Tag: carney

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Plan B for AI’s content theft – AI scorecards of news journalism – does Canada Post neutralize news subsidies? – minister Miller’s book briefing

July 18, 2026

News publishers around the world are about to get their asses handed to them by AI companies. And they know it.

What to do? Well there’s Plan A and there’s Plan B.

Plan A is for news publishers to combat the AI chatbots’ illegal scraping of digital news content by filing lawsuits seeking license payments. On that score, sympathetic legislatures could move the needle on compensating news publishers faster, more lucratively, and more broadly to all news publishers by legislating clear copyright ownership of the content that AI chatbots are ingesting without paying for it. 

Something like Plan A has been tried before, as you recall.

Over the last decade, the European Union, Australia and Canada have legislated a fair market in news licensing payments from Google and Meta with mixed success.

Landing in Canada as the Online News Act, Bill C-18 was a classic anti-trust remedy to the monopoly power held by Google and Meta over the ad-supported distribution of digital news hyperlinks and snippets on search engines and social media.

The legislated backstop of commercial arbitration meant that the “net exchange value” —-an independent measurement of the offsetting monetary value of publishers’ news content versus Google and Meta’s traffic referrals back to news sites — rebalanced bargaining power over news licensing payments from the monopolists in favour of hundreds of news publishers.

Once Bill C-18 became law, Google opted to pony up $100 million annually to Canadian news publishers. Deciding not to face the music of an independent assessment of net exchange value, Meta banned mainstream news from appearing on Facebook and Instagram.

Despite American trade pressure, Mark Carney hasn’t given away our Online News Act. But his obeisance to Donald Trump on the digital services tax —introduced to counteract Big Tech tax avoidance — and his climb down on the CRTC’s levies on Netflix and the foreign streamers are unnerving to say the least.

By contrast, Australia’s PM Anthony Albanese has been outspoken and defiant while moving slowly on implementing a new law that would put down the same mutiny that Meta staged in 2024 when its first and only licensing deal with Australian publishers expired.

In a recent speech at Sydney University, Albanese outlined a vision on AI that might have been cribbed straight from Carney’s “AI for All” national policy until he went where Carney wouldn’t go: support for copyright and creators’ IP:

But let me make this crystal clear: not everything produced in Australia is up for grabs. Not at all. Australian writers, musicians, artists and journalists must retain ownership and control of their work. Our laws will spell that out, plain as day. An artist’s creative endeavour is their work and their property. No company should use Australian books, music, art or news to build or train AI without the artist’s control. That includes the artist’s control of the price and value of their work. Anything less, is theft. No country has got this right yet. Nowhere do artists or rights holders have sufficient control of their work, when it comes to AI training.

That is why the best way to secure the strongest copyright protections for Australian artists is for Australia to be active and involved. To build the best possible solution for ourselves. And to preserve the creativity that is fundamental to who we are to our national identity and the journalism that is essential to our democratic society.

Stirring words, but talk is cheap. Plan A on AI news licensing is still just a plan. Remember how hard it can be to execute.

I would be surprised if news publishers aren’t spending every day contemplating a Plan B, i.e. how to survive AI without government intervention.

The question is what kind of ingenuity and resources can news publishers bring to the table that would change the balance of commercial bargaining power between them and the AI companies? How do news publishers negotiate licensing deals that give them fair compensation, brand visibility, and drive audience traffic back to their proprietary websites?

One of many ideas is news companies charging AI chatbots micropayments instead of selling them all-access licenses. Previously, pay-per-article failed as a news subscription strategy because, as Substacker Ulrike Langer puts it, “micropayments turn every act of consumption into a small purchasing decision, and humans will pay extra [in the form of an all-access monthly subscription] to be spared that unwelcome feeling.”

But could it be different if the news subscribers were emotionless AI scrapers trolling for just the right on-time content to satisfy the latest AI prompt? Langer isn’t sure, but whatever the potential in that kind of innovation might be, it surely isn’t a game changer for news publishers (although perhaps AI micropayments would be better than nothing for the small news publishers likely to be shut out of big licensing deals).

Making a real difference in this unequal contest of commercial leverage may depend upon the brand power of trusted news outlets. If AI companies want their own subscribers to trust their news content over the information offered by competing AI chatbots, they will pay bigger licensing fees to news organizations that are hitting it out of the park on audience trust.

