Television host and journalist Travis Dhanraj – CBC Photo
July 12, 2025
The fireworks ignited by television host Travis Dhanraj’s public resignation from the CBC will not be a flash in the pan. Not if the Conservative Party has anything to say about it.
The Conservatives are demanding summer Parliamentary hearings, a sequel to the political inquisition that followed the CBC’s annual payment of performance pay to some staff in late 2023.
Conservative headquarters also launched a volley of fundraising e-mails [download, below] citing Dhanraj’s “bombshell” resignation and reiterating its campaign promise to defund the CBC under the leadership of Pierre Poilievre, now standing in the August 18th by-election in Battle River-Crowfoot.
Dhanraj is a veteran television reporter and host who returned to the CBC in 2021 as a National Affairs correspondent and two years later, to much fanfare, as the host of Canada Tonight. At the time, CBC’s press release highlighted Dhanraj’s commitment to “unfiltered” and “diverse” journalism.
But last week Dhanraj announced his “involuntary resignation,” denouncing the CBC’s commitment to diversity as performative and promising detailed revelations to come. The CBC denied the allegations and cited confidentiality obligations as the reason for the brevity of its public reply. It also announced his resignation had been refused.
It’s difficult to recap the sequence of events leading up to Dhanraj’s pyrotechnic departure: much of it is connecting dots but will become easier to piece together once his lawyer Kathryn Marshall files a human rights complaint on his behalf.
The jumping off point appears to be Dhanraj posting a tweet in April 2024 that criticized the CBC for not making then-CEO Catherine Tait available as a news subject on his show, presumably to answer questions about the performance pay.
A public statement issued by his lawyer in February 2025 suggested that at one point he went on medical leave because of the psychological harm caused by CBC management’s alleged retaliatory actions towards him.
In his own public statement, Dhanraj characterized his resignation this way:
It comes after trying to navigate a workplace culture defined by retaliation, exclusion, and psychological harm. A place where asking hard questions — about tokenism masquerading as diversity, problematic political coverage protocols, and the erosion of editorial independence — became a career-ending move.
In further statements, Dhanraj’s lawyer linked “the colour of his skin” to CBC’s alleged exclusion of conservative perspectives and news guests. Specifically, she said that CBC assumed when it hired him that as a brown man his news hosting would focus on liberal perspectives, to the exclusion of conservative guests and issues. A proven connection to race might violate the federal human rights code, if discriminatory.
Marshall welcomed a Parliamentary hearing and suggested that Dhanraj’s experience was “systemic” and goes to the heart of the CBC’s workplace culture and delivering on its public mandate:
Obviously, the issues that Travis has highlighted in his resignation letter and which will be part of a future legal proceeding are very serious, and they’re not just isolated to Travis. I’ve heard from a lot of other CBC employees who have similar stories. It’s a systemic issue, and it’s a workplace culture issue that goes very deep at CBC, which is very concerning given the amount of public funds going to the corporation and its public-interest mandate.
Sooner or later the Conservatives will take this up at the Culture and Identity committee, with MP Rachael Thomas grabbing the spotlight in the prosecutorial role she relishes. But it may bring more thunder than lightning due to the stifling effects of pending litigation.
If the Conservatives go as far as attempting a filibuster of other Parliamentary business (like government bills), the balance of voting power in committee will be held by Bloc Québécois MP Martin Champoux.
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Two news items about AI technology just grabbed headlines.
The first was the revelation by the UK news outlet Mail Online that its traffic referral from Google’s search engine is nosediving thanks to Google’s “AI Overview.”
The Overview AI tool is a huge upgrade on Google’s old practice of providing a top ranked text reply to search queries, usually mined from Wikipedia. Overview threatens to divert any but the most hardened skeptics from a page full of search results to a single high quality synopsis, sporting just two or three priority links.
The decline of web traffic is a calamity for news and information websites that count heavily on advertising revenue from referred traffic. No one is saying this out loud, but it might drive more unpaywalled news websites to a subscription model. That has implications for media policy that supports the vast array of unpaywalled media serving the largest audience cohort: casual news consumers.
But paywalled or not, as the publisher of the conservative opinion website The Hubgroused it’s the “centre-left” mainstream media that’s likely to dominate the few hyperlinks offered by Overview. And that’s if Overview actually keeps displaying the links, Google’s AI competitors might not even bother.
Overview has the potential to accelerate the shift of ad revenue from news creators to platforms like Google. Not only does Google already monopolize Search and exercise illegal market power in digital advertising, but like all AI companies it is harvesting news journalism without licensing the content.
Another story that surfaced last week was an apparent AI song “recorded” by a fictional band hitting it big on Spotify.
AI-music is the latest, and most profound, evolution of Muzak and its heir, the day-long passive music algorithm. This is a big challenge to music as an art and as a business. As such, it will have a major impact on how Canadian music is created, monetized and heard.
***
As a follow up to the most boring post I ever wrote, I can report that the CRTC’s public hearings on the distribution of Canadian content wrapped up on Monday with a closing appearance from the Canadian Association of Broadcasters.
CRTC Vice-Chair Adam Scott is on the panel. Because of, or in spite of, the fact that his background is telecommunications rather than broadcasting he often puts his finger on the crucial questions.
Scott asked the CAB spokespersons what they thought of the regulatory scheme proposed by Friends of Canadian Media for foreign online distributors.
The algebra of the Friends’ proposal is to establish an overall contribution to Canadian content roughly equivalent to that already made by Canadian cable companies; say, an expenditure tethered to 30% of Canadian operating revenue.
From that 30%, says Friends, online distributors could deduct their 5% cash contribution to Canadian media funds as well as the non-cash value of their marketing and prominence of Canadian shows on home screens and recommendation tabs. The flexibility of the “deduction” approach opens the door to bespoke contributions by different online businesses.
CAB President Kevin Desjardins colourfully described the Friends proposal as more like a piece of cheese offered to the streamers than a mousetrap, meaning the CAB would still like to see some general commitments to Canadian content that all online distributors would have to meet.
What was disappointing, Desjardins told Scott, was that the foreign streamers have avoided any formal commitments to Canadian content other than being left alone to carry on their business in Canada. He suggested that the Commission insist the streamers submit proposals in the post-hearing phase of the public consultation.
