canadian media business is as good as another, be it an independent producer or broadcaster.

Then we decided to regulate the US streamers. Oops, now the CRTC needs a copyright rule.

The new reality is that if the CRTC is going to require the streamers to spend money making CanCon, the streamers are going to want as much control of the return on their investment across Canada and a global audience as they can get. That return comes from domestic release, global release, long term residency in the Netflix library, control of spin-offs and sequels, trademark revenue, etc.

That means three things are important: copyright, copyright and copyright.

When Netflix appeared before Parliamentary committees considering Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, its Canadian policy director bluntly stated that the amendment Netflix wanted the most was copyright ownership of the CanCon it would be required to commission.

He then disarmingly claimed that the streamer wouldn’t necessarily want majority ownership of every CanCon production it commissioned ——even though it does exactly that when commissioning US shows that are shot in Canada.

The Commission knew it had to find a balance between Netflix’s commercial interests and the viability of Canadian independents, the standard bearers for cultural production. The question was, where to strike the compromise?

Last week it struck that compromise by offering the streamers one of three options: 100% Canadian ownership of copyright, minority American ownership, and majority American ownership (to a maximum of 80%).

The first bucket of 100% Canadian ownership is status quo, allowing for the tweaks to the six-point rule.

The minority US ownership bucket means that Netflix can choose a non-Canadian lead producer although technically the Canadian production house retains an equal share of creative control.

The majority US ownership bucket obviously means that Netflix effectively owns the show and the lion’s share of its success. The only price it must pay is to move up from six to eight points (or 80%) on hiring Canadians with the aid of Canadianography points, hairstylists, make up artists, etc.

Chart from Canadian Media Producers Association, circulated to its members

Nevertheless it’s important to mark this mental footnote: the new CRTC copyright rule does not apply to subsidies controlled by Canadian governments and the Canada Media Fund, at least for now. As mentioned above, those rules currently guarantee that the Canadian independent owns the copyright, in fact for 25 years. But the streamers can ignore those federal copyright rules if they forego the subsidies.

What does the CRTC copyright rule mean when it comes to making money on a show?

“Copyright” is just the price of admission to commercial negotiations over profit sharing that is supposed to match investment to the return on that investment. Still, whomever controls the majority of copyright holds the hammer in negotiations over splitting profits and return on investment, often described as the long term commercial exploitation of intellectual property.

It’s perhaps unknowable how much extra muscle that gives the deep pocketed Netflix than it currently flexes as an equity investor in the occasional CanCon production (for example, CBC/APTN’s North of North).

But copyright is an undeniably important part of leverage in commercial negotiation, which is why Netflix tried so hard but unsuccessfully to persuade Parliamentarians to guarantee streamer copyright interests in Bill C-11.

Conversely, the Canadian independents wanted Parliament to guarantee full Canadian ownership. The final text of the bill genuflected support for the independents’ interests, but provided no guarantees, handing the difficult task of balancing interests to the CRTC.

Now that the CRTC has opened the door to the streamers’ majority ownership of copyright —expect them to rush through it at pace— the question is whether the CRTC will allow Netflix and Hollywood to dictate commercial terms to Canadian independents, treating them in effect as employees on wages set by the studios.

The Commission is hardly unaware of the problem, addressing it in this crucial paragraph:

The Commission adopts the following guiding principles in negotiations among production partners:

Fair compensation and exploitation: Ensure that remuneration, rights, and revenues are allocated in a way that fairly reflects the financial and human contributions to the production, while ensuring Canadian producers retain significant, equitable control and benefit from long-term exploitation.

Good-faith negotiation: Production partners negotiate in good faith.

The Commission may assess the effectiveness of these non-binding principles in the future. (emphasis added).

In other words, Netflix be nice.

CRTC shakes up CanCon rules

November 18, 2025

The CRTC has released the first of a hugely consequential two-part ruling on video streaming and television.

The famous “10 point” headcount of key Canadian creative talent that is required before the CRTC will recognize a “Canadian program” as fulfilling a broadcaster’s CanCon budget gets a make-over.

The most significant changes are:

The “minimum six points” rule that requires Canadian directors and/or screenwriters and lead actors remains intact. But other key Canadian talent can be displaced for up to half of those six points if the screenplay is based on a Canadian fictional or non-fiction written work; the screenplay features Canadian characters or locations; or the soundtrack features previously recorded Canadian songs.

Netflix and the foreign streamers have been cleared to own majority copyright in a Canadian program acquired from a Canadian producer for distribution on their services. The ruling essentially allows streamers to buy that copyright by hiring Canadians in both Director and Screenwriter roles, either worth two points, to reach a minimum of eight instead of six points overall.

The CRTC did not previously have a Canadian copyright rule because it did not regulate non-Canadian broadcasters or streamers until now.

Nevertheless the CRTC’s new copyright rule is significant because it leaves a gap between CRTC policy governing a streamer’s CanCon expenditures and, on the other hand, federal government and media fund rules that gate keep supplemental subsidies for making CanCon.

Those subsidy rules, administered by Heritage Canada and the Canada Media Fund, maintain 100% Canadian copyright to support long-term economic opportunity for independent Canadian producers who typically make Canadian programs and sell them to broadcasters and streamers.

The Commission has stated that it expects the streamers to treat Canadian producers fairly when negotiating the economic opportunity flowing from shared copyright but has not stated if or how it will enforce that.

The second part of the Commission’s ruling, to be released “in the near future,” will “focus on the funding and support for Canadian programming, including funding for news and at-risk programming.”

That’s a reference to overall “Canadian programming expenditures” expected of the streamers, in addition to the 5% cash contributions already levied in favour of independent Canadian Media funds, as well as potential funding for public service media and local news.

More to come.

***

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

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – The BBC lies the truth – Australia dips its toes into C-11 waters – Cohere fails to stop AI lawsuit

November 15, 2025

“I lie the truth,” American film director Oliver Stone once said of his controversial 1991 epic “JFK,” packed as it was with apocrypha and might-have-been speculation.

So did the BBC in its 2024 documentary on America’s insurrection day, January 6th, 2021, “Trump: A Second Chance?”

By now, most have heard about the BBC’s splicing of video clips that juxtaposed Donald Trump urging the crowd to march on the US Capitol with his later suggestion that they “fight like hell” against the Congressional confirmation of Joe Biden’s election victory. He made the “fight” comment 20 times during the speech, but the two comments in the edited clip were spoken 50 minutes apart.

Omitted in the report was Trump’s suggestion they protest peacefully.

Also omitted was Trump telling the crowd that his Vice President Mike Pence must be stopped from certifying the election results, “We’re just not going to let that happen.”

