canada – MediaPolicy.ca

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Miller is flexible on CanCon – WAPO sunk by Trump – CRTC is stil-l-l-l deliberating – ready for Digital Media@Crossroads 2026

AI illustration

January 31, 2026

Last week Heritage Minister Marc Miller walked back the tough talk of his predecessor Steven Guilbeault: cultural issues are no longer “off the table” in the upcoming trade talks with the US and Mexico.

In an interview with The Logic, Miller said Canada would have to be “flexible” in dealing with the US demands that Canada repeal the Online Streaming Act and the Online News Act although there are “lines that can’t be crossed.”

There will be no Davos speeches for Canadian culture. At least not in English. It probably escaped nobody’s notice that Guilbeault’s ultimatum was never repeated by the Prime Minister.

Miller also suggested that Canada needs to design its online harms bill with a clear eyed acknowledgement of Big Tech’s influence in the Trump administration. Miller said “we’re not oblivious to the fact that large American companies do have access to the administration, and colour a lot of the views coming out of the White House when it comes to the way they’re behaving.”

Despite an earlier news story that Miller was considering Australian and French bans on social media accounts for minors, he was quoted by The Logic as undecided about a Canadian ban.

“A simple ban, with doing nothing else, would be overly simplistic and probably wouldn’t achieve the goal that we’re trying to achieve, which is to make sure kids are safe, physically, emotionally and mentally,” he said. In a separate interview with the Globe & Mail, Miller said he was considering online harms legislation that would govern how AI chatbots impacted children.

That sounds very much in line with a new LinkedIn post from McGill University’s Taylor Owen, the most influential voice on online harms in Canada:

The core problem is that tech companies have failed to build safe products, and governments have failed to hold them accountable. Parents and teachers are rightly frustrated and so the impulse toward radical action is understandable.
But a ban treats exclusion as the end goal. It punishes users rather than the products causing harm. It restricts children’s rights rather than enhancing their safety. And when a kid turns 15, they enter an online ecosystem with no protections whatsoever.

Every jurisdiction that has studied this seriously—Australia, the UK, the EU—arrives at the same place: an enforcement body that can hold platforms accountable through risk assessments, mitigation plans, and transparency requirements. Age-appropriate design standards that eliminate targeted ads, auto-scrolling, data harvesting, and stranger contact for minors.

Canada had a bill [C-63] that did much of this. It should be retabled—and updated to include AI chatbots, which are now one of the main sources of consumer safety risk for young people.

However, the challenges in legislating an online harms bill in a minority Parliament are considerable.

The Conservatives have a different vision of legislating online safety, preferring to criminalize online harms so the law is enforced by judges and not government regulators.

Unlike the last minority Parliament, the Liberals can’t just make a deal with the NDP to form a House majority to pass an online harms bill. The NDP’s loss of official party status in the 2025 election means they aren’t on Parliamentary committees and can’t team up with the Liberals to break filibusters that bottle up legislation in committee hearings.

The Liberals would need the Bloc Québécois to get them out of that jam.

***

I said there would be no Davos speeches for Canadian culture.

There almost was: Prime Minister Carney’s seven-minute hit at this week’s Prime Time conference sponsored by the Canadian Media Producers Association was funny and spontaneous and, by pointedly celebrating great home grown shows like Heated Rivalry “at this moment,” comes close enough to a bold statement of cultural sovereignty.

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It would be easy to write a blog about the pyrotechnics going off inside American media so long as one was prepared to post, oh, about every fifteen minutes.

That’s not a segue into an update on the Netflix vs. Paramount bidding for Warner Brothers (although the latest is that Netflix is now making an all-cash bid).

What I am finding interesting is Bari Weiss’ ascendancy at CBS News as the new CEO appointed by Paramount owners David and Larry Ellison (after bagging $150M US for her news website The Free Press).

Unsurprisingly, Weiss is moving CBS news coverage to the right. How far to the right, and how deep into Donald Trump’s embrace, we shall see. There’s a fair amount of moral panic that CBS will just be a Fox News Two, as if the centre and left is not adequately populated by ABC, NBC, CNN and MSNBC. There’s an illuminating NPR story on Weiss’ shake up at CBS, here.

Speaking of NPR, the New York Times published a story noting that the Congressional revocation of federal funding of the now-dissolved Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which provided 15% of NPR and PBS funding) has not resulted in station closings, at least not immediately. For now, donations are filling the gap.

And speaking of the New York Times (and The Washington Post too), data-cruncher extraordinaire Nate Silver posted the following graph on his Substack that measures the news cycle buzz of political coverage:

It seems that the Jeff Bezos-owned WAPO did not get an attention-boosting “Trump bump” after the 2024 US Election but rather is experiencing something more like a “Trump sunk” effect.

Possibly that’s because Bezos alienated some readers by nixing a newsroom editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris and then, after Trump won, cuddled up to the White House. The eyeballs appear to be marching off to the Times.

All of it a damn shame: WAPO is replete with good watchdog journalism.

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In November, the CRTC issued a major decision about on-screen Canadian content. Two biggies began with a revised point system to define the “Canadian” in Canadian programs under the Online Streaming Act, C-11.

The other opened the door for the first time to foreign streamers owning majority copyright rights in Canadian programs.

The Commission’s November ruling was the first of a two-part decision on video streaming: the crucial issue of streamer expenditures on Canadian programs remains outstanding.

Well, don’t hold your breath.

In a speech to the Canadian Media Producers Association on January 29th, the CRTC’s Broadcasting Vice-Chair said the Commission was not ready to issue new rulings.

“There is still more work to be done, and I cannot tell you exactly what to expect as we continue deliberating,” Nathalie Théberge told the crowd, who might have noted that the Commissioners are still deliberating seven months after hearings concluded.

“What I can tell you, however, is that there will be follow-up decisions in the coming months. This includes decisions to address spending on Canadian programs, distribution rules for services, measures to ensure discoverability of Canadian content, dispute resolution and audio policy.”

The coming months catches the attention. The Commission owes Canadians and the industry the aforementioned Part Two (“spending on Canadian programs”) as well as two separate files on the other topics Théberge mentioned.

All of this after the Commission was ordered, not asked, by federal cabinet in November 2023 to get the job done of implementing a new regulatory framework under Bill C-11 in two years.

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This coming weekend February 6th-7th in Toronto the cultural nationalists and fellow travellers get together at Digital Media at the Crossroads. This is not to plug the panel I’m on; in fact there’s something for everyone and two of the boxes I’ve ticked on my dance card are the Nordicity report (Friday 2:15 PM) on the state of Canadian media and Globe & Mail reporters Angela Murphy and Mark Rendell speaking about news coverage of US/Canada relations (Saturday 10 AM).

And on Wednesday February 11th the Coalition for the Diversity of Cultural Expressions is holding a one day event in Ottawa to discuss the impact of AI on cultural production, a lead in to the federal government’s invitation-only policy summit, March 16th-17th in Banff.

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – CanCon and trade talks – ban on teenager social media accounts – TikTok prohibition repeal

January 27, 2026

Hola from the centre of the universe, Toronto, where the biggest snowfall since 1999 (50 cm) has everyone on the watch for the army to be deployed, shovels in hand.