Another question raised by the Commission got my union-antennae twitching.
In 2022 the Liberal government decided to handcuff the CRTC on the available tools to regulate online distribution platforms in the instances where Amazon, Apple, Roku et al might be willing to carry Canadian programming but only on their one-sided terms for revenue splits or screen prominence.
Instead of conferring dispute resolution powers of arbitration on the CRTC, Bill C-11 restricted the Commission to adjudicating a standard of “good faith negotiations,” backed up by powers to fine violators.
As any union rep (or small commercial party) knows, good faith doesn’t tip the scales of power imbalance.
Canadian labour law remains mired in the good faith swamp after decades of jurisprudence that tries to distinguish between hard bargaining and illegal “surface” bargaining, ie the powerful party going through the motions while quietly messaging “it’s my way or the highway.” In this legal fiction, the actual content of proposals is almost irrelevant. The stronger party can be as hard nosed as it likes.
The CAB referred the Commission to the American FCC’s definition of good faith bargaining. But it looks a lot like surface bargaining, to be honest.
In the labour world, Ontario passed a law in 1986 on the resolution of first contract negotiations following unionization, when corporate intransigence is at its worst. The main feature was binding arbitration, exactly what has been denied to the CRTC.
But the “good faith” standard was upgraded from the vexing “hard vs soft bargaining” distinction to a multi-factor test in which the Labour Board scrutinizes “the uncompromising nature of any bargaining position adopted without reasonable justification.”
If the CRTC pursued this kind of thinking about good faith, it would have an evidence-based opportunity to require an intelligible “justification” for playing hard ball and that it be reasonable.
***
Perhaps there’s been enough said about Prime Minister Carney’s blink on the Digital Services Tax.
Nah.
Hugh Stephens posted his view, similar to what you read in MediaPolicy. In the course of his piece, he links to a 2020 background study published by the Library of Parliament shortly after Royal Assent to the 2019 Bill C-82, which was the enabling legislation for the DST.
The Library study takes the tax narrative from its origins in OECD discussions in 2013 to February 2020, a month after Joe Biden was inaugurated as US President.
It’s a useful read in a couple of ways.
First, the blow by blow history makes it clear that many of the urban legends around the DST are wrong. It was never a “data tax,” or an “audience tax,” or a “make Big Tech pay” tax.
It was a response to the problem of digital companies operating in Canada without “a permanent establishment” that makes the company’s product, like a factory or a mine. Without changes to the permanent establishment rule, foreign digital companies can freely offshore their Canadian revenues (or just pay tax on them in their home countries).
The other thing that the Library study does is follow the negotiation narrative among OECD countries and with the US.
A first-term Trump was opposed to the DSTs being legislated in Europe and threatened retaliation. Once Trump lost the election to Biden, the UK and France moved quickly.
Canada lagged for reasons best known to the Finance Minister and the PM. Perhaps they were waiting to see if President Biden could get Congress to ratify a new tax treaty that would curb the use of offshore tax havens and agree to a minimum global corporate tax rate.
We know the outcome. Nice guys finish last.
***
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The CBC has a hip two-minute cut-for-social video explainer narrated by the tattoo-embossed Nick Parker.
And for another take, here’s Paul Wells interviewing Canadian tax expert Allison Christians.
President Trump has promised to re-announce tariffs this week. Carry on Canada.
***
Two months ago when Donald Trump blurted out his desire to tariff US movies filmed abroad he got a tepid response from the supposed beneficiaries, Hollywood studios and the Big Tech streamers.
That’s because the studios and streamers make so many movies in Canada, at a competitive and government-subsidized cost, with world class quality.
What Hollywood really wanted was production subsidies from the US federal government, but so far that has not happened.
Now California is stepping up to the plate. Governor Gavin Newsom is prepared to double existing state subsidies to the tune of $750 million, quite a slice of the pie in what is otherwise a major austerity budget for the state.
***
The Canadian Press has reported that Justice Minister Sean Fraser is having a close look at the federal Liberals’ online harms legislation before re-tabling it.
Bill C-63 died on the order table when Mark Carney called a federal election in March. The core of the Online Harms Bill was to require social media platforms to establish content safety codes, legislation that polling suggests is a winner.
The add-ons to the bill were more controversial. The opportunity for private citizens to file anti-hate complaints against each other under federal human rights legislation, abolished by Parliament in 2012, is to be revived.
And the anti-hate provisions in the Criminal Code are to be strengthened with more severe punishments. MediaPolicy offered some perspective on that, here and here.
Prior to the election, then Justice Minister Arif Virani reluctantly split the controversial from the core elements of the bill into separate legislation. Neither bill was taken up by Parliamentary committees in the months leading up to the election call.
The CP story quotes the new Minister as wanting to make his own “fresh consideration of the path forward.”
There are two 15-minute weekend reads on media that I can recommend.
In his personal blog “Fagstein,” the Montreal Gazette’s Steve Faguy has posted a short history of the CRTC’s decades long struggle to keep local television news solvent.
He’s done a great job. I know how hard it was as I tried to do the same in a shorter space in chapter six of my book on the Online Streaming Act. Faguy’s post is the learning resource that has been missing.
The other read is a feature story from the Globe and Mail’s Josh O’Kane. He’s updated his whodunnit reporting on the cyber-theft of $10 million from FACTOR, the music funding organization that distributes dollars contributed by government, radio stations and (subject to a court appeal) music streaming companies to Canadian musicians.
***
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Mark Carney’s shock repeal of Canada’s digital services tax on the eve of Canada Day was greeted by a gloating fan-dance by President Trump’s press secretary who claimed that “Carney and Canada caved to Donald Trump and the United States of America.”
In a brief news interview the Prime Minister suggested that the corporate tax measure, designed to capture offshoring of Canadian revenues by US tech companies, was never going to be in the final trade deal that he is working on with Donald Trump. MediaPolicy expressed its view on all of this in Monday’s post.
This might end up as a historic moment of humiliation, pending future events.
The backlash against Carney has come from all sides. He may be fortunate that Parliament is not in session and his minority government doesn’t have to face the music until the Fall. No doubt, that was his calculation.