As the crowd became a mob and surged violently into the Capitol building, some avowing to find Pence and murder him before he could certify, the outgoing President held back for two hours before making a public request to end the violent occupation.

The BBC rightly apologized to Trump for the video editing —-after a leaked document and public pressure made it impossible to do otherwise. The Beeb qualified its mea culpa by suggesting the President had not made a “direct call for violent action.”

The broadcaster denied defamation but Trump is filing a lawsuit.

It didn’t take long for Canadian commentators to apply the moral of the story to our own public broadcaster, the CBC.

The Hub’s Full Press podcast offers an intelligent review.

Globe & Mail columnist Konrad Yakabuski did the same, writing about recent events in which CBC management’s handling of an ugly anti-Semitic on-air report from a Radio-Canada foreign correspondent remains in blow-over mode.

The fates of the suspended reporter and the unsuspended news host who ignored the remarks are still unclear.

CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard told a Parliamentary committee that the public broadcaster’s response ends at its full and immediate public apology, not an investigation into how deep such anti-Semitic views do or don’t run in the newsroom.

Best guess: the spotlight will return to this issue when the CBC Ombud makes a report.

In the interest of equal time, let’s chalk another stroke on the wall to mark Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre’s most recent swipe at the CBC when asked a question he would rather not answer (“aren’t you with the CBC?”). If we’re going to hold the CBC responsible for its public reputation, we should hold everyone accountable.

***

For and CBC doubters and defunders, here’s an insightful and engaging Front Burner podcast featuring the public broadcaster’s three on-the-ground Washington correspondents, Canadians explaining to Canadians what Americans are doing to Canadians.

That’s what you lose without a CBC.

***

There’s a lot of media policy cooking in Australia lately.

A report in The Guardian says that the Labor government is going to move forward with incentives —-i.e. monetary penalties—- to lever Meta into reinstating news content on Facebook and Instagram and return to the bargaining table with news publishers to reinstate mandatory news licensing payments, regardless of Meta’s news ban.

The idea is to set the fine for Meta’s non-compliance at a level just above the dollar value of its expired agreements with news publishers, something that The Guardian cites as 1.5% of Meta’s annual Australian revenues. The Labor legislation is targeted for 2026.

If the Australians are baring more teeth than Canada has on our own Meta news ban, they are showing a little less on their new legislation that parallels Canada’s Netflix bill, the Online Streaming Act.

As MediaPolicy noted last week, the new legislation would set a spending quota for Netflix and the major streamers to make “AustralianCon” at either 10% of their local content budget or else 7.5% of their Australian revenues.

The 10% figure replicates the AuzCon spending that Australian-owned broadcasters obey for television dramas. By comparison, Canada requires our major domestic broadcasters spend 30% of revenues on Canadian content, including a 5% envelope for drama.

Another interesting piece of Australian context is that the streamers’ voluntary spending on AuzCon is over $200 million annually, slightly in excess of the Labor government’s estimates of mandatory spending under the new bill.

A government backgrounder keeps reiterating that the mandatory spending it has in mind would be a “guaranteed” spending. The concern is that Netflix and other global streamers might scale back their Australian spending in response to Hollywood’s contraction of content spending.

As an unregulated English-language market, Australia would be a logical place to start cutting. Better to lock in current levels of streamer spending.

Meanwhile, CRTC watchers in Canada will be interested to learn that the Commission is releasing its ruling on video streaming this coming week.

The decision may order Netflix and the foreign streamers to spend more on Canadian programming. It may also change regulatory rules for Canadian broadcasters who have asked for fewer CanCon responsibilities.

New obligations for the streamers will be closely tied into what the CRTC has to say about the ownership of copyright and intellectual property in Canadian dramas that the streamers will have to buy to fulfill a quota for local content.

The Commission must decide whether to mirror federal rules for CanCon financing that make the payment of crucial television subsidies conditional upon a Canadian producer owning the long term copyright in a show.

The global streamers want the option to demand Canadian producers sell them the copyright if the streamers are going to be compelled by the Commission to spend on CanCon.

Another wild card in the deck is the yet to be released ruling from the Federal Court of Appeal on the Commission’s June 2024 down payment of regulatory obligations for the streamers.

Heard by the court in June 2025, the appellant video and audio streamers are challenging the CRTC’s assessment of an annual cash contribution of $200 million to various media funds that channel the money to the financing of Canadian programming and music.

***

There is an update in the Globe & Mail reporting on the US lawsuit against Cohere that alleges the Canadian owned AI company is ripping off copyrighted content, even behind paywalls, from major North American media companies including the Toronto Star.

A New York judge rejected Cohere’s preliminary argument that the plaintiffs’ news reporting is so puréed in the AI summary that there is no “copy” being made. The case will proceed to trial.

In Germany, a lower court ruled in favour of music companies who sued OpenAI on the grounds that its ChatGPT application violated copyright by scraping lyrics content.

***

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

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – the new season of Stursberg’s CBC – the federal budget – Le Devoir’s Meta work around – Australia will regulate Netflix

Image by OpenAI

Are you not entertained? Richard Stursberg wants CBC audiences to say yes

November 8, 2025

This week MediaPolicy posted a guest column from Richard Stursberg, the former Vice President of CBC’s English language service, reflecting on the public broadcaster’s recently announced Five Year Plan.

You won’t be sorry you spent five minutes with it. It’s a compelling read. Stursberg is one of the few commentators who puts as much emphasis on CBC’s entertainment programming as he does the news service.

Stursberg sets a simple performance bar for the CBC: is it good television? And then he offers a hypothetical new season(s) of great shows that could meet that standard and bring a real buzz to the CBC’s CanCon offerings, while satisfying our Canadian cultural cravings.

The CBC just got its $150 million booster shot in the federal budget. That money fulfilled an election promise. The 11% increase to the $1.4 billion Parliamentary grant (70% of CBC’s overall $2 billion revenue) won’t necessarily go into a bigger budget for entertainment programming: the Five Year Plan prioritizes local and regional news reporting. But it does give the public broadcaster more options.

The CBC’s new money was the Carney government’s sole increase to cultural funding in this week’s budget. Culture and Identity minister Steven Guilbeault told the Globe and Mail that the public broadcaster had also been spared from the “15% savings” spending review announced by the government several months ago.

Budget announcements for the Canada Media Fund, the Canada Music Fund, TV5MondePlus, Telefilm, the National Film Board and Special Measures for Journalism (community weeklies) are all multi-year extensions of supplemental funding previously put in place by the Justin Trudeau government.