Here are a few things happening in Canadian media policy:

Canadian culture and the 2026 CUSMA trade talks

I’m going to be giving a ten-minute explainer on this topic at the Digital Media at the Crossroads annual conference on February 6-7 in snow-bound Toronto. The program and registration link is here.

No foolish predictions from me other than taking note that the US trade agenda goes far, far beyond Canadian cultural legislation such as the Online Streaming Act, the Online News Act or a potential online harms bill.

US chief negotiator Jamison Greer is floating the idea of a North American customs union which sounds a lot like double-digit Trump tariffs in exchange for Washington blocking Canadian trade diversification.

Regarding the Canadian streaming legislation that Netflix wants Greer to kill, last week MediaPolicy published a guest column from Peter Grant on how the CRTC might extend an olive branch to Netflix by allowing foreign streamers (and Canadian broadcasters) a CanCon credit for licensing and distributing Canadian shows abroad.

MediaPolicy also posted a book review of Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature, a call to revive the nearly dead Canadian-owned book publishing industry. The Globe’s John Ibbitson also reviewed it. Stursberg’s “what is to be done” menu of policy action requires CUSMA’s “cultural exemption” of CanCon to survive the trade talks.

Another cultural trade issue that might pop up during CUSMA talks is Trump’s previous threats to tariff movies made in Canada for the US market.

The context of this is the retrenchment of streamer spending on new productions since 2022. The Hollywood Reporter has fresh data about where US shows are being made and the only thing that is indisputable is that California is hurting and in an incremental way non-US foreign location shooting is taking a bigger share of a reduced production market . Canada’s volume is steady over time; UK and Irish shooting has gone up.

Within the United States, a game of musical chairs has resulted in New Jersey and New York gaining business, while Georgia and California have lost work.

Social Media Ban for Youth

Australia’s ban on social media accounts for youth under 16 has its detractors.

But it has its admirers too. The Globe & Mail reported that the Carney government is thinking about it for under 14s.

The French government just passed an under 15 ban.

Canadian TikTok “ban” repealed

Ottawa has repealed the TikTok “ban.”

The Trudeau government’s 2024 ban on the TikTok’s business activity in Canada (but not the app itself) followed a bipartisan Congressional ban in the United States on the grounds of national security.

Now that the Trump administration has completed the transition of the Chinese-owned TikTok into a separate US company, controlled by American interests with a minority Chinese ownership stake, the national security concern has evaporated in both the US and Canada.

Our federal government has agreed to a judicial consent order that reinstates TikTok’s right to carry on business in Canada (and presumably jump starts its investments in Canadian creators).

The odd thing: it’s the Chinese TikTok company, not the American-Chinese joint venture, that will operate in Canada. But the national security concern, which was never revealed by the federal government, has disappeared.

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Of books, sovereignty and morons. A review of Stursberg’s ‘Lament for a Literature’

AI illustration by Perplexity

January 24, 2026

Richard Stursberg, Lament for a Literature: The Collapse of Canadian Book Publishing (Sutherland House).

If we ever were, Canadians are no longer happy to be cultural North Americans.

The current US administration’s plan is to reduce Canada to a vassal state, like Russia’s Belarus.

Canadians have responded with fear, anger and pride. We are, the vast majority of us, resolved to defend our cultural sovereignty by any means necessary or available.

Enter stage right, Richard Stursberg’s history and policy statement on Canadian book publishing, Lament for a Literature. It’s more of an essay than a book at 96 pages with no footnotes to slow you down and, somewhat irritatingly, no index. It’s published by Sutherland House, one of the small and feisty Canadian publishing houses that are the objects of the author’s cultural affection.

The melodramatic book title is a riff on George Grant’s 1965 classic Lament for a Nation. Long before Canada bet big on North American integration, Grant meditated upon the death of Canadian sovereignty. He described a withering away of the Canadian identity and questioned our resolve to resist the black-holed gravity of the United States.

Stursberg articulates the essence of the matter in his first paragraph (inviting Kim Mitchell’s great compliment: “damn, I wish I wrote that”):

A country’s identity is forged from its political, military, and social history as interpreted and communicated through its arts. The stories that emerge define how a country thinks about itself, what it values, and how it perceives others. The stories can come in the form of epic poems, TV shows, magazine articles or oral traditions. The Ur medium is books. They provide the most thorough and immersive explorations of identity and often underpin all the other media.

You can pick a bone with any of that if you like, including the claim that books are our cultural supercode, or as Margaret Atwood once described that literary universe, “the geography of our Canadian mind.” (Alas, Atwood’s acerbic wit got the better of her when she playfully designated those uninterested in Canadian books as “cultural morons.”)

Despite long form narrative having to compete for attention with the Internet, we are still a nation of book readers with the time and patience for that immersive wonder.

The trouble is, Stursberg writes, the Canadian book business has largely collapsed over the last 20 years. We have the weakest domestically-owned publishing sector in the industrialized world (a measly five per cent of book revenues in its own market); we prefer celebrity memoirs and self improvement books to Canadian biography and politics; we’re mostly reading American fiction and non fiction distributed by the foreign publishing houses and their Canadian subsidiaries that have the other 95% of sales in the Canadian market; and our tight cohort of prominent Canadian novelists are increasingly setting their narratives outside of Canada, whether out of artistic vision or with an eye on foreign distribution.

For all of this, Stursberg puts the blame on public policy failure, going back decades.

The public policy for supporting the arts and media in our small Canadian market is always a variation on a theme: government subsidies underwrite the cost of Canadian culture so that art which is truly local and authentic will earn enough money that the Canadian media companies making a business of selling and distributing Canadiana can make a go of it.

For books, the largesse is not lavish: the federal funding of the Canada Book Fund ($50M/yr) and the Canada Council book program (another $40M/yr) are rounding errors of a federal budget rounding error.

But the key thing is that unless we’re going to cut subsidy cheques to foreign book publishers (we don’t), we need a regulatory framework that keeps Canadian media companies strong.

The thinking goes, the foreign book houses are in Canada to make money. But their diminutive Canadian-owned counterparts are in it for both the love and the money. However the small scale of the Canadian-owned houses makes them vulnerable to economic rip tides and the occasional financial crisis. That is why regulatory and government support to grow their business scale, and to build a backlist of great titles and a stable of bestselling authors, can be the key for Canadian publishers to survive the day and live to publish more Canadiana.

Stursberg recounts the narrative of how peculiar (and fatal) it was that federal policy on Canadian book publishing failed to follow the more successful regulatory model supporting broadcasting.

Where Pierre Trudeau’s 1968 broadcasting legislation demanded Canadian ownership of all television and radio broadcasting, his corresponding book policy in 1974 grandfathered American publishing houses already here while impeding further foreign takeovers of Canadian publishers.

When Brian Mulroney’s heritage minister Marcel Masse tried to strengthen the takeover rules in his “Baie Comeau” book policy (named for the location of the cabinet retreat where it was approved), he later ran into the headwinds of the Mulroney cabinet’s natural instincts and eagerness to make a free trade deal with Ronald Reagan.