Today the Toronto Star published an open letter signed by Canadians for Digital Sovereignty who describe themselves as “a group of patriotic Canadians and civil society organizations who care deeply about the future of Canada.” The letter expresses the concern that backing off the digital services tax will embolden Trump to press other trade demands, in particular where Big Tech and Hollywood are involved.
Carney might regard some coalition members as the usual suspects in public policy matters affecting digital and cultural sovereignty, but the inclusion of others suggest a broader opposition that ought to disquiet the Prime Minister.
The members of the coalition hail from English speaking Canada. From what I have seen on social media, their French-speaking counterparts in Québec are angered by Carney’s DST climb-down and their displeasure will be expressed.
Here’s the Open Letter:
Open Letter: Canada cannot afford to concede more to foreign tech giants
Dear Prime Minister Carney and Minister Champagne,
We are a group of patriotic Canadians and civil society organizations who care deeply about the future of Canada. We are disappointed by the government’s decision yesterday to both halt collection of the Digital Services Tax and eventually repeal the Digital Services Tax Act. As a result, on Canada Day, foreign tech giants will enjoy an immediate $2.5 billion windfall and a $7.2 billion tax break over the next 5 years. While we recognize the difficult choices facing the government, we feel that we cannot ‘build Canada strong’ while surrendering ever more of our digital sovereignty and security.
We urge the Government of Canada to:
(i) Find ways to use foreign tech giants’ massive untaxed profits to fund homegrown alternatives, despite proposing that Parliament repeal the Digital Services Tax Act
(ii) Strengthen Canada’s digital sovereignty in trade negotiations and in undertaking a reset of Canada’s forward digital policy agenda, and
(iii) Make no further concessions to foreign tech giants, including on legislation passed by Parliament (the Online StreamingAct, Online News Act) or in addressing urgent matters including combatting online harms, regulating artificial intelligence, ensuring the integrity of the information environment (including for health information), protecting privacy, among other measures to rein in foreign tech giants’ negative impacts on our economy and society.
Foreign tech giants, especially U.S.-based companies, have made hundreds of billions of dollars in Canada in recent decades and yet have not paid their fair share in taxes. Many enjoy tax breaks on digital advertising paid for by Canadians thanks to a loophole in the Income Tax Act. We are one of the largest digital markets in the world, with a highly online population, skilled workers, and innovative companies. Yet in 2023 alone, U.S. tech giants made $20.7 billion in Canada from distributing online content. U.S. tech giants are crushing domestic competition, dominating our markets and imposing a range of externalities on Canadians. They profit from the amplification of online harms, including the spread of false and manipulated information, hurting the mental and physical health of children along with all Canadians. They are eroding the economic basis for the professional news media and feeding the toxification of our increasingly digital public sphere upon which our democracy depends.
The Digital Services Tax is a modest yet much-needed measure that will ensure foreign tech giants are more fairly taxed and held accountable for their enormous power over Canada’s society and economy. We are disturbed to see the alignment of CEOs of Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon and X Corp. with the current U.S. administration’s agenda, which threatens Canada’s political and economic independence.
Rather than repealing the DST, we urge you to consider how foreign tech giants’ massive unfair profits in Canada could be taxed to invest in Canada’s digital sovereignty, building homegrown alternatives to U.S. monopolies. At many times in our history, Canada has invested to build communications infrastructure in the national interest. Canadian companies can help build platforms, networks, and tools that reflect Canadian values, strengthen our cultural and information ecosystems, and nourish our diversity as a country with two official languages and three founding peoples – Indigenous, French, and English – so that Canadians in communities across our far-flung country can better serve their own needs to communicate and connect.
We note that the U.K. did not make concessions to their digital services tax to get a trade deal with the US.
We stand ready to help our government, to inform and rally Canadians to help build our digital sovereignty and a better digital society.
Regards,
Organizational signatories
ACTRA National Amanda Todd Legacy Society Broadbent Institute Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Canadian Centre for Child Protection Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions Canadian Medical Association Canadian Media Guild Canadians for Tax Fairness Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy Children’s Healthcare Canada Community Radio Fund of Canada The Dais Documentary Organization of Canada Friends of Canadian Media Goodbot Society Inspiring Healthy Futures Open Media Pediatric Chairs of Canada Reset Tech Unifor National & Local 87-M
Individual signatories Mike Ananny, former advisor to Canadian Heritage on the future of CBC/Radio-Canada, and Associate Professor of Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California
The Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson, CC
Linda McQuaig, author and journalist
Taylor Owen, Director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy and Associate Professor at McGill University
John Ralston Saul, CC
Leslie Regan Shade, Professor Emerita, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto
Paul Valée, CEO of Tehama.io
Dwayne Winseck, Director Global Media and Internet Concentration Project, and Professor School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
***
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After years of calling the shots as a business CEO and bank governor, the Prime Minister is discovering how tough it is to play the weaker hand when negotiating —-well, trying to negotiate—- with a bully like the United States.
Trump not only wanted the DST to be cancelled, he demanded on Sunday morning it be repealed as a condition of further negotiations over tariffs, trade and continental security. On Sunday evening Canada folded.
Carney cancelled the DST literally hours before the Silicon Valley titans were obliged to send us about a couple of billion dollars in corporate tax remittances, after years of Canada delaying the tax in the hope of coming up with an alternative measure to address the problem of US tech giants reducing their global tax bill by offshoring revenues earned in Canada and countless other jurisdictions. A deal with former President Joe Biden fell through because US Congress would not ratify it.
The rapid chain of events on Sunday had a whiff of Kabuki theatre: it’s plausible that weeks ago Carney made the decision to clear ballast from his trade agenda, much as he did with a carbon tax he once endorsed, but he needed Trump’s threat of walking away from the trade talks to do so. Whether Carney and Canada got anything from Trump in exchange for this unilateral concession we may never know.
It’s an understatement to say there is a disturbing pattern taking hold. Canada spent $1.3 billion on border security to rebuff Trump’s first round of trade tariffs triggered on the phony pretext of fentanyl smuggling.
We enacted and then suspended most of our retaliatory tariffs in hopes of expedited trade negotiations.