On the other hand, the budget document includes projected cuts to Canadian Heritage expenditures which might be either civil servant salaries or “recalibrated” program spending. Guilbeault pointed out to the Globe that the $93 million savings figure was 5%, not 15% of expenditures.

The numbers on recalibrated programs might include the scheduled reduction of the federal labour tax credit from 35% to 25% of journalist salaries on January 1, 2027. As well, Guilbeault told the Globe the government was exploring a merger of the Canada Media Fund, Telefilm and the National Film Board.

The budget document included a brief note that changes are in the works for the Canadian Periodical Fund that subsidizes weeklies and magazines (the government only told me that the details would be communicated at a later date).

The status quo on cultural funding shouldn’t be surprising, given other priorities in 2025.

Still, TV and radio news outlets were miffed that the government didn’t end its arbitrary exclusion of broadcasting companies from accessing federal aid for their online news websites that —-but for the television and radio properties operated by their parent companies—- would be eligible for the $75 million pool of journalist salary subsidy available to all online news outlets.

***

There’s a useful explainer posted in Paula Clark’s Substack about the Blacklock’s Reporter litigation with the federal government over Parks Canada’s sharing of a paywall password obtained from an individual subscription, giving unlimited access to every article in the Reporter’s database.

The watchdog news website was in court last month, appealing a controversial trial ruling in favour of the government which appeared to bless the government’s actions and give short shrift to copyright protection.

Among the many legal frailties of the trial judge’s decision is that it appears to expand the public right of “fair use” sharing of quotations or text snippets to authorize redistribution of full articles and, thanks to the password sharing, Blacklock’s entire news archive.

It’s a legally complicated appeal, which is why’s Clark’s piece is helpful.

***

As you know, in 2023 Meta responded to Parliament passing the Online News Act by banning most news content from Facebook and Instagram in Canada (a news outlet can pay Meta to post content as an advertisement).

The ban hit the many Canadian news outlets relying heavily upon Meta platforms for content distribution. While the news blackout probably impacted free sites harder, paywalled sites were affected too.

The marketing director at Le Devoir is claiming a measurable success in making up for the lost distribution by working a lot harder at its direct engagement with readers, especially demonstrating the value of content to new subscribers.

Meta hasn’t entirely given up on Canadian news journalism of course. Just last week The Hub published a well argued commentary advocating against the federal government pursuing a digital sovereignty strategy. Meta sponsored the article.

***

The Australian government has moved the yardsticks on implementing something like Canada’s Online Streaming Act for Netflix and the other foreign video streamers, a move it has been mulling over since early 2023.

The legislation hasn’t been tabled with details yet, but the announcement suggests the streamers will have to spend 7.5% of their Australian revenues on local entertainment programming. Australian-owned television companies are already required to meet spending quotas for local content and they see the new law as a measure to “level the playing field.”

The news coverage of the announcement is unclear as to the impact of the legislation, as Netflix already invests in video production shot in Australia. It may depend upon the definition of local Australian content.

Significantly for Canadian observers, Australia is not proposing that the foreign streamers make financial contributions to Australian programming through contributions to third party production funds.

A report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation speculates on whether the announcement will provoke a reaction from the Trump administration.

***

If you have the twenty minutes, I recommend Natalia Antelava’s incendiary interview of Google’s Richard Gingras in Coda, just for sheer entertainment if not enlightenment. Gingras is Google’s former VP of News and is currently the board chair of Canada’s Village Media.

Antelava goes after Gingras for some of Google’s controversial decisions in foreign autocracies, like agreeing to Vladimir Putin’s demand to spike a voting app set up for the Russian 2021 elections by the dissident, Alexei Navalny, who later died, possibly poisoned, in a Putin prison.

However on the main interview topic of the power asymmetry between Google and the news industry, Gingras sticks to his story that Google’s relationship with publishers is collaborative, not exploitive, which requires him to engage in some grimace-inducing denialism about Google’s abuse of market power over news outlets in Search and digital advertising, both of which have been ruled illegal monopolies by US courts.

Another tidbit: Gingras claims that Google CEO Sundar Pichai was embarrassed by the now famous line-up of tech CEOs attending the Trump inauguration and suggests the photo op was “cleverly staged” by the White House.

“That’s the last photo Sundar ever wanted taken,” says Gingras. “We don’t support this administration.”

Only the ballroom.

Associated Press photo of Tech CEOs Zuckerberg, Bezos, Pichai and Musk.

***

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

Are you not entertained? Richard Stursberg’s five year plan for the CBC

November 6, 2025

In October CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard unveiled her eagerly anticipated five year plan for the public broadcaster.

MediaPolicy commented on her map here and here. Months earlier, I also provided a platform for a number of guest columns or interviews with former CBC insiders and pundits who offered some broad brushed comments on how the CBC ought to reinvent itself, one of the nation’s great and never-ending dialogues.

One of those guest columns was from Richard Stursberg, the former CBC Vice President of English language programming, “welcome Ms.Bouchard, here’s some advice.”

Now that President Bouchard has weighed in, it’s the right time for another guest column from Stursberg, the author of The Tower of Babble: Sins, Secrets and Successes inside the CBC.

***

The CBC’s Five Year Plan

By Richard Stursberg

In 1965, Robert Fowler, the Chair of The Royal Commission on Broadcasting and The Advisory Committee on Broadcasting, noted in a much quoted observation that:

“The only thing that really matters in broadcasting is program content; all the rest is housekeeping.”

He was, of course, quite right. The measure of a successful broadcaster is the quality and popularity of its shows. All the rest – technologies, personnel, locations, financing, studios and platforms – are housekeeping, there to support programming.

Recently, the new President of the CBC, Marie-Philippe Bouchard, announced her new five year plan for the corporation, her vision for its future. It is called: Here For Canada, 2025-2030 Strategy.

The plan begins by stating – correctly – that “the core purpose of the CBC (is) ‘to contribute to shared national consciousness and identity.’” She then goes on to discuss the audiences she will target and the housekeeping measures she will employ to get there.

Her focus, she says, will be on children and youth, who she acknowledges are largely lost to digital platforms, newcomers, and “non-users and dissatisfied users”. She is planning to focus CBC’s programming on those least likely to consume it. This seems a tough assignment.

She goes on to target small towns, the North and minority language communities. Canadians, however, mostly live in large cities. Almost 60% of the population lives in the ten largest urban areas that produce 75% of the country’s economic output. Her focus on the places where Canadians are least likely to live also feels like a tough assignment.