This graphic from a recent academic study, the “The News Canadians Actually See,” illustrates how deeply skeptical Canadians remain about getting their news from an AI chatbot instead of traditional media.

We should probably assume that Plan B is only a plan for the very best and biggest news organizations.

That brings us back to Plan A, which is a legislative intervention to rebalance the bargaining power between Big Tech and Little News. 

***

Speaking of hitting it out of the park on brand trust, I’ve been opining about trust in news journalism in my last two posts and perhaps I should stop. But not just yet.

South of the border, Big Tech titan Peter Thiel is bankrolling a couple of AI businesses doing interesting things with journalism.

State Affairs is a news organization that hires journalists to report from US state legislatures. It feeds their reporting into an AI news product. In other words, it’s a hybrid human/AI news outlet (see Plan B, above).

State Affairs’ co-founder Evan Burns told The Washington Post that “AI can’t build sources. It can’t ask follow-up questions. It can’t go knock on the doorframe of the chief of staff of the whatever.”

Less altruistically, the media-hostile Thiel is also the money behind The Primary, an AI-fueled rating agency for news organizations and individual journalists. The Primary publishes a trust scorecard. Here are the ratings of news outlets and here is another scoring of bylined journalists (including those that report on the AI companies that Thiel owns).

The Primary scores don’t seem outrageously skewed although they definitely suggest a right-of-centre standpoint (for example, the New York Times is rubbished). 

The idea of a media watchdog keeping tabs on journalist watchdogs is hardly new: media criticism podcasts and columns abound. But the marriage of media criticism and AI tools is new.

AI analysis of bias in media is just getting off the ground in Canada. A few months ago, Substacker David Clinton of The Audit published an AI-assisted review of CBC News coverage. Honest Reporting Canada did something similar on the “emotional sympathy” extended to various news subjects and public actors in CBC’s coverage of the Gaza conflict.

There are also media websites like Briefly News which appears to use AI tools to rate global news companies for bias and trust. You will find two Canadian outlets there, the CBC and the Globe & Mail. The site has no masthead, corporate information or country of origin.  

The idea of a machine intelligence stepping forward to referee disputes over news bias has its allure for anyone looking to comment upon trustworthy news journalism.

It would be premature to say that right now that AI tools can reliably improve our ability to measure fairness in news journalism. But I have a feeling we’re going to be talking about it a lot more.

***

In the centrifuge of public policy and competing priorities, sometimes governments do things at cross purposes.

Take the example of the federal government and its historic support for small, mostly rural community newspapers. Since before Confederation, we have subsidized news outlets. At first it was through discounted postal rates and subsequently through direct subsidies in the Canada Periodical Fund, all pre-dating the more controversial journalism labour tax credits for daily and mostly urban newspapers. 

I don’t need to re-tell the story of how the advertising market was captured by digital platforms and undermined the business model of community newspapers, subsidized as they were. I reckon the federal government is now paying 50 cents on each dollar of publisher costs.

On a completely separate track from newspapers (and under the aegis of a different government department), Canada Post met its own paradigmatic shift in its legacy business model by going all in on door-to-door distribution of retailer ad flyers, piggybacked on its regular mail delivery.

Since its introduction in the 1990s, the “Admail” Canada Post program has undercut newspaper companies who depend on flyer distribution as a major stream of revenue, offering free editorial content wrapped around local retail advertising inserts. There’s a chapter and verse history of the next thirty years in a News Media Canada op ed published today.

Fast forward, the problem just got worse. Enter the Montreal-headquartered Transcontinental, a national printer and distributor of local retail flyers through Raddar, its printing and home delivery program. Instead of a free newspaper and a bundle of flyer inserts, Raddar prints a single aggregated advertising flyer.

This spring Raddar struck a deal with Canada Post to break into new markets across the country by contracting for national Admail delivery on a discount offered by the Post Office at a rate that local news publishers can’t match.

This week the Winnipeg Free Press announced it is laying off its network of 817 distribution contractors that support its flyer business and shuttering the companion editorial product, the Free Press Community Review. That cedes the 200,000 local household market to the federally-owned Canada Post and Transcontinental. With that, goes 10% of the Free Press’s overall revenue, according to its publisher.