We joined hands with NATO allies to click our heels at Trump’s demand that NATO countries more than double their defence spending to 5% of GDP.
And as a ten out of ten on the cringe scale, who can forget Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s bumbling bluff to cut electrical power exports to the United States.
Carney is gambling that Trump won’t see the DST climb-down as weakness and be emboldened. If Canada was the European Union of 400 million souls, an ocean away from the US, the Prime Minister might have chosen a different strategy.
What’s the right way for Carney to play this in the next few weeks?
I spent my trade union career negotiating against powerful companies, usually playing the weaker hand unless the rank and file were angry enough, for a long enough period of time, to face down their employers. One of the key responsibilities of the negotiator is to figure out your own strength.
This is Carney’s challenge. How resilient are Canadians in our collective commitment to economic defence against the Trump onslaught? We get riled up by Trump’s “51st state” threats. But are we tough enough for a grinding trade war of attrition that lasts until Trump’s economy tanks and he has to face mid-term voters next year?
This is a question that the Prime Minister must ask himself every day. It is a question we must ask ourselves.
Our first test of bargaining solidarity is for our politicians, especially our provincial premiers. I suppose we could ask them to just shut up and let the winner of the federal election speak for Canada and certainly not head south to cut their own deal with the US President at Mar-a-Lago.
But voters expect their elected officials to speak up for their constituencies —-Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has every right to remind us that the oil patch is as important as the auto industry— or else they will no longer be elected officials. But there is a line to be drawn and respected.
The same test of solidarity can be expected of non-elected political agents. The chorus of domestic critics of the tax on Uber, Google, and the other digital titans has mischaracterized the tax as just another cynical cash-grab from Big Tech companies that are better left unregulated.
Canadian journalists have tried to correct that misimpression, reporting on the DST as a story of global tax policy. The story is that Canada was a relative latecomer to the international consensus among OECD nations that US Big Tech was offshoring revenues earned in other countries to tax havens like Ireland and that national digital taxes were the best way to combat it until the cheating stopped.
Most European Union nations have already implemented their digital services taxes. While the US President still has those levies in his trade crosshairs, any changes will come at the negotiating table where the EU can pursue a solution to the offshoring problem. In a recent announcement, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the US was prepared to mirror OECD/G20 nations’ tax policies on a minimum corporate tax even though the US will not ratify a tax treaty on the matter.
The details of this recent understanding between the OECD and the US are still hazy.
The EU is keeping its DSTs, for now, because it has some things that Canada doesn’t. Like, the EU nations’ DSTs were already implemented and they had not delayed them out of good will as Canada did. Like the trade of EU nations is less exposed to the United States than Canada’s is. Like, the EU can fall back on an internal trading bloc of 400 million.
The EU will discover, as Canada is, that a solid front at the bargaining table is the only way to defend economic opportunity and political sovereignty against Trump’s trade war.
If it’s all over quickly because we can’t keep a grip on our internal solidarity, we will have lost the trade war. And losing the trade war could mean losing our country.
***
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Mark Carney is due for a follow up to his 2021 book Value(s)
June 29, 2025
I start this week with a recommendation, but not Mark Carney’s first book Value(s) (2021).
Instead it’s book publisher Ken Whyte’s latest Substack post cuffing the Prime Minister for cutting a deal for his unreleased second book with an American publisher.
Aside from the PM striking this discordant note during a trade war, it’s inviting to contrast the Liberals fighting the good fight for Canadian broadcasting and news journalism to their neglect of book publishing where foreign publishers claim 95% of Canadian sales and 98% of profits.
To be fair, book publishing lies outside of federal regulatory jurisdiction and many of the titles printed by Canadian book publishers are subsidized by federal Canada Council grants and the Canada Book Fund.
Still, I have to sign on to this statement from Whyte:
There aren’t many silver linings to Trump’s second term, but one has to be that it has highlighted the perils of outsourcing so much of our economy and culture to the US. We were lulled into a cultural complacency, thinking it didn’t matter that another country’s norms, values, and market demands dominated our markets and our discourse.
***
Speaking of “outsourcing our culture to the US,” doing something about it is the CRTC’s full time job lately.
The Commission is almost done public hearings on yet another file implementing the Online Streaming Act. This one’s inscrutably labelled “market dynamics.” It’s about getting the big players in distribution to bring Canadian content to market.
Not a sexy policy issue compared to defining Canadian content or ordering foreign streamers to pony up $200 million for Canadian media funds. But crucial.
In the Market Dynamics proceeding, the Commission is revisiting its expectations of cable companies to distribute Canadian content and then doing the same for online distributors like Roku, Amazon and PlutoTV.
It’s the Commission’s job to sniff out the danger of big distributors exploiting their gatekeeper power over smaller content programming companies. Unchecked, this chokepoint market power can stifle cultural competition and the survival of independent Canadian broadcasters.
What unites all three CRTC proceedings is the holy grail of “discoverability”: making Canadian content prominent for Canadian audiences so they consume it.
There’s a long list of what prominence means in an online environment.
It might include marketing campaigns, event sponsorships, online fan pages, favourable home screen positioning for Canadian shows and playlists, “For You” recommendations, and even ranked outcomes in response to content searches. In other words, something better than the ghettoized “Made-in-Canada” menus on offer, heavily populated with titles that frequently aren’t Canadian by any definition.
Based on their legal filings, the global giants are opposed to any regulated prominence for online Canadian content. They plead the uniformity of their platforms across a global audience and their pursuit of a frictionless connection between platforms and subscribers. Regulation, as they see it, is someone else choosing your clothes for you.
The Canadian Association of Broadcasters retorts that the reality is that online programming is bought, sold and distributed on market-by-market basis around the world and platforms are not global monoliths. That means unique Canadian requirements can be customized to each global’s “dot ca” Canadian streaming services.
In filings to the CRTC, cultural advocate Friends of Canadian Media has sketched out a regulatory scheme in which the Commission assigns online distributors a target CanCon budget of 30% of their Canadian revenues. That commitment can be satisfied by the cash and prominence value of commercial deals with the Canadian programmers they put on their platform. There’s already a down payment on the 30%: the Commission’s 2024 ruling that foreign online undertakings fork out 5% cash contributions to Canadian media funds.