Having established her target populations, the President describes the housekeeping measures she will employ. She proposes to be “digitally agile”, to emphasise “partnerships”, to get “closer to communities”, to expand “FAST channels”, and to”increase investments in independent productions”, among other things. These are no doubt sensible things to do; they should receive The Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

There is, however, little or no discussion in the President’s plan of programming, “the only thing that really matters in broadcasting”. There is no indication of what kinds of shows will be financed over the next five years. There is nothing in the plan that describes the types of dramas, news, documentaries or comedies that will be produced. It provides no discussion of what Canadians can expect to see, hear or read on the CBC’s many platforms.

Mme. Bouchard is not alone in providing a plan that emphasises housekeeping. Almost all of her predecessors did the same thing. Despite Robert Fowler’s caution, they have produced strategies, plans and visions that decade after decade have been preoccupied with the nuts and bolts of broadcasting, and only rarely with its content.

What, then, might a real plan look like, one centred on programming and not housekeeping?

In producing one, it would be wise to start with Mme. Bouchard’s observation that the core purpose and mandate of the CBC is “to contribute to shared national consciousness and identity”.

It must also recognise that – as the president makes clear – “social and political polarisation are on the rise, as are threats to national sovereignty”. Canada feels badly divided: the West is alienated; Quebec is flirting again with independence; indigenous people are rightly aggrieved; and the young feel deeply disadvantaged. At the same time, Canada is confronted with a belligerent and unpredictable neighbour to the south that threatens the very existence of the country. Whatever program plan is created, it must speak to the moment.

The programming must also stand out in what is a very crowded field. New, beautiful foreign shows are available everywhere There is more content than anyone can consume, and the sheer excess dictates that only the really original, dramatic, relevant and exciting will be watched, listened to or read.

By way of a simplistic formulation, let’s break shared national consciousness and identity into three key questions and see what kind of programming might speak to them. The questions are:

1. The classic: Who are we?

2. The obverse: Who are we not?

3. The Northrop Frye: Where are we?

Here For Canada: 2025-2030: The Program Strategy

Who are we?

Twenty-five years ago, the CBC released Canada: A People’s History. Its narrative connected the different periods of our history into an overall account of Canada’s national identity. It was an enormous hit.

The CBC will produce three new histories.

– An Indigenous people’s history of Canada. The history of the conquered is invariably different from that of the conquerors. For Reconciliation to be achieved, it is essential that all Canadians understand what happened. It will be dramatic and revelatory.

– A history of French Canada. The struggle to preserve French Canada’s language and culture is little known in English Canada. Understanding is the key to shared consciousness.

– A history of Western Canada. The emergence of a Western identity is not well understood in the East; its grievances, triumphs and ambitions are often met with scorn. To create a national consciousness, its story needs to be told.

With these three new histories, the CBC will reclaim its position as the principal source of broad public debate about who we are and the events that formed us. The new histories will inevitably precipitate debate. While we will try to make them as factually accurate as possible, there will surely be controversy. We welcome it. Arguing together is how we find out who we are.

Who are we not?

The answer, of course, is not Americans. Canada has historically defined itself in opposition to the United States, now perhaps more than ever. But not wanting to be American is not the same as not wanting to understand them. In the current circumstances, with the ongoing trade war and threats of annexation, it is essential to understand deeply what is happening south of the border.

The CBC will explore Canada’s relationship to the United States through comedy, news, documentaries and drama.

It will resurrect its comic exploration of the States. A new version of Rick Mercer’s Talking to Americans will be produced, with a sparkling new host.

A new half hour situation comedy will also be commissioned about a Canadian family that has to move to the heart of MAGA-land. It will be similar to Schitt’s Creek, but funnier – if that is possible. Think of it as MAGA Creek.

The news department will expand its coverage of the Republican strongholds in the Red states. It is no longer possible to understand US politics and society with reporters only in LA, New York and Washington; Canadians also need to hear what people are thinking and doing in Florida, Texas, Alabama and Utah.

The CBC will initiate new documentary and current affairs coverage of the key sectors of the MAGA movement, providing in depth explorations of American gun culture, the manosphere, evangelical Christianity, and white nationalism. They will look not only at what is happening in the US, but how these movements overlap developments in Canada. Our coverage of the Americans will focus on how what happens there matters to us.

Finally, a major dramatic series is in development about the invasion of Canada by the US. It has happened twice before.This series is set in 2029 and features tense negotiations. Doomed lovers, drone warfare, blockades, split families cyber attacks, tragedy, excitement and victory – but for whom?

Where are we?

Many of the CBC’s most successful shows have criss-crossed the country, letting us know and laugh at ourselves. The Debaters and The Rick Mercer Report showed us who we are in all our variety. The new season will bring back travelling shows that explore the country’s music, sense of humour, accents and general weirdness in all our regional variety.

A big unscripted exploration is also planned, a sort of Survivors: The Winter. It will be short on swimsuits, but long on snowstorms, frozen lakes, treachery, huskies, snowmobiles, ice fishing and bad behaviour. Where are we if not in The Great White North?

The physical country has increasingly given way to a virtual one. Canadians live more and more online, in social media, through avatars and artificial intelligence, the CBC will explore our new digital environment through news, documentaries, drama and comedy.

The news department will assign journalists to the major platforms, as they are assigned now to major cities. They will be covered as distinct places with, like all places, their own characters, myths, values and events. Their reporting will be enhanced by documentaries on how these worlds are structured, how they treat their citizens, and what they mean for Canadians’ sense of their own identity.

The CBC has a number of dramedies in development that will explore what happens when people are stuck in and cannot escape their favourite social media platforms, how they respond to falling in love with an AI based lover, and what it means to give up normal life altogether for the pleasures of a purely digital one.

These new programs will supplement the great shows the Corporation already produces.

We will also update our flagships with a broader set of views and guests. The National will be modernised; and the News Network will search out a broader set of voices. We will invite Canadians to see not just politicians and “experts” but also the vast range of thought leaders throughout the country: the zany, the ignored, the keepers of secrets, the ideologically marginal and the hilarious.

The CBC will judge the success of its five year plan on how Canadians respond to our programming. We will measure our success not just in terms of audiences, but also the debates and controversies it engenders. Our hope is to be funny, wise, difficult, exciting and unforgettable. Our ambition is to be as charming, cantankerous, funny and well informed as the country itself.

This may not be the best program strategy for the CBC in 2025-2030. It may be too ambitious, too expensive, too hard to execute or simply wrong headed. The point of it is not that it’s right but that it provides a point of departure to talk about what the CBC should be programming over the next five years.

If not this approach, then what? After all, “The only thing that really matters in broadcasting is program content; all the rest is housekeeping”.