This looks like a case of cross-purposed public policy: the federal government’s revenue strategy for Canada Post submarines a major source of commercial revenue of the news publishers whom it subsidizes with federal money. 

***

A few months ago I reviewed Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature. It’s a policy pitch for a better federal policy on supporting Canadian book publishers and authors. 

As a follow up on that I think you will enjoy reading Ken Whyte’s last two Substacks on the same topic here and here.

The acid-tongued commentary asks why culture and identity minister Marc Miller asked his civil servants for an update on Canadian book publishing policy and got back advice that ignored whether it was effective. The answer might be that the minister didn’t ask that question, but perhaps he will now.

***

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This post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Carney’s Fleecing – Honest Reporting’s tax troubles – what CRTC chairs do – huzzah Canada!

July 5, 2026

Of the gamut of emotions that supporters of the Online Streaming Act ran through when Prime Minister Mark Carney overruled the CRTC’s 15% contribution scheme for Netflix and the foreign streamers, the most gut wrenching was betrayal.

Who could forget only 125 days earlier Carney horsing around with Hudson Williams at the CMPA Prime Time conference, donning the iconic Team Canada fleece jacket from the TV series Heated Rivalry? The smash cultural hit was a demonstration of Canada’s “soft power,” said the PM, as he snuggled deeper into the jacket.

In my high school days, wearing the football team jacket was the prerogative accorded to the girlfriends of the young men on the championship team, showing up to class on a daily basis sporting the team colours. 

Well, Carney’s bromance with film producers is over. Or at least they are very seriously taking some time apart. So there’s the problem of the jacket, you see.

Marie Woolf has a delightful story in the Globe & Mail reporting that the executive producer of Heated Rivalry, Brendan Brady, is taking back the fleece (or more precisely, putting on hold his promise to send it to Carney). 

Said Brady, “We actually have one of those fleeces on hold for him that we want to send to him. But obviously I think we’re waiting to see how this goes and making sure that everything gets cleared up for the Online Streaming Act to be enacted for real for us, so we might just be holding off on that.

“If we’re on pause with the government, then the fleece is on pause until we know.”

Alternatively, Brady could raffle it off. 

***

The Investigative Journalism Foundation published a story last week on the tax troubles of Honest Reporting Canada (HRC).

HRC is a media watchdog that appears to have two main functions: the first to stridently criticize by-lined journalists whose news stories it considers treat Israel unfairly. 

The other is to offer journalist-facing content to educate reporters about controversial assumptions often made about the Israeli-Arab conflict without sufficient historical depth or geographic breadth. 

The tax trouble is that as of a year ago the Canada Revenue Agency has been seeking to revoke the charitable status (“as a qualified donee”) of a related organization, Honest Reporting Canada Charitable Organization (HRCCO) on the grounds that it does not engage in any of the tax code’s short list of charitable activities.

Examples of the CRA’s approved spending on charitable objects include the relief of poverty or the advancement of education. 

Also, the CRA told HRCCO that from the audit it performed HRCCO appears to be diverting charitable donations to pay the expenses of the media website, Honest Reporting Canada, which is not a registered charity. 

The tax dispute is headed to the Federal Court of Appeal and in the meantime HRCCO has stopped accepting donations and the CRA has paused deregistration.

Honest Reporting Canada’s publishing generally does not include original news, which explains why it could not obtain “qualified donee” status directly under the federal government’s QCJO program of news subsidies. Probably for a similar reason, HRC is not eligible for Google journalism funds under the Online News Act.

The QCJO program allows non profit journalism organizations to become “qualified donees” of public donations, as an expansion beyond traditional tax parameters limited to education or the relief of poverty. 

In general, US charity tax laws are more hospitable to public interest journalism than the Canadian tax code. 

Meanwhile charities are free under Canadian law to engage in public policy dialogue and development activities connected to the legal purpose of the charity as long as they are not directly or indirectly partisan. Previously no more than 10% of donations were permitted to support political advocacy.

Oxfam Canada Facebook ad

***

It’s not every day you ask yourself, “what would Konrad von Finckenstein do?” 

In February 2011 the one-term CRTC chair (2007-2012) made a ruling he thought was good public policy —-allowing ISP providers to charge more to heavy consumers of data —only to be publicly slapped down by the Harper government that had appointed him. 