The Friends proposal mirrors what the Commission previously said it has in mind.
In its very first public pronouncement on implementing the Online Streaming Act in May 2023, the Commission identified prominence rules as the non-cash component in each streamer’s regulatory load. Prominence efforts would be assessed a monetary value as a supplement to cash investments in Canadian programming.
Whatever these three Commission rulings end up saying in broad strokes about discoverability, the detailed prominence rules for each streamer or online platform are supposed to be nailed down by the Commission in yet another regulatory phase that won’t even begin until 2026.
But the prominence of online Canadian content is only part of the cultural gatekeeping problem, and not the most difficult for the Commission.
Before prominence comes “access.” Canadian audio and video programmers that are big (Bell, Rogers or Québecor), medium-sized (e.g. Stingray or Corus) or small (e.g. APTN or OneSoccer) first have to elbow their way onto crowded distribution platforms and get paid a fair market rate by distributors or else they needn’t trouble themselves about prominence.
As Corus stated its filing, it’s unrealistic for Canadian programmers to go solo with their own streaming apps as a core business model.
If the online streaming step-outs launched by Canadian broadcasters are too small to go toe to toe with Netflix and the Hollywood streamers, that makes the alternative ——getting on global distribution platforms like Roku and Amazon—- increasingly indispensable as Canadians shift from cable to streaming. That puts the distributors in the driver’s seat in any negotiations over prominence and compensation of Canadian broadcaster content.
If this problem of market power in online distribution has a familiar ring to it, it should.
For the last two decades the same power game has played out between Canadian cable companies and Canadian broadcasters over access, prominence and compensation.
In 2011 the Commission responded with a Wholesale Code setting out rules of fair play, enforceable through Commission orders for access and prominence as well as binding arbitration over commercial rates for distributor payments for programmer content. The Code was revised and strengthened in 2015 and tweaked again when the Commission approved the Rogers-Shaw merger in 2022.
Ever since, commercial fist fights have broken out and, in the public eye, play out as David and Goliath stories. Litigation before the Commission abounds.
The large cable distributors Bell, Rogers, Telus and Québecor are often accused of bullying Canadian programmers, threatening to kick them off the cable dial for audience underperformance, whether real, imagined or exaggerated.
Programmers see it all as a cynical bargaining ploy to renew expiring commercial deals at lower rates of compensation.
In turn, the cable companies routinely accuse programmers of gaming the regulatory system by manipulating the fair play rules to hold on to expiring commercial rates negotiated during better times in the industry.
The Wholesale Code’s fair play rules are up for inspection in the Market Dynamics proceeding. The big Canadian companies want the rules either heavily edited (Québecor and Bell) or gutted (Rogers).
The Canadian programmers are defending the Wholesale Code. They have allies in second-tier Canadian cable companies, such as the Nova Scotia based Bragg Communications and the Montréal-headquartered Cogeco, who believe the big Canadian broadcasters make them overpay for the programming that audiences want in their cable package.
The programmers also want the spirit of the fair play rules to be mapped over (see Bell’s chart below) to online distribution by the global giants and, now that Rogers operates its Xfinity platform for streaming apps, their Canadian imitators too.
It’s an uphill if not impossible regulatory battle for Canadian programmers.
In a strange move that they never properly explained, the Trudeau Liberals hamstrung the Commission when writing the Online Streaming Act by withholding the Commission’s key lever to impose binding arbitration on online distributors.
But other regulatory powers over online access and distributor favouritism remain intact, at least in the legislation and perhaps soon in CRTC regulations.
If the Commission trains are running on time, we’ll get a ruling on Market Dynamics in late 2025.
[Disclosure: I am a volunteer member of Friends of Canadian Media’s policy advisory committee. The Friends proposal above wasn’t my idea, but as Kim Mitchell might say “damn, I wish I wrote that.”]
***
One of the more tone-deaf utterances offered by Netflix during CRTC proceedings was that it doesn’t need to be told to make Canadian content more prominent on its service, because entertainment writers at Canadian news outlets are doing the job of promoting CanCon so well.
Nevertheless, here’s a sincere MediaPolicy shout-out to the dwindling corps of Canadian journalists regularly reviewing a global ocean of content and spotlighting great Canadian shows and music.
And here’s a gold star and thanks to the writers at the Globe and Mail who, after consulting with other critics far and wide, just put together a song playlist from their top 100 Canadian albums. There’s a handy gizmo: you can upload it to your Spotify account.
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The 2025 Reuters Oxford Digital News Report was published this week, offering both global and Canadian break-out numbers.
It’s a trite observation that digital technology has turned media on its head, disrupting the advertising revenue that once paid our bar tabs for the consumption of media. The disruption has hit hardest in news journalism and stoked alarm about its knock on effect upon liberal democracy.
That’s probably why recurring polls and surveys tracking the arc of that disruption seize our attention, even if the trends are slow moving. For example, this year’s Rubicon crossed was that social media surpassed news websites as the leading access point for online news.
Cue the Reuters report, for my money the leading annual global survey. It tracks metrics on news consumption, platform preferences, news avoidance, misinformation, fear of misinformation, and “trust in media,” which is essentially a hybrid metric tracking legitimate skepticism of news journalism, alienation from public institutions, and audience polarization.
The global report also generates break out national numbers and additional polling for individual countries. Canada’s supplementary report on news consumption was written by University of Laval researchers Colette Brin and Sébastien Charlton.
Canada saw a 1% down tick in online news subscriptions from 15% in 2024 to 14%. In 2016 it was 9% but has been flat since getting a bump from the Covid pandemic and the 2020 US election.
Globally, the willingness of the local population to pay for online news ranges from 42% in Norway to nine per cent in Italy. Canada’s 14% is just slightly under the global water line of 18% of the adult population.
There was startling data that Canadians are world leaders in our readiness to shell out for foreign news subscriptions, clocking in at half of Canadian news subscribers. Together with Ireland, Canada’s sign up for foreign news sources is a global outlier.