***

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

Letter to the Editor: there’s an alternative to S-209 choice of age verification

November 2, 2025

In response to the October 30, 2025 post from MediaPolicy.ca, I have some ideas on how Canada could proceed with accomplishing the objectives behind S-209, “An Act to restrict young persons’ online access to pornographic material”, while respecting user privacy and dramatically reducing the chances of a data breach.

Who am I? I’m a Java software developer with over 25 years of experience not only paid to write code, but participate design software solutions, assess requirements, work with product managers, and occasionally lead times. As part of our profession, we’re expected to proactively address potential security vulnerabilities, such as upgrading software libraries before they become outdated, and thus, more likely to be vulnerable.

Prologue:

First of all, I have no fundamental objections to restricting internet porn from minors via an age verification scheme that guarantees anonymity.

My issues with S-209 are how it captures many sites and services that are not primarily for porn, and how it risks violating user security and privacy, especially for those not seeking porn, by storing their age (and possibly identity) proofs on the internet, where they could be breached.

Maximizing Privacy and Limiting Data Breaches:

Any age verification scheme ought to maintain biometric data used as an input exclusively on the client device.

By client device I mean the phone, table, or PC used to access the internet, but on no server on the internet itself. In turn, this client-side software sends proof of the user’s age, in a way that can be authenticated as legitimate, to the site in question. This means no server on the internet would have the biometric data, such as a face scan or government ID.

This doesn’t eliminate risk, but since each piece of user-identifiable data is on one client device at a time, it means a far lesser incentive for bad actors to try to steal such data. That is, it’s far more work for far less benefit than targeting a single server.

Lower Compliance Costs for Sites Hosting Porn:

Any site that’s captured by this law would still have compliance costs, but would be much lower than what is currently proposed under S-209.

The client device vendors (Google, Apple, Samsung, etc) would be responsible for implementing this scheme. They’d be tasked with providing software for the sites in question, and those sites would simply have to install and configure this software in order to complete the verification process.

Blast radius of the law:

In addition, I propose there be clear guidelines for a site to opt out of being captured by this law.

Part of the controversy of S-210 and its current iteration S-209 is the number of sites captured by the statute. This would have included search engines and social media sites, which are light years away from primarily hosting porn but on which porn is hosted to a small degree.

In my opinion, the proposal to exempt search engines is insufficient, since many people including myself largely use AI instead of Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo searches. Also, social media has a whole series of non-porn uses. I believe the vast majority of AI and social media users are not interested in porn, at least, not while using those vehicles.

So what I propose is a way for any site, such as with news under the Online News Act Bill C-18, to opt out of this law by meeting guidelines to not expose porn at all to the users of those sites.

I admit to not having fully considered the mechanisms under which this would, but likely it would involve AI scanning for pornographic images and text. Obviously, it wouldn’t be 100% bulletproof, so sites would have to merely prove a good faith effort to accomplish this. Such sites could then offer premium versions, which would be captured by age verification mandates.

Furthermore, many computing devices are “headless” and quite simply can’t comply with an age verification scheme to access the internet. Among these devices are servers like NAS’s, which must access the internet for updates. There are also minitower PCs, which don’t come with cameras.

Final thoughts:

Many users have zero interest in porn, but are very adamant about accessing the internet anonymously, and are understandably wary of data breaches given the Discord experience in the UK.

Furthermore, many minors have a long list of legitimate reasons to access the internet, AI, and social media while having no interest in porn.

Why risk blocking non-porn seeking minors from accessing the internet, or make it harder for non-porn seeking adults to access the internet?

According to many polls, Canadians are wary of digital ID schemes. On the other hand, many are also rightfully concerned about minors accessing pornography.

The solutions to the stated objectors to the framers of S-209 is a client-based age authentication scheme that maintains biometrics and other age proofs on the client device, and off servers.

It also involves allowing any general site to make porn unavailable to the vast majority of its users and thus opt out of being captured by new porn-gating mandates.

Luke deGruchy, Cornwall, ON

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Will YouTube take it all? – the CRTC’s intriguing question for music streamers – leading news avoiders to water

Graphic from the Hollywood Reporter

November 1, 2025

It’s not exactly breaking news, but YouTube is taking over television. Or to put it more vividly, YouTube is threatening to storm the Alamo of television programming, live sports and scripted drama.

The Hollywood Reporter has a lengthy feature story about how that’s happening in the US where, in addition to YouTube’s mushrooming ecosystem of self-broadcasting “creator” YouTubers, the paid subscription service YouTubeTV is a much bigger player in premium television programming than it is in Canada.

The Reporter story begins by breathlessly anticipating that YouTubeTV might, someday soon, elbow its way into the inner circle of exclusive rights to broadcasting NFL games (currently parcelled out among Disney’s Fox and ESPN, Amazon Prime, Comcast and a few others).

But an even bigger breakout for YouTube would be joining the platinum club of streamers like Netflix, Disney, Amazon and Paramount who dominate the market for premium scripted drama.

YouTube’s relationships with a seemingly endless parade of YouTuber stars could morph into something very different from, and competitive with, the fraternity of big studios and streamers, i.e Hollywood.

As AI drives down production costs for premium video, and advertising slowly migrates from television drama to the most successful YouTubers, we could witness an explosion of independent producers of scripted drama who toggle back and forth between selling to the big streamers or else broadcasting on their own YouTube channel.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan is so cocky that the Reporter quotes him proclaiming “today, YouTube has become the epicentre of culture. And I don’t mean short-lived fads or a one-off hit show. I mean culture with a capital ‘C.’ The place where day after day, year after year, the events, conversations and voices that define the moment break through.”

The Reporter doesn’t put it this way, but YouTube is uniquely positioned to offer audiences both premium and non-premium content with an unbeatable distribution algorithm.

What the Reporter story doesn’t do is explore the deeper ideas about video consumption that media futurist Doug Shapiro is talking about in his most recent blog post “Big Media’s Structural Disadvantage”.

A dumbed down summary of Shapiro’s column is that the cheaply produced videos flooding YouTube and social media apps make our brains happy because it’s both addictive and passive, like a getaway spa session: we don’t have to expend energy (or money) finding just the right kind of premium content, we just lay there.

Shapiro’s argument is that tut-tutting about quality is a waste of time, this shift in audience attention is happening and the advertising dollars are following.

***

The CRTC has this handy way of telling you what’s on the commissioners’ collective mind when it publishes a post-hearing list of questions for industry and cultural groups to answer. What the questions tell you is where the public record is light on key issues and that the Commission wants to fill those gaps.