Von Finckenstein was outspokenly defiant in response to the government’s public rebuke although in the end his Commission came up with a compromise. He was not reappointed when his term expired a year later.

In a recent appearance on Michael Geist’s half-hour podcast, Mark Musselman is unsparingly candid about the current CRTC chair Vicky Eatrides meekly submitting to her now diminished independence on implementing the Online Streaming Act.

Musselman has the gift of the explanatory gab and calls it as he sees it (and his narrative just happens to line up with the MediaPolicy’s posts on this topic). We part company at about the 27th minute when he describes the current federal policy on supporting film and television as outdated and in need of something new.

Still, the podcast is well worth your time. 

***

If this was a blog site devoted to American media policy, not Canadian, we could spend a lot of time tracking the never ending mergers and corporate somersaults that feature south of the border.

Here are a few in the recent past:

The latest is that Comcast is spinning off its content division, NBC Universal, into a separate company.

This is seen as an acknowledgement of the fading benefits of combining NBC Universal content with Comcast cable distribution, despite Comcast going out of its way to buy NBC in 2011.

Comcast shares bounced up following the announcement that it was cutting NBC Universal loose. More long term, the plan is for Comcast to focus its efforts and its capital on competing with other cable and fixed wireless distribution networks and to free itself of the less predictable media business.

The new NBC Universal would arguably be in a better position to make deals with other distributors not named Comcast. But the sleeper in this new arrangement may be that it becomes a takeover target for Netflix.

Meanwhile, the 900 pound gorilla YouTube has asked that its sleep not be disturbed. 

***

I cannot sign off this week without stating my admiration of the Canadian men’s national soccer team.

If you watched their 3-0 exit —not reflective of the balance of play—-from the World Cup against a superior team from Morocco, you would have witnessed a special cultural moment of Canadian self belief, ambition, and a brotherhood of young men utterly unafraid of the odds.

Instead of doing the classic underdog routine of turtling in a defensive shell and playing 120 minutes for a penalty shoot out, the Canadians went for the jugular from the opening whistle. They were the better team for most of the game.

Other than the injured Alphonso Davies, there are no world class stars on this team. Yet they played as if it was the ghost of Admiral Horatio Nelson whispering in their ears, “ne’er mind the maneuvers lads, always go straight at ‘em.”

Huzzah.

***

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This post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.

Miller has no idea what Carney and Sarandos discussed – will Montreal voters punish the Netflix bailout? – Senate publishes CBC report – US media giants continue to merge

June 20, 2026

After getting challenged by CTV’s Vassy Kapelos for his government’s June 3rd “capitulation” on the Online Streaming Act, culture and identity minister Marc Miller travelled to the Banff World Media Festival this week where the Globe and Mail’s Barry Hertz put the same proposition to him.

“Look, well, it’s wrong,” said Miller rejecting the “capitulation” label. The minister is preparing to issue new instructions to the CRTC on foreign streamer contributions to Canadian content.

“There isn’t a chance that we won’t stand up and make sure that Canadian culture gets supported. I certainly do understand the frustration, because there’s been a lot of blood shed and battles fought on these grounds. … But you can have all the aspirations in the world to make sure that people are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, but if that doesn’t work, we have to act. And this reflects my impatience, and the Prime Minister’s impatience, to make sure that we are creating some stability in the system.”

Hertz also asked Miller if Netflix and the other US streamers would ever pay anything into Canadian media funds that subsidize Canadian content, given that Netflix had volunteered to the CRTC in 2023 that a two per cent levy was acceptable.

Miller responded that “we have to have that conversation with streamers, which has yet to occur in any developed form. My colleagues in the Bloc Québécois assume that it will go down to zero. That isn’t the case. We want people to pay what they would on a fair basis, and you can compare it to some other jurisdictions. It may be a staggered process of policy directions. I want to get it set out quickly, so we can get the ball rolling.”

Miller’s answer appears to contradict a government source in an earlier Globe and Mail story who said the government would direct the CRTC to levy no cash contributions on streamers at all. 

Next, Miller was asked if the government is confident in its assumption that streamers can successfully pass along the CRTC’s 6.55% cash levy to Canadian subscribers given the aggressive price increases of the past years in an industry notorious for subscriber churn. Research from the EU suggests regulatory charges don’t necessarily get passed along. 