But what really got my attention was a graph from the global study revealing that 71% of non-news payers say they can’t be tempted to subscribe through innovative options to bundle multiple news services, access more non-news content, or by pick-and-pay news content falling short of a full subscription. They just won’t pay for news, full stop.
As Hunter S. Thompson might have said, not paying is a matter of principle.
That suggests (excuse my confirmation bias) that in the best case scenario there is limited room to grow the subscription-model for Canadian news. The vast majority of Canadians are casual news consumers who will not pay to keep up to date on current affairs.
The good news, if you can call it that, is that the free-distribution CBC, CTV, Global News, the Canadian Press and hundreds of community news outlets continue to post news online (see the graphic below, where CBC leads the pack among English speakers).
Should that change, I’m not counting on the news subscription model to bail out liberal democracy. It’s more likely (and this is also reflected in the Report) that Canadians will turn to social media influencers to deliver news, reliably or otherwise.
***
A couple of follow-up stories for you:
Last month the CAQ Québec government tabled its Bill 109, aiming to deliver seismic changes to the rock bottom consumption levels for French language music on global streaming platforms operating in Québec.
The tabling of the bill by Culture Minister Matthieu Lacombe was timed to coincide with Québec City hosting the 20th anniversary of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expression.
Unamended since its inception in 2005, the Convention is an aspirational international standard for sovereign nations willing to step into the commercial media market and push back against the domination of English-language and mostly American content.
Lacombe was looking for other countries to sign off on an upgrade to the Convention, specifically to match Bill 109’s claim to cultural diversity as a fundamental right of citizens backed up by regulatory efforts to move the needle on the consumption of domestic media content.
The Québec City meeting didn’t deliver for Lacombe. A few countries said yes, but more gave a muffled maybe.
The muffled included Canada’s federal government. Culture and Identity (and Official Languages) Minister Steven Guilbeault issued a statement that endeavoured to navigate the narrow channel between the cultural nationalism embedded in Lacombe’s bill and, on the port bow, the exclusive federal jurisdiction over broadcasting. Not to mention, Guilbeault’s boss the Prime Minister must be thinking it’s not an ideal time to piss off Donald Trump by making more announcements about regulating foreign streamers.
All this is happening on a parallel time track with the CRTC’s upcoming public consultation on regulating foreign music streamers operating in Canada.
Apple, which has more of a flair for corporate arrogance than you might think, filed a policy brief with the CRTC that sassed the Québec cultural groups who have asked the CRTC to build a stronger regulatory regime for music streaming. Said Apple:
Apple opposes the requests of groups such as ACCORD and APEM to obtain further information from online audio services in an effort to dictate approaches that supposedly will result in more streams of Canadian songs. Setting aside the remarkable fact that these organizations apparently think that they would be better at running the streaming services than the services themselves, these requests lead to a dead end. As Apple explained in its response to APEM’s application of more than one year ago, much of the information being requested is either not provided to Apple or does not even exist.”
American Big Tech disses Québec cultural leaders. Game on!
In addition to Apple, the world-leading music platform Spotify filed information with the CRTC culled from its annual report “Loud and Clear.”
The Spotify document claimed surging growth in musician earnings in the global market for French-language music. Musician earnings have doubled globally and in Canada since 2017 thanks to rising royalty payments to music labels. Spotify told MediaPolicy that earnings growth was experienced at all levels, from the poorest bands to superstars (but not broken out by language group).
The policy implication of Spotify’s claim is that it’s part of the supply-side solution to domestic music and that the demand-side of music consumption ought to be left to the unregulated market.
The earnings data reported by Spotify is 10,000-foot stuff. Royalty payments are probably 20% of total label and musician earnings, says the company. But without the streamers opening their books to public analysis it’s hard to say how well things are working out for individual bands, or in particular for Québec musicians who may be making money in the global francophonie but have less than 10% of their own domestic market.
The same data problem exists on the consumption side of the equation. Spotify has never contradicted the repeated claims made by Québec’s cultural groups that their third party data shows that less than 10% of streaming in Québec is in French and that French-language songs rarely crack the charts.
In response, Spotify says that half of Québec’s streaming audience “regularly” consumes French language music but chooses not to define “regularly” or provide its internal data on the proportion of English versus French language songs.
The coyness about data may come to a point in September when Spotify executives must appear before CRTC commissioners.
***
In last week’s post, MediaPolicy offered an update on the CRTC’s decision to extend news subsidies from the Independent Local News Fund (ILNF) to the Global News network of local stations.
Some of the Commissioners were nevertheless unhappy with the funding gap remaining between 34 independent local stations and the 45 operated by “vertically integrated” media companies Bell, Rogers and Québecor. If you want more context, check out last week’s post.
If some Commissioners think that the Big Three are getting the short end of the stick on news subsidies, imagine what the telcos think.
Bell owns 35 local stations in its CTV and Noovo networks and, according to filings, loses $40 million annually on news.
Here’s Bell’s illustration of the news funding gap it provided to the Commission:
But being sensitive to how the big telcos are viewed by their admiring public, Bell isn’t having too much of a moan.
Instead, Bell’s ask of the Commission is that they be allowed to reassign the remaining $13 million of their cable division’s funding of community programming to their broadcasting division’s network of local news stations.
In return, Bell wants the Commission to repeal its 2016 regulations requiring the vertically integrated Big Three to allocate 11% of their programming budgets for conventional television to local news.
Also, Bell wants the Commission to remove minimum exhibition requirements for weekly hours of news programming.
***
The best podcast I listened to this week was four Americans debating trade, Trump and culture war, courtesy of Canada’s Munk Debates.
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The latest CRTC ruling (2025-133) on local television news has delivered a predictable outcome, but also the beginnings of an adult conversation about a broader CRTC strategy.
The Commission was bound to reclassify the Corus-owned Global stations as “independent” once they were cut loose from Shaw Cable in the CRTC-approved Rogers-Shaw merger. Denying them admission to the ILNF would have been difficult to explain and now the streamer money makes the numbers work.
The level of ILNF subsidy works out to approximately 70% of news production costs, a dramatic figure, although it varies from station to station depending on how much they spend on news and how many hours they produce.
A CRTC rule caps any station owner in a single regional market from drawing more than 12% of the $18 million (now $58 million) fund.