The CRTC just finished public hearings on the full implementation of the Online Streaming Act for the foreign audio streamers who were previously ordered by the Commission to make a cash downpayment of five per cent of revenues to Canadian media funds for music and radio news (the streamers appealed the order to Federal Court and we’re waiting for the ruling).

One of the intriguing ideas that Commissioner Bram Abramson kept raising during the hearings was a concept he called “pay or play.”

The idea he’s running up the flagpole is that each streamer might be allowed to make trade-offs of direct expenditures on Canadian audio content in favour of making special efforts to give prominence to Canadian content on its services, something that’s worth money to music labels and artists and hypothetically is a cost to audio streamers.

Abramson is only one of five commissioners deliberating on the audio file, but in question 20 of the CRTC’s list the commissioners ask “what kind of exchange rate between financial contributions and Canadian content aired would be appropriate? For example, for every 1% increase or decrease from a hypothetical baseline percentage of Canadian content, what should be the corresponding percentage or dollar-value change in the required financial contribution?” (Emphasis added)

As a speculative example, if the Commission expects Spotify to spend 30% of its Canadian revenues on Canadian content (including the 5% cash contribution to media funds) Spotify could reduce the 30% to 15% if it made heroic efforts to increase listening to Canadian songs through more recommendations or song selection for playlists.

More radically, the Commission might be thinking of reducing Spotify’s 5% media fund contributions by, say 1%, if it ups its streams of Canadian music from the current 10% of its top 10,000 songs to something like 20%.

That’s analogous to what the Commission already did with video content. Last year the Commission said it will allow Netflix to reduce its 2% cash contribution to the Canada Media Fund —-a contribution that Netflix appealed to Federal Court—-to 0.5% by using the money to buy more Canadian shows for its streaming service.

***

And now for something completely different: news subsidies and news consumers.

When writing about the sustainability of news organizations, I always think about the importance of news outlets making information about current affairs available to Canadians who aren’t news junkies.

My thinking is undoubtedly too binary, but you could divide the world into those who are interested enough in current affairs to pay for news, or at least coaxed into doing so, and those who say to themselves “if news is important, it will find me.”

If the news avoiders aren’t engaged with current affairs —unless it’s free, intriguing and right in front of them— our democracy is kind of screwed.

Cue this new poll conducted by the Globe Strategy Group in the US, summarized by Joshua Benton in Nieman Lab.

The poll divides Americans into active and passive news consumers and it would be fascinating if someone ran the same poll in Canada. The results don’t reveal a single litmus test that predicts who’s a news junkie and who’s not, but the results offer signposts to where the less engaged, passive consumers are to be found.

***

This week MediaPolicy posted an update on the Parliamentary journey of Bill S-209, the age verification law aimed at protecting children from pornography. Judging from the readership numbers (thanks to Reddit), folks are interested in this law which also raises issues of viewer privacy.

***

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

Canada’s age verification bill S-209 faces its first Parliamentary test

October 30, 2025

The Senate’s justice committee will soon be voting on Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne’s Bill S-209, an age verification bill for pornography that was launched in the upper house and will eventually make its way to the House of Commons.

The committee was scheduled to stop hearing witnesses and consider amendments on November 5th but hit a snag on October 29th when a representative of the German online regulator told Senators that the Canadian-owned PornHub had not complied with German law, something that appeared to contradict PornHub lawyer Solomon Friedman‘s testimony on October 8th that PornHub would obey a Canadian law as it had elsewhere, specifically mentioning Louisiana and the United Kingdom. The Senate committee is now considering its options which could mean recalling the fiery PornHub lawyer to answer questions again.

Regardless, the bill will likely get to a committee vote in November and then move on to the full Senate where an earlier version was previously endorsed in 2024 as Bill S-210.

The committee debaters, including Senators, seem to be divided into two groups, one for those that are single-minded in their concern about the privacy risks to porn consumers and another for those fed up with the lack of a policy response to the scourge of violent pornography miseducating children about sex.

UBC law professor Janine Benedet, in the bluntest possible language, described porn as a harmful cultural product sold by companies hiding behind an expansive view of the right to privacy:

UBC professor Janine Benedet – 4 minute video

LCJC meeting no. 8 17-38-02 Download

So far the Senate debate has been preoccupied with adult porn subscribers being outed in a data hack. The policy challenge for the bill is how to avoid, minimize or secure the risk of personal data stolen through hacks, a risk that goes up when Photo ID is required.

That’s why the bill is designed to exploit age estimation as far as possible to dramatically drive down the number of Internet users who would ever have to verify age by submitting ID proof of majority.

Age estimation technology is driven by AI-fueled online surveillance and web scraping: the age-estimating company searches the web or commercially available data for the Internet footprint associated with the viewer’s e-mail address, suggesting either an adult or a child. To the extent that estimation misfires and wrongly concludes the viewer is ineligible as a minor to access porn, the viewer can then submit ID to the age estimator.

The fear of data leaks is an anxiety that can’t be medicated by amending the bill, but likely amendments will be tabled anyway.

Right now, S-209 says that porn sites (which could include social media platforms that allow porn) have to contract with a commercial age verification service that meets federal government standards, including a critical requirement that personal data is digitally expunged as soon as age is verified.

In this regulatory model, thousands of websites or content applications become the age-gaters for porn in partnership with age verification companies. This is how the UK is doing it.

Some US states, like Utah and Texas, have moved the responsibility for age verification further up the chain of online distribution and are hanging the age gating role on apps and content applications (like Meta, X, Google etc.) by making them contract with age verification companies. If age estimation generates false positives and denies age verification to an adult, ID would likely be required.

California has gone one step further up the tech chain. The California bill puts the onus on companies selling device operating systems to require device users to volunteer their age. Perhaps the reason that the state’s Silicon Valley giants endorsed the bill: there’s no ID required at any point.

(An interesting aside, Google’s corporate policy is to use age estimation first, requiring ID if necessary, but only for their own products available in the GooglePlay app store).

The thinking seems to be: the bigger the tech company managing the age estimation task, the better their access to data, and therefore the better their age estimation results.

The downside to moving age verification up the Internet chain is that all adult users of a major online product, like Google Search or Facebook, might be caught in the age verification net, even if they’ve never sought out porn or never will.

Google’s approach to S-209 is generally supportive: it applauds sticking the porn providers with age verification responsibility and opposes PornHub’s view that it’s simpler and less risky to make a few Big Tech companies responsible.