“Not to minimize the counterpoint that you’re making,” he responded, “but we have seen in some of those jurisdictions an increase in production costs, which is an affordability issue from another angle.”

In other words, the government’s assumption of a subscriber paid “Netflix tax” is based not only on the CRTC’s order of 6.55% streamer cash contributions to media funds but also an assumed increase in streamer production costs arising from the CRTC order for streamers to spend 8.5% of Canadian revenues on making Canadian shows for their own platforms. (The EU study did however take that into account).

Finally, Hertz got to the salacious stuff and asked Miller what he knew about the private meeting that the Prime Minister had with Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos a week before his June 3rd announcement of the government bailout.

The minister said he didn’t know.

“I don’t know what was discussed, to be honest I know they met, and he meets with a lot of people in the industry. I don’t think that anyone meeting would shape policy in any way that’s material.”

Meanwhile according to Hertz’s further reporting, the Canadian producers attending the Banff festival were generally in a state of disorientation following the government striking down the Netflix levies and promising to replace the CanCon production money from a $600 million increase in federal cultural spending. 

Like any entrepreneurs investing in multi-year projects, Canadian film producers need to know where their financing is coming from before they start taking out loans and passing on other projects. More than half of their production budgets come from government tax credits, media funds, and direct investments by broadcasters and, until June 3rd, foreign streamers too. 

The government promised to replace the streamer money with taxpayer cash but for now no one knows when, how much, or what the program rules might be.

Yet despite all appearances to be making it up as they go along, there are signs that the federal Liberals know what they are doing but are keeping their cards close to their vest.

One clue is the special industry committee that Miller created in April to advise on the future of Canadian video production. In a press release, the government offered no details on the committee’s mandate. Neither did officials for the Canada Media Fund, the public-private subsidy fund central to any changes in the bundle of financing sources that consists of investments from independent Canadian producers, Canadian broadcasters, foreign streamers, and federal and provincial governments.

Now we have a second clue: a document obtained by veteran journalist Dean Beeby (who was kind enough to share it with me) written in October 2025 by former deputy heritage minister Isabelle Mondou for then-minister Steven Guilbeault. Commissioned immediately after the Carney government was elected in April 2025, the lightly redacted report appears to have three major recommendations:

  • Identify efficiencies by combining the program administration of Canada Media Fund, the National Film Board and Telefilm Canada. 
  • Formulate an “integrated vision of audio-visual production.” 
  • Align the funding mandates of federal subsidies (i.e. the Canada Media Fund and the CPTC tax subsidies) with that vision.

One of the salient points made by the deputy minister is that government CanCon subsidy is overwhelmingly dedicated to production financing and is underwhelming in its support of pre-production development and post-production distribution and export strategies. Although the final recommendations are redacted in the document, the deputy minister’s observation correlates with advice from some Canadian commentators that a policy shift is overdue (and see the item on the Fox-Roku merger, below). 

The Mondou memo was signed off eight months ago by Guilbeault, so it may be that since then civil servants in the Department of Heritage have fleshed out a plan they want to run past the industry volunteers on the minister’s new committee. 

It’s unknown if the new vision that emerges will dovetail with the minister’s other big files: rewriting instructions to the CRTC on streamer contributions, figuring out what that means for “equitable” contributions from Canadian broadcasters, and then replacing any shortfall from the $600 million bank account for federal cultural subsidies, also announced on June 3rd.

On another front, there is the policy storm moving in from a different direction: what to do about federal funding of news journalism. 

Miller announced in May that the Carney government plans to extend federal QCJO journalism salary subsidies to broadcasting companies. The public consultation was also announced on June 3rd, the same day as the CRTC’s streamer levies were struck down. Those QCJO subsidies are scheduled to drop from 35% to 25% of journalist salary rates in 2027. 

As well, the Netflix bailout scotched the annual $45 million in expected streamer contributions to the Independent Local Television News Fund earmarked as relief for the financially distressed Global News network and 19 other independent television stations. 

The quashed streamer cash levies were also expected to put $40 million in annual radio news funding.

On yet another funding front, the federal government is cutting $10 million of the funding for weekly newspapers in the $85M Canada Periodical Fund . 