At the first real test of Baie Comeau, Mulroney green lit the Gulf & Western conglomerate’s takeover of the Canadian-owned Prentice Hall. Over the next two decades, under Conservatives and Liberals alike, the Baie Comeau policy supporting small Canadian book publishers was enforced poorly and then not at all. Today it is effectively a dead letter.

Stursberg reminds us of the bestselling and buzzworthy fiction and non-fiction that Canadian owned publishing houses once brought to market: Peter Newman’s Renegade in Power and The Canadian Establishment, Grant’s Lament for a Nation, Pierre Berton’s The National Dream and the Last Spike, Mordecai Richler’s St.Urbain’s Horsemen, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Alice Munro’s Bear, and Atwood’s Surfacing and Survival to name a few; many of them prize winners in Canada and internationally.

Stursberg writes of the tragedy of the Canadian publishing powerhouse McClelland & Stewart, with its dream team backlist of iconic books, falling into financial crisis and, after some serious skullduggery, emerging eleven years later as foreign-owned but not before new owners feasted on $77 million in Canadian subsidies. Plenty of villains in the piece, and not all foreigners.

Today the Canadian subsidiaries of foreign publishing houses can cherry pick the best Canadian authors and books, while the smaller Canadian-owned houses embrace the commercially challenged mission of mapping the geography of the Canadian mind. As for the authors that Canadian publishers bring to success, they can hardly resist the lure of foreign book houses for their next title, what with their global distribution and Canadian marketing budgets.

But Lament is a policy treatise and, like Stursberg’s 2019 manifesto on broadcasting The Tangled Garden, he is not shy about providing an answer to the question “what is to be done?”

His answer is a multi-point program of more generous federal book subsidies and regulatory support for Canadian publishers that he would put in the hands of a Canadian crown corporation. As a kind of CBC for book publishing, federal BookCo would be backed by a tougher policy on Canadian ownership (to protect the last five per cent of our market) and supported by a nationalist policy to grow that five per cent through book distribution and publishing rights, as well as leveraging federal money to persuade provincial governments to imitate Québec’s policies supporting French language authors and books. It’s a bold menu that would see powerful enemies queueing up and US trade negotiators at the front of the line.

As we head into the ugly confrontation with the US in upcoming trade talks, it’s an opportunity for Canadians to stake our claim to cultural sovereignty. Better to fight on our feet than become vassals on our knees.

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Why the Online Streaming Act is Crucial for Canada’s Cultural Sovereignty

A Guest MediaPolicy column from Peter S. Grant

January 21, 2026

If you intend to become a student of Canadian broadcasting, the first name you learn is that of Toronto lawyer Peter S. Grant, a son of Kapuskasing, Ontario.

That’s not because he’s the most important figure in Canada’s history of broadcasting, but he may have been the most influential over the last fifty-five years at the CRTC, in private practice, and in public policy. The bio on his website doesn’t really cover it: but his autobiography Changing Channels is like a travel guide of unknown stories, pearls of Canadian telecommunications and media history. His totemic Blockbusters and Trade Wars is still the first book you should read if you want to acquire a deep understanding of Canadian media policy, even though it was published 22 years ago. He was central to the writing of the 2020 Yale Report that provided the blueprint for the Online Streaming Act.

Peter’s the ultimate Canadian cultural nationalist. I’m hearing that’s back in vogue.

Peter’s retired now. He keeps a curated page of legal and policy essays on his website and this timely new piece is the latest addition.

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Why the Online Streaming Act is Crucial for Canada’s Cultural Sovereignty

by Peter S. Grant

One of Donald Trump’s targets in his war against Canada is the Online Streaming Act. This Act was enacted less than three years ago. And in a recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, Peter Menzies has argued that Canada should be prepared to give up the Online Streaming Act in U.S. trade talks to satisfy Trump.

Which raises the obvious question. What does the Act do? Is it important to keep it in place?

What Does the Online Streaming Act Do?

Prior to 2023, online undertakings in Canada were governed by an Exemption Order for Digital Media Broadcasting Undertakings, which had been issued by the CRTC in various forms since 1999. In some versions, internet services were referred to as “New Media”. In 2011, the Commission did a fact-finding inquiry into what were then called “Over-the-Top” programming services. But it concluded in October 2011 that these services had not reached a stage where regulation was required.

However, this all changed with the enactment of the Online Streaming Act on April 27, 2023. That statute amended the existing Broadcasting Act, to implement recommendations of the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel. Its report in January 2000 was entitled “Canada’s Communications Future: Time to Act”.

Among its recommendations was for the CRTC to create a registration regime for foreign online undertakings and to ensure that all media content undertakings that benefit from the sector contribute to it in an equitable manner. The Online Streaming Act implemented these recommendations and added section 3(1)(f.1) to the Broadcasting Act, which reads as follows:

Each foreign online undertaking shall make the greatest practicable use of Canadian creative and other human resources, and shall contribute in an equitable manner to strongly support the creation, production and presentation of Canadian programming, taking into account the linguistic duality of the market they serve.

How the CRTC Is Implementing the Online Streaming Act.

The CRTC began the process of implementing the Act on September 29, 2023, when it issued Registration Regulations requiring all online streaming services operating in Canada with $10 million or more in annual broadcasting revenue to register by November 28, 2023.

Then, on June 4, 2024, the CRTC issued Broadcasting Regulatory Policy CRTC 2024-121, announcing a policy to require online streaming services that make $25 million or more in annual contributions revenues and that are not affiliated with a Canadian broadcaster to contribute 5% of those revenues to certain Canadian programming funds. The condition was expected to take effect in the 2024-2025 broadcast year, which began on 1 September 2024, and that this would provide an estimated $200 million per year in new funding for Canadian programming.

The affected foreign streamers promptly appealed this order to the Federal Court of Appeal, arguing on various grounds that the order was not properly made. The matter was heard by the court in June 2025 and we are still awaiting the court’s decision. If the court overturns the CRTC order, the Commission will likely re-issue it in a way that meets the court’s requirements.

Still to come is a CRTC decision requiring online undertakings to make expenditures on Canadian programs as a percentage of their Canadian advertising or subscription revenues. Last fall, the CRTC issued a decision redefining what qualifies as a Canadian program, so this will apply to any Cancon expenditure requirements.

Cultural Sovereignty and Canadian Broadcasting in the Past

Canada has had to deal with foreign intrusion into its broadcasting system in the past. In the early 1970’s, the border U.S. TV stations carried by Canadian cable systems began garnering revenue from Canadian advertisers for their audience in Canada. The same US programs were carried by Canadian TV broadcasters but their ad revenue was undermined by the US stations. The CRTC responded by requiring Canadian cable systems to substitute the Canadian version of the program for the US version. This meant that all the ad revenue from these programs stayed in Canada. Since the CRTC required Canadian TV stations to invest at least 30% of their revenue in Canadian content, this strongly supported cultural sovereignty. Later, the CRTC imposed a requirement on cable systems in Canada to contribute 5% of their subscription revenue to Canadian program funds. So cable systems also contributed directly to support Canadian content.