The S-209 amendment that Google is proposing to the Senate is to narrow the scope of porn regulation to online entities that are porn sites by nature, as opposed to most websites, apps and platforms whose overall content is not “primarily intended” for porn. That might let Elon Musk’s X off the hook even though X officially permits porn. (Google’s YouTube does not allow porn, but age-verified adults can find it on Google Search if you disable the SafeSearch default settings. On the other hand, X allows under age children to view pornography if they opt-in).

As drafted, the Bill delegates to a future government regulatory body the line drawing exercise of which online entities with porn content are going to be in or out of the age verification scheme. Age verification could be restricted to conventional porn sites or expanded to a site like X which reputedly is the source of 41% of porn consumption by children.

Critic and law professor Michael Geist told the Senate committee that such an impactful decision on requiring age verification for social media apps or search engines ought to be written right into the legislation, not deferred to a regulator.

Geist does not offer an alternative to S-209 however, other than suggesting the bill be scrapped entirely and the problem of underage consumption of violent pornography punted to a broader Online Harms bill that the government has yet to table.

***

Letter to the Editor: there’s an alternative to S-209 choice of age verification

***

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

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Canadians don’t want culture thrown under the bus – the CBC’s trust factor – Wikipedia or Wokepedia

(Some classic Canadian humour to start your weekend)

October 25, 2025

MediaPolicy previously made the observation that while Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault rejects any further trade concessions to Donald Trump on cultural legislation, we haven’t heard from Mark Carney. And probably won’t. The PM is shying away from those kind of red lines as he transitions rhetorically from “elbows up” to bended knee.

Those of you who recall your history might remember that, according to reports, Canada’s theatrical film legislation was the very last thing on the negotiating table when Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan agreed to Free Trade deal number one in 1987. It didn’t go our way.

It’s good to educate ourselves in anticipation of similar cliffhangers. Last weekend the Globe and Mail’s arts staff writers went all out with a collection of stories about the challenges for Canadian artists and media producers as Canada’s trade relationship with the United States wobbles.

Kelly Nestruck wrote about how television production, stage shows and museum exhibitions are going to manage when access to their main export market, the United States, could be up for grabs.

Brad Wheeler invited Rheostatics’ Dave Bidini to riff on his new album, as well as elbows-up nationalism (“Bumper sticker nationalism is not interesting to me,” says Bidini).

Josh O’Kane looked at the desperate state of Canadian-owned book publishing.

Kate Taylor offered a solid overview of trade deals and US retaliation (and trade law wonks can check out the latest from Hugh Stephens).

Eric Andrew-Gee explained the warm hearth of Québec’s cultural nationalism to anglophones (“The price of having a culture to protect is constant fretting about the state of that culture”).

And last of all Barry Hertz broached the sensitive topic of whether collectively we are up to supporting Canadian culture at all.

Hertz’s column references a new opinion poll just released by Pollara, sponsored by Canada’s independent television and film producers, that shows Canadians want Mark Carney to defend Canadian culture against American trade aggression.

The poll says that 87% of Canadians now support the Liberals’ Online Streaming Act Bill C-11 (up from 67% in May 2022). As for having a fight over Canadian culture with Trump, 68% of Canadians say yes, only 13% say throw it under the bus (the rest don’t know).

It’s true that half of Pollara’s respondents had no clue about C-11 in the first place, but the pollster’s “statement” polling below suggests Canadians’ values are nevertheless strongly aligned with defending cultural legislation.

***

In last weekend’s post, MediaPolicy summarized CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard’s plan for reinvigorating the public broadcaster. Her two biggest points were “more local” and “more diversity.”

Bouchard did the Parliamentary rounds last week, appearing before the Commons Heritage Committee and the Senate communications committee.

Bouchard’s line on ‘more local’ —-she keeps using the word “proximity” to capture both geography and audience affinity with content —- is that digital technology means the CBC can pivot back to local without having to build new stations.

Sitting next to Bouchard, CBC’s Regional Services GM Jean Francois Rioux also emphasized affinity. Canadians want to see people “like me” or “like us” on CBC. They also want other Canadians to see and hear their concerns on the national stage that CBC provides.

There are others who have a different take on affinity, and they mean ideological affinity, code for “more conservatism” on CBC.

Bouchard treads delicately on this one, although in her Commons appearance she thoughtfully suggested that the CBC’s retreat to major cities as a response to budget cuts in the 1990s probably meant that coverage skewed to metropolitan values, which can feel “more centre and left” to anyone living in the “more centre or right” hinterland of Canada.

Bouchard was also interviewed by CBC reporter Jayme Poisson on her October 16th Frontburner podcast. Poisson poked reasonably hard on a number of sore points. On ideological diversity, Poisson pointed out that although CBC’s “trust” rating tops the charts, CTV and Global score better with conservative listeners. Maybe more opinion coverage is what’s needed?

Bouchard didn’t immediately bite on the suggestion —- avoiding a debate over whether big-c Conservatives are treated fairly in CBC coverage— but said what was needed was consistent inclusiveness in CBC content:

Well, I mean, there’s all sorts of ways to make people feel reflected and included. It starts by being in the communities where they are. It also means including a more diverse set of points of view. If that’s possible. And it’s also about being constant about it. Not just during an election period or during a specific period of time. It’s just to have that reliable approach to a diversity of points of view.

That sounds like a shift in content curation as a conscious effort. The execution will be the hard part.

***

A public broadcaster that offers affinity as broadly as possible (my new description of being “highly trusted”) is something we need to keep our democracy glued together. It’s important that everyone is motivated to check in with at least one media source that tells them about all tribes, not just their own.

Wikipedia does something similar. The popular website is quietly just there in our Google Search results. If you read it critically, you’ll get both the uncontroversial facts and the contentious points, the latter helpfully linked to content that you can read and then draw your own conclusions.

That’s unless Wikipedia is a woke, left-wing mind control machine, which is how it gets disparaged these days by the MAGA movement. To that point, Elon Musk says he’s about to release his politically recalibrated competitor to Wikipedia.

Here’s an interesting read from the Washington Post about the political campaign against Wikipedia lead by co-founder Larry Sanders.

***

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

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – CBC President unveils a new vision – Anti-porn bill is back in the Senate – did C-18 give Google a get-out-of-jail card on content scraping?

October 18, 2025

Last fall, when the CBC seemed destined to fall at the hands of an incoming Conservative government, MediaPolicy published a number of posts on “what is to be done” if the CBC received a stay of execution.

One post (MediaPolicy’s most popular ever) was a guest column from ex-CBC VP Richard Stursberg welcoming the new CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard with some advice for a re-engineered public broadcaster.

One federal election later and we are now getting a clearer picture of what a rethought CBC might look like.