In this recent ruling, the CRTC added an “entity” cap which restricts the 15-station Global News network to 45% of the available money, somewhat less than the majority share they would be paid without a national cap.
Those are the headline numbers.
There’s some unfinished business.
The Commission says its going to develop an incentive —details to come later— to reward local news stations for increasing their news coverage of underserved communities (read Indigenous, minority French and Anglo communities and equity-seeking groups).
As part of that ruling, the Commission has imposed a quid pro quo for receipt of ILNF cash: stations must post all of their television news content on their websites; whether its available for free or subject to paywalls isn’t clear from the ruling. Many stations already distribute their video content digitally for free.
So far, so predictable.
But three —three!— Commissioner dissents from the ruling suggest that a more wholistic vision of broadcast news funding is coming. And in fact a general rethink of news funding is one of the issues the Commission is reviewing in its current consultation on audio-visual broadcasting by television and streaming operators.
Ontario Commissioner Bram Abramson decided to speak his mind in a way you rarely find in Commission rulings, suggesting the tweaking of the ILNF to satisfy Global’s admission to the subsidy club is only an “interim” (read, “timid”) step with more to talk about.
Abramson makes the taboo suggestion that the Commission consider access to the ILNF subsidy by local stations owned by the three major networks, the 45 stations operated by the “vertically integrated” (“VI”) Québecor (5), Rogers (5) and BCE (35) that own both cable services and local stations.
Abramson’s view is that what’s more important than ownership of stations is the market they operate in, in particular the extent of local “news poverty,” meaning the availability of news from other local news outlets.
Québec commissioner Stéphanie Paquette weighed in on this as well, arguing that because the French language markets are dominated by Québecor’s TVA network, which is ineligible for ILNF money, that means the production of French language news gets shortchanged by the only-for-independents ILNF.
Going back to the establishment of the ILNF by the Commission in 2016, the “VIs’” local stations aren’t eligible for that Fund. But they are eligible for a different CRTC cross-subsidy that redirects cable company patronage of their own hyperlocal community stations to their own network TV stations. But depending upon how you do the calculations, that VI news subsidy is worth half or three-quarters of an ILNF dollar.
The CRTC’s standing justification for two sets of subsidy rules for VIs and independents is that the big three networks have greater access to pooled news resources as well as deeper pockets for capital investment.
There’s compelling policy logic to the Commission’s traditional approach, however the bright red line between the financial capacity of VI and non-VI television stations can get muddied in practice, particularly where some of the ILNF-eligible stations are owned by big media companies that don’t happen to run cable operations.
Stingray and Pattison come to mind. Each company closed television stations last month in the rural Prairies, Stingray in Lloydminster (population 31,000) and Pattison in Medicine Hat (population 63,000). The closure of the Pattison station was influenced by the capital cost of renovating the television studio that had sustained major flood damage.
The Jim Pattison Group is a multi-billion dollar, multi-industry conglomerate.
The other notable thoughts from the Abramson dissent were directed at free content. The Commissioner was of the opinion that the availability of industry cross subsidies ought to be subject to a public policy favouring the free distribution of news programming under the conditions of a “Creative Commons”: in other words, a general policy of favouring free news content.
The implications of that thinking are far reaching. Certainly Google and Meta have been making the same claim: that the public interest in accessing news content overrides the desirability of mandatory news licensing payments through legislation like the federal Online News Act, Bill C-18.
***
The Republican defunding of “biased” public broadcasting by PBS and NPR in the United States is on track after the House budget bill narrowly passed and was sent on to the Senate.
Judging from this New York Times report, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson was able to mollify Republican holdouts with promises of reinstating some federal funding in the near future.
***
I attended a journalism conference recently where a focus on “essential standards of news reporting” inevitably turned into discussion about who is a journalist.
I’ll spare you my soapbox thoughts on the matter but I recommend an entertaining article in The Hubabout online influencers straddling the line between partisan activist and journalist.
***
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Sarah McLachlan will be a Canada Day headliner on CBC
June 7, 2025
Now that Parliament is back, and Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault is re-seated for a second tour of duty in his portfolio, there may be speculation about whether the Liberal government will do anything to bring Facebook and Instagram back into the scope of the Online News Act Bill C-18.
The Minister will keep an eye on Australia.
The Australians’ 2021 New Media Bargaining Code served as Canada’s model for Canada’s legislation that compels Google to pay $100 million annually in licensing payments to online Canadian news organizations.
In both countries, Meta’s response to bargaining codes was to ban news content from Facebook and Instagram in order to avoid regulation. In Australia, that meant Meta refused to renew the annual $65 million (AUS) value of its expiring voluntary agreements with news organizations which earned it an exemption from regulation in 2021.
Australia’s Labor government caught everyone’s attention last December when it announced that it would respond to Meta’s actions by legislating mandatory licensing payments regardless of the company’s ban on Australian news.
If and when it is enacted, a “News Bargaining Incentive” would provide a default cash levy on Meta, Google and TikTok if those platforms refused to bargain with news organizations, irrespective of any ban on news content.
The Incentive would be set at a price in excess of the estimated value of a voluntary agreement with news organizations. In late January the Australian government announced that a pre-legislative consultation paper would be “released shortly” but an election intervened.
Now that the Labor government has returned to a majority Parliament in a surprise comeback that paralleled the re-election of Canada’s Liberals, the expectation will be that it releases a white paper and legislates as promised in “late 2025.”
None of that will take place in a vacuum as the American tech platforms will seek the aid of the Trump administration and Congressional trade retaliation. Their lobby organization CICA has released a statement that characterizes the Incentive as “arbitrarily” targeting “select foreign companies” just like the Digital Services taxes that 11 OECD nations have enacted to collect corporate tax revenues that are alleged to be evaded by Big Tech.
An overview of different national versions of a news bargaining code is offered here.
There are also various attempts at the state level in the US. The Californian version was a flop as Google’s modest financial commitments have been scaled down in lock step with the Governor’s budget cuts to its parallel subsidy program. However legislation has been tabled in Oregon, New York, Washington and Illinois.
***
Three independent Canadian television stations closed last month.