In the 1980s, Canada negotiated a free trade agreement with the United States. The first version of that agreement was the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement in1989. This was succeeded by the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA in 1994. And this was succeeded by the Canada United States Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) in 2018. CUSMA came into force on July 1, 2020.

In all of these agreements, Canada insisted on an exemption for measures that relate to a cultural industry. The term “cultural industry” includes any person engaged in “the production, distribution, sale, or exhibition of film or video recordings”. Thus it is clear that an internet platforms like Netflix or YouTube would qualify as a cultural industry simply because they distribute film or video recordings.

The existence of the cultural exemption has not deterred the United States from threatening retaliation whenever a Canadian cultural policy adversely affects a US company. Over the last 25 years, the US has complained about a number of Canadian cultural policies, including Canada’s ban on US split run magazines targeting Canada, and the CRTC policy on which US channels can be carried by Canadian broadcast distribution undertakings (BDUs). In all of these matters, however, Canada managed to negotiate a compromise that maintained Canada’s cultural sovereignty.

How Are Online Undertakings Regulated in Europe?

In Europe, online undertakings are subject to the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, which was last revised in 2018. Under the Directive, video-on-demand services like Netflix need to ensure that European content has at least a 30% share in their catalogues and they are required to give prominence to European content in their offers.

The Directive also allows Member States to impose financial contributions on online undertakings to the production and rights acquisition of European works. These can be direct investments or levies payable to a fund. A number of European countries have done so. For example, in France foreign streaming services must invest at least 20-25% of their French revenues into European (primarily French) production. And Italy requires that streaming platforms must invest about 16% of their Italian revenues into European and especially Italian content.

The bottom line is that Europe has recognized the impact of foreign platforms on cultural expression and has taken measures to require them to support European production.

Why Should Canada Focus on Online Undertakings?

There is a simple reason why the CRTC needs to focus on online undertakings. In the last ten years, those undertakings have overtaken the conventional Canadian broadcasting system, eroding cable and TV revenues, and dominating viewing in Canada.

A look at the revenues over time tells the story. The numbers are shown in “Canada’s Network Media Economy: Growth, Concentration and Upheaval, 1984-2023”, published last year by the Global Media & Internet Concentration Project. By 2018, the total revenues from online media services in Canada were about C$14 billion, matching the revenue of the traditional media services. However, by 2023, the revenue for traditional media services had declined to C$12 billion, while online media services revenue had increased to C$27 billion.

In 1997, BDU subscriptions to cable and satellite in Canada were around 77% of households. But by 2025, BDU penetration has declined to only 54% of Canadian households. Corus, the Canadian owner of the Global TV network, is under financial distress.

Who were the beneficiaries? Leading the pack is Netflix, which by 2025 was watched by close to 20 million Canadians. But following behind are Disney+, YouTube, Paramount, Apple TV and Amazon Prime, each of which has millions of Canadian viewers. Yes, there are some Canadian online services like Crave and GEM. But they are dwarfed by the foreign-owned services.

Simply put, the Canadian broadcasting system is now dominated by online undertakings. If Canada wants to maintain any form of cultural sovereignty, it must address the role of these undertakings in its cultural policies.

Are Foreign Online Undertakings Discriminated Against?

US trade officials have publicly said that Canada’s cultural laws “discriminate against U.S. tech and media firms.” A House committee has written urging Canada to suspend what it calls the “discriminatory Online Streaming Act”.

But do CRTC online policies discriminate against foreign firms. As noted earlier, the Broadcasting Act does single out foreign online undertakings and states that they are to “make the greatest practicable use of Canadian creative and other human resources”. But the obligation for Canadian broadcast undertakings is even stronger: “to employ and make maximum use, and in no case less than predominant use, of Canadian creative and other resources in the creation, production and presentation of programming…”

In its initial 2024 decision, the CRTC required foreign online streaming services to contribute 5% of those revenues to certain Canadian programming funds. But was this discriminatory? Not at all. In Broadcast Regulatory Policy CRTC 2016-436, the Commission had already imposed a 5% financial obligation to support Canadian content on all Canadian on-demand services.

So the argument that the foreign online firms are discriminated against is simply wrong.

How Foreign Online Undertakings Can Address Their Cancon Requirements

As we await the CRTC decision on what expenditures on Canadian content will be required of the foreign online services, it may be useful to examine how it might be implemented. If required to make expenditures on Canadian content, an online service would use the required funding to acquire the rights to exhibit the program in Canada. But it could also use the funding to acquire the rights to exhibit the program in other territories, like the US or Europe.

In doing so, the cost of the program to the online service will be much higher, since it would be paying extra to the Canadian producer for the foreign rights. But that higher cost would come out of the global program budget of the online service. By taking this approach, the online service can effectively lower the net impact of the expenditure requirement on its Canadian operation. This approach also has the benefit of exposing Canadian content to a wider global audience.

Canadian producers will be up to the challenge. Canadian programs like Murdoch Mysteries, produced by Shaftesbury Films Inc., are already seen around the world. In fact, Netflix itself has acquired the right to run episodes of Murdoch Mysteries on its Canadian service. And there are dozens of other Canadian producers who have generated popular programs. Foreign online services required to expend money on Canadian content will have many ways to do so.

Conclusion

Given the foregoing, it is clear that keeping the Online Streaming Act in place will be crucial to Canada’s cultural sovereignty. Foreign online services already dominate the broadcasting universe in Canada and must be required to contribute to Canadian audiovisual productions that can speak to Canadians in their own voice. Europe has led the way in imposing local programming requirements on foreign online services. Canada needs to follow suit.

Last September, an online random survey of Canadians was conducted by Pollara, commissioned by the Canadian Media Producers Association. Based on this survey, Pollara concluded that fully 87% of Canadians supported the Online Streaming Act.

This is an incredible level of support, but hardly surprising. In the face of US threats, it is clear that Canadians recognize the importance of cultural sovereignty, including sovereignty over foreign online undertakings.

***

Reprinted by permission

Catching up on MediaPolicy – YouTube’s fake AI Journalists – Go west, CBC – DM@X 2026

AI image by Perplexity

January 19, 2026

You like to think you’ll never fall for a digital fishing scam. You like to think you’ll never fall for a deep fake news video.

Ahem, I fell for a deep fake news video.

YouTube, in its algorithmic omniscience, pushed to me as its top daily recommendation a video of the famous Washington Post political corro George Will. As the NeverTrump Reaganite we know him to be, Will delivered a withering critique of US tariffs by pointing to Toyota’s investment of $40 billion in Canada. Later, after I searched for a news announcement and found none, I wised up. (My friend in the auto industry kindly reminded me that $40 billion equals eight new car plants).

But for a good ten minutes, I was all in. The AI-video had George Will on the screen, live and in the flesh, saying exactly what George Will would say and how he would say it, but strangely looking twenty years younger than his 85 years. Then checking the meta-data, the video creators claimed to be a George Will fan site. I very much doubt they were licensed to impersonate George. A week later, YouTube had taken it down.

A few days later YouTube pushed me a similar fake, this time tech journalist Kara Swisher. Fool me once, etc.