This week Bouchard disclosed an advance copy of her five year plan to Canadian Press which published reports in English and French. The latter story is more in-depth, based on an interview with Bouchard.

Combing through the obligatory recitals for something new, Bouchard’s vision has some promising ideas.

The Plan document makes the familiar aspirational points about connecting Canadians with each other and fostering dialogue.

More concretely, her Plan commits to increasing CBC’s presence in local communities, “aiming to fund additional overage and hire sufficient journalists to cover 15-20 communities with a population greater than 50,000, that currently have no or little local CBC/Radio-Canada presence.”

Keeping that promise no doubt depends on the Carney government following through on its election promise for $150 million in additional funding.

Then there is the CBC’s platform problem. There are too many of them. But the CBC needs to be on them if it’s going to reach the nation’s audience —-multi regional, multi generational, multi lingual and so on. That’s a resource challenge for Bouchard.

Bouchard says CBC has to follow that national audience, youth in particular on digital platforms. The public broadcaster’s analog-to-digital transformation has been underway for years now —over time, television and radio funding has been cannibalized to support digital, especially the CBC News website. Its YouTube audience has grown quickly and TikTok is a must-do opportunity. Bouchard says the logic of the transition necessarily means cutting costs on other platforms, “stopping or transforming certain activities,” though she doesn’t say where or how much.

As for the CBC’s uneasy relationship with private sector media, always frayed because of CBC’s competition for advertising dollars on television and digital, Bouchard wants to focus on where the CBC can collaborate with local media and independent journalists, but also with the content creators and influencers who are popular with youth.

Bouchard also says the CBC should be “a pollinator, a helper to the [journalism] industry.” She told CP that “when we have services to share or offer, we should offer them on terms that are affordable for these media outlets. We have premises, we have space. We can consider facilitating access to [our] assets at zero cost or at a reduced cost that promotes budgetary balance for our colleagues.”

Finally, she grabs hold of the elephant’s leash: the widespread perception that the CBC isn’t ideologically ecumenical in its editorial curation; that it’s insufficiently conservative by content and temperament.

There will be no pleasing the CBC’s harshest critics, but Bouchard says the CBC wants to make a big effort to win over those who don’t tune in or else “undervalue” (what a euphemism!) the public broadcaster’s content. A step in the right direction is devoting more resources to the West and in rural Canada.

But that doesn’t just require money, it requires a migration of corporate culture.

The five-year Plan is officially unveiled on October 28th.

***

There is no sign of the federal government retabling its online harms bill in Parliament. It died on the order table at the last election.

Instead, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne’s has revived her Bill S-209 which zeroes in on harmful pornography being made available to kids. The debate rages in the Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs committee and MediaPolicy reported on it this week.

***

The much-slagged Online News Act Bill C-18 took another hit this week from The Hub publisher Rudyard Griffiths who told the Parliamentary Heritage Committee that C-18 protects Google from potential copyright lawsuits for ingesting and repurposing Canadian news content in its AI tools, Overview and Mode, embedded in its search engine.

The bill, Griffiths told MPs, “requires all news organizations [accepting money under C-18] must make all of their content available to Google. If you are a recipient of funding through the Online News Act, you are unable to prevent Google from scraping behind your paywall, scraping subscriber-only content to serve up in their [large language model]”

Sections 2 and 26 of the Act grant a copyright waiver for news content that Google “makes available” on Search by “ranking and indexing” so long as Google reaches a compensation agreement with news publishers.

The Conservatives’ slagger-in-chief of the Online News Act, MP Rachel Thomas, jumped on Griffiths’ claim and posed it as rhetorical question to subsequent witnesses appearing before the Heritage’s committee that is investigating the impact of AI on Canadian media and cultural industries.

As Canadian news outlets have yet to sue Google for ingesting their news content and repurposing it in Overview and Mode, this remains a hypothetical issue for now. If it got before a judge, the court would have to decide if “ranking and indexing” is what an AI tool does, as opposed to ingesting, summarizing and rewriting from multiple sources. The fact that Mode and Overview are embedded in Search, as opposed to a separate AI app, could be important too.

This idea that that Google might have snagged a windfall immunity from copyright challenges to its content-scraping for AI tools arose previously when Google struck its agreement in June 2024 with the Canadian Journalism Collective for the distribution of Google’s $100 million compensation for Canadian news content, a year after the Overview prototype was launched in the United States.

Taking its cue from section 26 of the Act, Google inserted a clause into its agreement with CJC:

7(h) The Collective will not initiate or participate in, and will include a similar requirement of the Members in the Members Agreement, from initiating or participating in, (i) any bargaining process or (ii) proceeding before the Commission, a mediator, an arbitration panel, or a court of competent jurisdiction, in each case related to (A) any bargaining process in connection with Google, any of its Affiliates, or any Intermediaries pursuant to the Act or the Regulations, or (B) infringement of copyright in relation to making available news content of Members by Intermediaries in the manner permitted by the Act. The Collective will enforce such provision in the Members Agreements to the fullest extent and in a timely manner.

When the Google-CJC agreement was submitted to the CRTC for approval, the Commission appeared to say that the copyright waiver didn’t apply to AI tools so there was no need for action “at this time”:

Some interveners, including the CP group, Village Media, The Logic, and Unifor, raised issues with clause 7(h) in the Agreement, which forbids news businesses from pursuing Google for “infringement of copyright in relation to making available news content of Members by Intermediaries in the manner permitted by the Act.” The interventions raised concerns that this would limit their ability to enforce their copyright against Google for uses beyond making news content available on Google Search. In particular, interveners were concerned about potential use on DNIs other than Google Search, or used to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. Google argues that the provision is drafted specifically to reflect the use considered under the Act, namely the making available of news content on the DNI covered by the Agreement.

Section 26 of the Act protects an operator from copyright liability in certain circumstances where its DNI makes news content available. Clause 7(h) of the Agreement extends a similar protection to Google in respect of the making available by Google Search of the news content of news businesses in the collective. (Original Footnote: Clause 7(h) refers to news content made available by “Intermediaries” of Google. Under the Agreement “Intermediaries” is defined as DNIs operated by Google to which the Act applies, which is only Google Search). To the extent that this clause reflects protections from liability set out in the Act, the Commission notes that there is no need for any further action at this time. As a result, the Commission makes no order with respect to clause 7(h) of the Agreement.

So far there’s no copyright lawsuit, so there’s no issue. That might change.

While you’re thinking about news organizations and AI scraping, you might find interesting copyright expert Hugh Stephens’ latest post about the debate that is unfolding at the Heritage committee.

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

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