In mid-May, Stingray’s twin stations in Lloydminster (respectively affiliated with CityTV and CTV) shuttered. Ownership cited plunging revenues and audience.
Then last week Pattison’s Medicine Hat station also went dark.
It’s an attention-grabber for the CRTC which is poised to release a ruling later this week on revised cash allocations from the Independent Local News Fund (ILNF).
In a June 2023 submission to the CRTC, the umbrella organization representing 19 independent television operators —not counting the 15 Global News stations cut loose in the Rogers Shaw merger— reported that collectively they cover 70% of news production costs from $18 million in ILNF grants.
***
Just as the window closed on submissions to the CRTC on audio regulation, industry leader Spotify published a news release touting the success of Canadian artists on its platform.
The gist of Spotify’s claim is that Canadian artists are growing their earnings on Spotify by expanding their global audiences.
The Canadian news release cites Spotify’s annual “Loud and Clear” global report on musician earnings that was posted in March. The break-out of Canadian data hasn’t been published other than summarized in the June 4th news release.
Significantly, the Spotify report does not cite any changes to consumption of Canadian music in domestic audiences in Québec or the rest of Canada. As far as we know, the CanCon share of domestic market remains at 10% of the Canadian audience and, in the French language market, less than that.
***
If you’re making beer and cedar deck plans for Canada Day, it looks like a good CanCon line-up for the televised broadcast from Ottawa, Vancouver, Yellowknife, and Summerside. It’s on CBC.
***
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Last week MediaPolicy offered an analysis of whether the Québec CAQ government’s Bill 109 might trigger a constitutional conflict with the federal government’s Online Streaming Act Bill C-11 over who can regulate video and audio streaming platforms with the goal of making French language content more prominent in Québec.
Having federal and provincial governments running active public policy on exactly the same thing is a bit of a problem, something Julie Miville-Dechêne immediately pointed out on the floor of Senate.
The Senate’s Government Representative, Marc Gold, replied that the federal government was thinking about Bill 109 and “may have more to say on this in the coming days.”
What the Carney government might or might not say in the coming days will probably follow some off the record conversations with CAQ Culture Minister Mathieu Lacombe who has already said publicly he doesn’t have to negotiate with Ottawa.
The legal question of whether it’s Parliament or the Québec National Assembly that has jurisdiction over the “discoverability” of Internet-borne content is a juicy orange for the many devoted fans of Canadian constitutional law.
Legal expert Pierre Trudel of the Université de Montréal published his view in Le Devoir. He argues that Québec can take legislative action “to ensure that French-language works can be easily found in the mass of available content, even by someone who isn’t searching for them,” because nowadays the delivery of online content depends so heavily upon consumer data that it becomes a matter of provincially-regulated commercial affairs and consumer protection.
Trudel offers as a legal precedent a 1978 Supreme Court case. In that 6 to 3 majority ruling, the Court upheld a Québec consumer protection law governing the exposure of children to advertising content even when it was applied to federally regulated television programming.
***
In the quiet lull following its miraculous survival of Election 2025, the still-funded CBC released its commissioned report from Mercer compensation consultants that answers some of the outstanding questions about the $18 million in “bonus payments” to 1,200 executives and non-union staff that fed the news cycle for so many months in 2024.
The headline is that Mercer recommended to CBC management that its at-risk “performance pay” component of total compensation is a common practice, a good thing, and ought to be retained in the name of effective staff recruitment and retention. In spite of the advice, CBC management rejected the recommendation to stay the course on performance pay and instead converted those dollars into wages.
And perhaps that puts an end to the melodrama manufactured by MPs of all parties, as well as many members of the media commentariat, using the bonus payments as a stick to beat the CBC and its unpopular President because she refused to cancel payments owed under employment contracts in a year that the public broadcaster laid off 141 staff and then narrowly avoided mass layoffs.
Before closing the book on this, there are a few parting observations worth making:
Every MP ripping former President Catherine Tait for not cancelling performance pay was well aware of what Mercer confirmed: an at-risk component of total employee compensation is a prevalent business practice throughout the economy. The idea is to keep high achieving employees hungry for success through good performance. It’s not a perq. It’s not a cash grab.
If the unspoken script to the drama is that CBC employees get paid too much, the Mercer Report put that one to bed. CBC executives and non union employees are paid smack in the middle of the spectrum of total compensation for similar work. In fact they would be slightly below median earnings were it not for a solid pension plan.
Between MPs asking the wrong questions, Tait clamming up in response to political attacks, and the limited information in the Mercer Report, we still don’t know anything about a number of key questions. Did legal entitlement to performance pay depend in any way on whether the CBC was laying off employees ? (Probably not). Did Tait have any option to reduce or cancel them? (Unlikely). Did employees achieve their targets for full at-risk pay or are the payments gimmes for most employees ? (Unknown).
More importantly, now that $18 million of budgeted at-risk pay is being integrated into fixed salary, will that be at a dollar-for-dollar rate or discounted because there is no longer an at-risk portion?
The fact that none of these questions have been pursued, let alone answered, tells you what performative nonsense this has been.
***
Back to the issue of Canadian content made discoverable on the big streaming platforms: I recommend the latest episode of Dan Runcie’s Trapital podcast hosting Will Page, the high profile expert on global music streaming and ex-Chief Economist for Spotify.
Page says that after a decade and a half of audio streaming that fuels “glocalization” of music — where musical cultures cross pollinate across national and linguistic borders — he was surprised at the growth in the US dominance of the global music earnings when he had expected the opposite.
That has implications for Canada:
“I ask you to go to the YouTube artist charts for Brazil…. Google it up and pull down those top 100 artists in Brazil this week.
And you’ll find one, maybe two international artists on that chart is singing in Portuguese, very little Spanish. And if you’re lucky, I think The Weeknd is ranked 95, and Bruno Mars is ranked 65…
Other than that, it’s an entirely Portuguese chart. So there you go. There’s a top 10 global music market that just said, “thank you and good night” to the English language.
If you are a non-English speaking country with a strong identity, glocalization is a force for good. If however, you are an English speaking country that’s not American, glocalization leaves you screwed. So we have winners and we have losers.”
Page has lots more to say about Canada and Canadian music. You can listen to the podcast here.
***
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