Digital deception is now a daily event, according to a Canadian poll. Fifty-two per cent of us are “very concerned” about it; a full 88% are concerned.

Canadians generally want action against digital deception and hold a mix of views on who ought to do the acting:

Meanwhile, news publishers are soaking their heads in an icy bucket of water.

The Oxford Reuters Institute posted a new year’s survey of 280 CEOs, executives and editors in 51 countries expressing, guess what, their deepening pessimism about the future prospects for journalism.

The collective wisdom was that news journalism is getting squeezed for audience attention (and ultimately revenue) on either side by AI and social media influencers. Thanks to AI-generated videos and Chat summaries, the latter published with or without links to digital news sites, publishers are expecting referral traffic to keep declining and more or less crash and burn.

If there’s a silver lining, twenty per cent of publishers believe they will make deals for significant licensing revenues, another 49% see a minor stream of revenue, and another 20% expect none. The latter group are concentrated in local media, public broadcasting and smaller countries.

A cause for optimism is that a lot of publishers are innovating by hiring digital creators to work with their journalists to compete in the influencer /video/ social media world.

Watch that space: I am waiting for someone to come up with a licensed AI-generated celebrity journalist/influencer who gets content up on the ‘net tout de suite in the news cycle. Someone like George Will.

***

As I’ve been griping about for some time now, the CBC has been slow out of the blocks to put its five year plan into action and earn that $150M raise in the Parliamentary grant.

We may be getting somewhere.

Editor in chief Brodie Fenlon just announced that CBC “will add 33 local journalists and create 11 new bureaus, increasing [our] Canadian footprint from 66 to 77 locations. This “boots-on-the-ground” investment is in addition to last year’s local service expansion of 30 journalists hired in 22 communities across Canada. Many of the new positions are based in Central and Western Canada.”

Now for context, CBC has about 3600 news journalists in television, radio and online. It’s long been underweighted in western Canada, likely because of where the television and radio stations were located decades ago when our demography was a lot more central Canadian. In British Columbia, for example, the private television broadcasters collectively outspend CBC television 7:1.

The CBC has also hired a new head of English language services to replace the retiring Barb Williams. The new EVP is Doug Smith. He’s arriving from Paramount Canada and his CV stretches back to ViacomCBS, Rogers, and Alliance Atlantis.

A streaming guy. Let’s give him a couple of years and see what he can conjure up at CBC Gem.

Maybe we’ll see a shift to buzzy blockbusters that emulate the recent success of Crave’s Heated Rivalry in Canada and abroad.

Making hit Canadiana television that is validated by successful export is not new: Canadian broadcasters have done it repeatedly with Transplant, Flashpoint, DaVinci’s Inquest, Degrassi, etc.

At home, Bell Media can take credit for a hitting streak of popular and authentic Canadian shows, smacking doubles like Shorsey, LetterKenny and Late Bloomer, and now Heated Rivalry, a centre-field blast worthy of Bo Bichette (sorry, too soon?).

There’s no reason CBC can’t do the same. It can and has (Sort Of was genius). But as a paid subscriber to Gem (how many of us is a secret), my personal request is to pour money into the functionality of the high friction, algorithmically anemic streaming site.

(Correction: An earlier version of this post identified the number of CBC newsroom employees at 3400.)

***

This year’s annual coven of Media Policy conspirators is scheduled in Toronto in the first weekend of February.

Digital Media at the Crossroads will be held at the Faculty of Music building, University of Toronto, on Friday 6th- Saturday 7th. Here’s the program. See you there.

***

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Australia does Canadian style news aid – Californian news subsidy flounders – Hollywood merger fight continues

West Wing‘s C.J. Cregg is doling out the cash in California

January 10, 2026

Australia is close to cutting cheques to news outlets under its News Media Assistance Program (“News MAP”), similar to Canada’s QCJO federal aid to journalism.

The highlights to News MAP are:

$99 million ($92M CDN) over a three year period.
$67 million is targeted for news outlets delivered as salary subsidies of $13,000 AUS ($12,000 CDN).
$33 million to the Australian Associated Press, similar in staff complement to our Canadian Press.
In addition to the $99 million, it’s anticipated that a one time $30M “innovation fund” will be announced in the next two months.

There are other, less headline grabbing, features:

$3M of government advertising committed to news outlets for the next two years, a symbolic rather than substantial sum, but the kind of program that has been touted in other countries (including Canada, where Ontario has committed $50M annually).
$10.5 million over 4 years, backdated to 2023, to the Australian Communications and Media Authority to implement a Media Diversity Measurement Framework. The ACMA has already released its first biennial report, a thoughtful document worth reading. It describes and analyses the state of news journalism in Australia.
A three-year study of media literacy, possibly leading to a national media literacy policy in Australia.

Per journalist, the Australian News MAP is worth to news outlets about half of the dollar value of the Canadian QCJO program.

The News MAP program is being launched under the uncertainty shadowing Australia’s flagship public policy for news journalism, the News Media Bargaining Code. The NMBC was the policy template for Canada’s Online News Act.

In 2024 Meta refused to renew its payments to Australian publishers and broadcasters (reputed to be a third of the $200M AUS contributed by Meta and Google). Presumably Google is considering its options.

That $200M AUS was about twice the value of the $100M CDN Google payment in Canada, for a country two-thirds our size, so you get the picture of how the combined Canadian and Australian programs for government subsidy and Big Tech payments are comparable, if asymmetric.

The Australian government is signalling that News MAP is truly a time limited three-year program. The Albanese government, strengthened by its majority-election victory in 2025, is moving forward with public consultations on proposed legislation that would strengthen its NMBC by assessing financial charges on Google and Meta, regardless of whether the tech companies escalate by banning news links on their platforms.

***

In 2024 MediaPolicy posted about the state of California’s attempt at imitating Canada’s Online News Act and Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code that compel Google and Meta to make mandatory licensing payments to news outlets.

The initial Californian scheme that earned the support of Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom was valued at $250M over five years, combining matching contributions form the state budget (akin to Canada’s QCJO program), Google dollars, existing philanthropic projects, and the possibility of a $62 billion tech fund to support AI tools in the newsroom.

Then California faced a budget crisis, whittling down its matching contribution to $10M annually. Google obliged by cutting its own. The AI innovation fund is grounded too.

The Californian bill can now be officially designated a debacle. Politico has a story on how that happened, here.

One of the key problems, still unresolved, is that even the $20M in matching state and Google funds remains undistributed to Californian news outlets. The University of Berkeley was initially contemplated as the gatekeeper but withdrew after the state rejected the journalism school’s plan for bespoke allocations to favoured projects and news outlets.

Then the program distribution landed with the state librarian. Then it was moved to the Governor’s office of development, headed by former Bill Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers (the real-life C.J. Cregg of West Wing). Now Myers is trying to set up a third party to distribute the funds, however her office will retain the final say on allocating the $20M.

News outlets haven’t seen any of the money and Governor Newsom’s final term in office ends in 2027.

***

Here’s an update on the battle between Netflix and Paramount to buy Warner Brothers’ studio and streaming businesses.

The board of Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD) has rejected a second Paramount bid, insisting that the Netflix offer is still better.

If the WBD board stays the course, there will not be any shareholder vote on the Paramount bid.

For WBD to go forward with the tentative deal with Netflix, Netflix must first get regulator approval of its bid document, send it to WBD shareholders, and then a special shareholder meeting will vote on the Netflix offer. Nothing is scheduled yet.

Paramount is focussing on persuading the WBD board, and shareholders, that WBD’s television assets that aren’t in the Netflix bid are worthless and Paramount’s offer is better because it takes those channels off the hands of shareholders.

If WBD and Netflix consummate their deal, the federal Department of Justice could consider an anti-trust court challenge.

***

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2026 will be Canada’s cage match

“G-S-P !

G-S-P !

G-S-P !”

December 31, 2025

You already knew it: Canada’s 2026 is going be a battle, a pivotal moment in our history.

CUSMA talks begin this spring. They will be brutal. Even in the innocent days of cross border free trade, the US played rough when it came to a trade dispute over Canadian culture.

This US President wants high tariff walls to keep Canadian goods out of America and to grab Canadian jobs. Going the other way he wants open borders and unregulated markets for US exports such as streaming services and social media apps.

Given the thousands of Canadian manufacturing jobs and family farms at stake in the trade talks, and the inevitable reprise of 51st state threats —-“we just have to have ~~Greenland~~ Canada”— it may seem parochial at first to focus on media policy. But with 660,000 jobs in our media and cultural sectors, focus I shall.

Here are some of the upcoming headlines.

The CUSMA trade talks

An internet meme recently popped up in my X feed that put two contemporaneous statements from Google spokespersons next to each other.

In the first, Google addressed the digital regulators of a foreign government —-in this case the European Union—- with the utmost respect. In the second statement to a much different forum, Google demanded US Congress stomp all over the EU.

This is how the tech bros roll. They’ve enlisted the Trump administration in their cause and the tiff with the EU has escalated from White House accusations of European censorship of American content to barring the architect of the EU Digital Services Act and four advocates of the EU regulating online hate and disinformation from travelling in the US.

Canada, you’re warned.

So no surprise, when CUSMA talks begin the US is going to come loud and hard against Canada regulating media in our own country, whether it’s the Online Streaming Act C-11 or the Online News Act C-18. I don’t have a high degree of confidence that PM Mark Carney won’t flush them like he did the carbon tax, the digital services tax, the emissions cap, etc.

It’s not that we shouldn’t reconsider Canadian media policy any time we want, but it would be better to do so because Canadians wish it. The polls say we don’t: at least not during the trade talks.

What’s at stake here is not only those two pieces of legislation, C-11 and C-18, but our right to take future action on any media policy that might cost the tech bros money or convenience. Think AI. Or online harms.

I make no prediction. On the one hand, as a banker and a corporate lifer I think Carney would happily throw cultural regulation under the bus.

On the other, if he does that he can kiss his Québec caucus goodbye. Or, the NDP might find its gag-point and bring down the Liberal minority government.

CanCon

I just can’t figure out the CRTC. The commissioners alternate between putting a bold $200 million cash levy on streaming services and, on the other hand, their timorous ruling on CanCon video content.

The Commission has three big decisions to release in the new year, arising out of the Online Streaming Act (having missed the December 2025 deadline set by cabinet).

The most consequential is the second instalment of the aforementioned CanCon video streaming ruling which will deal with issues that could carve out regulatory conditions for a generation:

How much money will Netflix and the California streamers have to spend on Canadian shows?

Will the Commission reduce CanCon spending for Canadian broadcasters (it will) and by how much?
Will the Commission swap out obligations for Canadian broadcasters to make CanCon dramas in favour of underwriting their unprofitable news operations?

The Commission owes us two other big ones in broadcasting distribution and audio streaming. There are lots of issues packed into those two rulings, but the one I am watching is whether the Commission will make Spotify and the music streamers grow the Canadian listening audience for Canadian artists (it’s currently less than 10%).

There are some wild cards in play.

The Federal Court heard the streamers’ appeal against the $200 million levy in June and judgment is overdue.

The legalities of appeal are narrow and amount to whether the Commission dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s. They don’t allow the streamers to easily challenge the CRTC’s wisdom on the size of the levies, nor what they are spent on (i.e. CanCon dramas and broadcast news).

Still, if the Court strikes down the levies on technical grounds just before the CUSMA talks begin it will significantly assist American negotiators or, if our Prime Minister’s climb down on the digital services tax is any guide, assist him in dumping trade ballast.

Another wild card is Québec’s new streaming law, Bill 109. It’s the CAQ’s claim to regulate streamers in case the federal CRTC disappoints on French language content on screens and AirPods.

When CUSMA talks begin, Québec’s bill will be sited in the same American crosshairs as the federal C-11. With a Parti Québécois election victory in the offing, and possibly another referendum on separation we could hear a lot more about this provincial law.

Next, we can speculate on whether Global TV News makes it to 2027 in one piece. Its parent company Corus refinanced its debt this year and managed to land some new television programming to replace the profitable Disney and Discovery content that Rogers poached from them.

But Corus still lives hand to mouth, and the news division loses a lot of money. The Shaw family ownership can’t find a Canadian buyer. Even Mark Carney wouldn’t dare exempt the 15-city Global News network from Canadian ownership rules and watch Fox or one of the other US television chains march in and set up shop in every major Canadian city.

The last question mark is a boutique policy issue but carries huge consequences for the survival of the Canadian film and television industry. The CRTC’s ruling that allows US streamers to own majority copyright in their new Canadian dramas turned four decades of Canadian cultural policy on its head.

The domino that might fall is whether the Liberal government would harmonize the CRTC’s new rules about the ownership of intellectual property in Canadian dramas with its own rules that govern federal subsidies to Canadian programs. The CRTC ruling invites American trade negotiators to demand it.

Online Harms

If Justice Minister Sean Fraser tables an online harms bill in Parliament, it will be time for some soul searching by all of us.

How seriously do we take the online harms of race-baiting and anti-semitic hate, humiliation of women and girls, and harm to our adolescent and teenage children? Are we virtue signalling our concern or do we really want to do something about it?

On the other hand, we shouldn’t be so naive to think that these platforms won’t err on the side of censorship rather than pay fines for permitting harmful content on their services. That’s the sort of malicious compliance Meta meted out by banning Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram rather than comply with the Online News Act.

You can see this debate play out in its beta-version with Bill S-209, tabled by an independent Senator. That bill is legislation that would require porn sites and social media apps to exclude minors from accessing hardcore porn by using third party age verification services.

Again, the harm is obviously serious, but how seriously do we take the harm? Even though the risks are remote, how much are we willing to gamble the privacy of porn site visitors and social media followers whose identities might be hacked and exposed?

All eyes will be on Australia which has grabbed global attention by banning teen access to social media, a move that requires age verification of adult social media accounts.

It would be guesswork to predict what happens next with the amazing explosion of AI technology, its impact on economic growth and social harm, and government efforts to regulate it.

The most pressing policy questions are in the hands of AI Minister Evan Solomon who has frequently telegraphed his reluctance to impede the development of Canada’s fledgling AI industry by “over indexed” regulations.

But neither has Solomon warmed to the Big Tech campaign to create an American-style “text mining” exception in Canadian copyright law. If he did, he would be sinking any chances that Canadian news organizations and cultural creators have to force AI giants into paying license fees for scraping online content to feed their products. Hugh Stephens has an excellent summary of the current state of affairs, here.

The worst case scenario for content creators is very bad but grimly not a lot worse than the best case scenario.

Even if AI companies submit to paying license fees —-and there have already been a few licensing agreements struck between AI companies and a select group of big news publishers and content creators—– it’s entirely possible that in the next five years AI will so disrupt the direct interface between news organizations and news consumers that news outlets will pine for the days when Google and Meta were taking their hyperlinks for free but at least sending audience traffic their way.

Either the US or Canada may raise AI commerce or the mitigation of its harms at the CUSMA bargaining table. The Trump administration appears to be all in for making American AI into the global masters of the Internet.

But as many have pointed out there is a back eddy at state-level where MAGA politicians are as concerned about AI harms as anyone.

CBC Radio-Canada

After the CBC’s near death experience in the last federal election, policy wonks everywhere had suggestions on how the public broadcaster might re-capture the popular imagination with a strong programming line-up that resonates across the entire country.

We’ve had a statement of intent from the new CBC President: more local news, especially in the West, but what else?

If the Prime Minister gives away the media policy store to the Americans, what the CBC does becomes even more important.

Bandwidth

Whatever the government wants to do on media and cultural policy in 2026, bandwidth could be a problem.

I don’t mean download speeds. I mean the administrative bandwidth in the federal Heritage Department. Bureaucrats will be on call 24/7 during trade talks; the department is already charged with developing legislation to overhaul the governance of the CBC; and there are any number of quiet policy reviews and projects going on.

This could be the busiest year ever for media and cultural policy and the unhappy timing of Steven Guilbeault’s exit from cabinet means that we have a rookie Heritage minister, Marc Miller (who may or may not be as invested in C-11 or C-18 as Guilbeault).

Compounding that lack of experience is Carney’s decision to shuffle the deputy ministers who do the grinding work of getting things done in government. Long time Heritage deputy Isabelle Mondou just got shuffled to the Privy Council Office. Good luck to the new guy, Francis Bilodeau.

***

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Canadians in a dangerous time.

December 28, 2025

I am ever grateful for my library card. After waiting just a few weeks for 100+ Torontonians to read this book before me, I got my turn with this new anthology of thirty Canadian artists and writers reacting to Donald Trump’s threats to crush our economy so he can annex our country.

Elbows Up! (subtitled “Canadian Voices of Resilience and Resistance”) is of course a riff on the Prime Minister’s election slogan that helped to put him where he is now. Whether in fact we are conducting ourselves that way is, I think it’s best to say, a work in progress.

The editor of this book, CBC host Elamin Abdelmahmoud, pitches the relevance of this collection as a cultural reboot of a similar publication in the turbulent year of 1968: The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the US.

The 2025 remake has less to say about the annexationist threat to the south than it does about being and feeling Canadian in dangerous times.

A few contributions stood out for me. Tom Power (the host of CBC’s radio show Q) offers a guileless and heart warming account of his journey from not-a-clue teenager to Newfoundlander patriot to passionate Canadian. The secret of his self discovery: sharing music, half-finished beers and sunrises with other dissolute musicians touring Canada. It’s a metaphor for community that anyone ought to find relatable, even if they find it in less dingy environments.

Author Iain Reid has a stunner of a short story (“The Appointment”) that is curiously de-contextualized from history and nationality. I’m not sure what it’s doing in this book, but it’s terrific.

Actor Jay Baruchel goes on a rant about how the American media juggernaut has smothered (English language) Canadian content. It’s hard for me to judge how good this piece is because that’s what I sound like all of the time, but I certainly nodded my head in agreement throughout. It should not be lost on readers that this book was published by a foreign book publisher because after years of foreign acquisitions the Canadian-owned press has been reduced to fighting for scraps.

But the disappointment I felt reading this book was its insularity. There’s not a single conservative voice. There’s one Québec writer. Presumably these missing voices, our fellow Canadians, have something to say in our moment of national peril.

Yet there are several contributions from writers who come from the cultural left perspective that Canada is not morally legitimate and, as a polity, is the perpetrator of a colonial and Euro-Caucasian supremacist domination of the powerless. Some of these pieces are well written and carry intellectual weight. But you can’t get to the end of this anthology without feeling that the project was put together for an audience demographic of about 20% of Canadians. That’s not the path to national resilience and resistance against annexation.

My last comment is that I want to point out the short, inspiring piece written by Dr. Jillian Horton who spoke to my innermost convictions and fears, and maybe your’s too:

It is our Canada.

We are a nation like almost every other —-built on violence, cruelty, oppression, as well as ingenuity, hard work, tenacity, community, faith, hope, and the sacrifices of those who came before us. But that is only one truth about us…a puzzle piece, not the whole story. That story has taken a turn at just the right moment. Sometimes saying what you will never become —-whether that is a fascist state or the 51st—- is the thing that brings the most clarity.

***

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Online harms bill is coming back – Canadians are alienated – Manitoba action on local media

(AI image)

December 23, 2025

The Online Harms bill is coming back to the House of Commons.

The Liberal Bill C-63 that died on the order table when the April 2025 federal election was called was initially a three-in-one omnibus.

It was an anti-hate bill that increased prison terms for existing Criminal Code hate speech offences and hate-motivated crimes as well as codifying the judge-made law on defining hate.

It also reinstated the abolished right of individuals to bring human rights complaints against hate speech.

And it charged social media companies with the responsibility of developing and enforcing safety practices to mitigate online harms, particularly to kids. This was the long expected policy piece that was born of lengthy public consultations, taking aim at Facebook and Instagram.

Michael Geist was right (he is, occasionally) in condemning C-63 as three controversial bills wedged into one. Others agreed and the Justice Minister Arif Virani split the legislation into two bills. But the election call killed them anyway and when the government reformed the new Justice Minister Sean Fraser messaged he wasn’t committed to C-63 as it stood.

Since then, Fraser has tabled bills that are policy-cousins to C-63. Bill C-9 takes up the supercharging of prison terms for hate-motivated offences, permits the police to charge hate offences without waiting for the green light from the Attorney-General, and picks up the judge-made law on defining hate (detestation or vilification is hate, but disdain or dislike is not.)

As part of a broader criminal justice reform, Fraser also introduced Bill C-16 to make it easier to prosecute blackmail threats of online sexual humiliation and deem the posting of deep fake sex videos a criminal act.

Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne’s Bill S-209, a proposal to use age verification technology to keep kids away from online porn, is paused in Senate committee but will probably re-emerge in February.

Now the Hill Times is reporting that Fraser will return some time in the new year with an online harms bill that may offer an organized government policy on online hate, harms and safety.

***

There are the standard ways that we like to take the temperature of public opinion on media.

The go to is whether one “trusts” media. Asked that simply, the polling outcomes reflect likes and dislikes of news outlets as much as reliability or manipulation.

I like this news outlet; I trust it. I hate this news outlet; I don’t trust it.

Occasionally pollsters try to dig a little deeper. The latest poll from Innovative Research doesn’t probe trust-in-media per se but rather the thing that drives trust and mistrust of public institutions: “cultural alienation,” a state of disengagement from the other, where the other is believed to be harmfully powerful.

The Innovative poll reports shocking levels of popular alienation from Canadian “elites” (another piece of terminology, like “trust,” that can barely shoulder the weight it is asked to bear).

As for the pollster, it describes “culturally alienated” thus: “A full-spectrum pessimistic bloc that believes Canada’s institutions are broken, elites are disconnected, our shared identity is lost, and the country is headed toward crisis. Their worldview is consistently bleak.”

According to the poll, there is a large pool of culturally alienated Canadians, about 28%.

The culturally alienated are joined in their disaffection by “anti-elite populists” who are “Canadians who feel strongly that the system is rigged and elites don’t care about ordinary people. They are less concerned with institutions or national identity collapsing.” That’s another 29%. I know a lot of people matching the description and I am guessing so do you.

Added together, the numbers look dire.

Now if that puts you into too dark a mood, keep in mind the poll was taken from a standing opinion panel of opted-in respondents, not a random sample of Canadians, so it is disproportionately asking questions of opinionated Canadians.

Also, the results might be skewed pessimistic by the questions. Many of the mood-testing questions are necessarily binary, asking respondents to answer yes or no to questions like “Canadian institutions are broken” and “Canadian elites don’t care about ordinary Canadians.”

Ask an emotional question, get an emotional answer.

I keep telling myself, it isn’t as bad as it looks. That makes me a moderate pessimist, apparently.

***

An all-party committee of the Manitoban legislature is recommending Premier Wab Kinew’s NDP government follow the lead of provincial governments in Ontario and Québec to financially support local media.

If the NDP acts on the recommendation, it will copy the Ontario procurement practice of reserving 25% of $200 million in government ad spends for placement with local media.

Also, the MLAs propose that Manitoba offer a journalist salary subsidy similar to Québec which provides a 35% salary subsidy (up to $26,250 annually) that stacks on top of the federal 35% salary subsidy (up to $29,000).

***

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – CUSMA snooker – CRTC copyright ruling appealed – shareholder vote on Netflix v Paramount – the Oscars on YouTube

December 20, 2025

This week the US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told US Congress what American stakeholders want from CUSMA trade talks with Mexico and Canada in 2026.

Greer’s report was an opportunity to be performative about US interests. As a member of President Trump’s cabinet, he wasn’t offering a blueprint for trade negotiations or even hinting at what’s the most important to his boss.

Only Donald Trump knows what he really wants. Does he want to run the table and steamroll Canada and Mexico?

Well, imagine a snooker game with a full rack of balls on the felt. What strikes you immediately upon reading Greer’s report is how many meaty issues there are in a long list of industrial sectors.

For those concerned about Trump’s cultural hit list, you would be surprised how brief and perfunctory Greer’s comments were.

As we’ve known for some time, the US streamers hate our Online Streaming Act. Google and Meta hate our Online News Act. Prime Minister Mark Carney already gave away our digital services tax, the thing the US companies hated the most.

On the other hand, the American companies canvassed by Greer like the Digital Trade chapter in the CUSMA trade agreement just fine.

As a very permissive set of trade rules, it may be up to Canadian negotiators to carve out of the Digital Trade provisions a wider scope to exercise our sovereign right to set the terms of AI services.

***

In case you missed it, read my rant about the CRTC’s ruling on copyright and intellectual property in Canadian video content.

Sounds like a snoozer when I describe it that way, but Canadian ownership of CanCon copyright is central to whether the federal government’s Bill C-11 the Online Streaming Act accomplishes what it was meant to do.

My rant was that the CRTC effed it up. The Canadian Media Producers Association appears to agree: it just filed a court appeal against the ruling.

The CMPA’s legal filing, asking the federal court to hear its appeal, argues one of the things I wrote about in the blog post: Bill C-11 was written to ensure that Canadian TV and film producers reap the fruits of their labour, what industry insiders call the “long-term commercial exploitation of intellectual property.”

Mere copyright “in the title” of a show isn’t that, says the CMPA.

In the words of the statute, the Commission is supposed to consider whether Canadian producers enjoy “a right or interest in relation to a program, including copyright, that allows them to control and benefit in a significant and equitable manner from the exploitation of the program.”

That means revenue, in other words a stake in the profit earned by Canadian shows from distribution and other monetization opportunities until the lemon is squeezed dry.

***

This week the board of Warner Brothers Discovery rejected Paramount’s hostile takeover bid. That leaves the winning suitor Netflix as Hollywood Rex for now, but WBD shareholders vote on Netflix’s $82 billion offer in January.

Paramount isn’t rushing out an improved bid: CEO David Ellison is making the case to WBD shareholders for his all-cash bid, arguably better chances than Netflix of clearing anti-trust hurdles, and the fact that Netflix’s offer for the WBD studio and streaming assets doesn’t include taking WBD’s lagging television assets off the hands of shareholders.

In the meantime, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner withdrew from Paramount’s financing consortium. Then business analysts questioned whether Larry Ellison’s money was good: his participation in his son David’s takeover bid is through a revocable trust, subject to change by Ellison senior. (Update, 22/12/25 – Ellison Sr. responds with personal guarantee).

Almost unnoticed in all of this, Pa Ellison is now officially a part-owner of TikTok-USA after the Chinese company ByteDance completed the sale of its American operations to a consortium of US interests, including Ellison.

***

Netflix may be the undisputed king of streaming. But YouTube is the lord of video consumption.

YouTube’s market dominance is a reflection on the growing popularity of short-form video of course. Yet not long ago I posted about YouTube’s plan to go all out into bidding for the rights to big events in premium, long-form video.

Last week YouTube scooped the exclusive global rights to the Oscar awards, beginning in 2029. That seems like a big deal for boomers raised on Hollywood glamour, although we could remind ourselves that at 20 million viewers, the Oscars trail the Super Bowl (130 million) and Game 7 of the World Series (50 million).

No word yet on the consequences for Bell Media’s CTV network which has held the Canadian distribution rights for the Oscars since 2003.

***

There’s a new American opinion poll published by Pew Research which rattled my optimism about the future of news journalism.

According to the poll, young people are more likely than older Americans to trust news influencers, concede a wide definition of who they recognize as a journalist, and are more likely to find it acceptable for journalists to be advocates for a cause and sport their ideological colours brightly.

***

The Washington Post’s newest AI widget (proprietor Jeff Bezos holds a minority interest in the AI app Perplexity) is in Beta. It has a long, long way to go.

A six minute daily podcast features two AI agents summarizing WAPO’s top three stories of the day. You can customize your topics or WAPO’s algorithm will figure you out.

Other than saving on two journalist salaries, the added value of this AI widget is a mystery. It’s a downmarket product offering from an upmarket news outlet.

Real life podcasters at the NYT Daily, fear not.

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

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