With all of those funding cuts in the wind comes the news that Heritage is continuing its five-year review of the Periodical Fund but now also the $20M Local Journalism Initiative which was only recently reviewed.

Something’s up.

***

Another potential outcome of the Netflix bailout is whether the Liberals pay the price for their decision in Québec where electors rank cultural issues —-deeply intertwined with language issues—- near the top of their list. The Carney government’s shredding of the Trudeau-Guilbeault environmental policies is also on the list. 

Not only is there a provincial election in October that could produce a separatist government spoiling for a fight with Ottawa, but the Bloc Québécois is gearing up for three federal by-elections in the greater Montréal area triggered by pending resignations from the House of Commons by Liberal Steven Guilbeault, the Bloc’s Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, and NDP MP Alexander Boulerice. Two of the three ridings are sufficiently progressive to have elected Québec Solidaire provincially. 

The Carney Liberals currently hold majority government by a three-seat margin. 

***

The Senate Transportation & Communications Committee has released its report on the CBC. 

The report made only seven recommendations, three of which can be summed up as arguing for a major pivot of the public broadcaster into local news. 

What grabbed headlines of course was the recommendation of a regular audit of CBC News content by an external consultant to assess for bias in news reporting. 

Source: Reuters Oxford Digital News Report, 2026

***

Media merger activity in the US is getting frothy.

After the US Department of Justice announced it had no anti-trust concerns about the Paramount $110 USD billion takeover of Warner Brothers Discovery, the Wall Street Journal published a story with sources from “people familiar with the matter.”

The story was that DOJ staff lawyers were “leaning towards recommending” a DOJ anti-trust lawsuit blocking the merger when senior DOJ officials unexpectedly announced the green light for a “pro-competitive” merger. The focus of the staff investigation had been whether Paramount CEO David Ellison can deliver on a promise to increase, not decrease, the number of feature film productions given the extraordinary debt load incurred to buy Warner Brothers. 

In an unrelated announcement, the Murdoch-owned and content-rich Fox Corporation is paying $22 USD billion to buy streaming distribution giant Roku. 

Fox already runs its own free advertising streaming television (FAST) platform Tubi that engages 100 million active users each month. Fox will consolidate Tubi with the Roku’s industry-leading 80 million accounts that are integrated into its streaming hardware and content launch screens.

***

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This post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Miller explains the Netflix bailout – Federal ad vouchers to support Canadian media? – US DOJ approves the Paramount/ Warner Bros merger

June 14, 2026

There are few things more refreshing than CTV’s Vassy Kapelos grilling cabinet ministers.

The host of Question Period had culture and identity minister Marc Miller in the dock on Saturday to ask him bluntly why Canadians would expect that his new Safe Social Media Act Bill C-34 won’t be given away upon President Donald Trump’s insistence, as were the Digital Services Tax and the CRTC’s assessment of cash and investment contributions to Canadian content by US streaming services.

Miller’s answer: there will be no surrender by the Liberals on his new bill. Protecting kids is not on the table, he said, “hard stop.” The minister thinks that similar legislative efforts being passed or proposed in Washington and various US state houses to protect children from online harms bodes well for Canada pursuing the same strategy.

Also, he said protecting children is more important than “redistributing money within an industry,” a reference to the CRTC ruling. (Public polling on conceding ground on the Online Streaming Act under US trade pressure is here.)

As for overruling the CRTC on streamer contributions, Miller said he wouldn’t comment publicly. That lasted about ten seconds once Kapelos went after him for “capitulation” to US trade pressure and American companies.

Kapelos asked Miller what Canada got, or might get, in CUSMA trade talks for coughing up the Digital Services Tax and the CRTC ruling.

“I’m not going to tell you,” replied the minister.

The minister then gave up some fresh talking points on the CRTC ruling and the $600M in federal funds that includes replacement of the streamer contributions:

  • The CRTC “is not the final arbiter” on implementing the Online Streaming Act, the government is.
  • The Prime Minister may have overruled the CRTC’s 15%-of-revenues assessment on foreign streamers but it is only because the 15% number wasn’t the right one. When the minister formally instructs the CRTC “in a few months” on the make-over of the overturned decision, there will be “a number.”
  • The annual $600M in federal funds announced on June 3rd will compensate for giving away the $200M in annual streamer contributions ordered two years ago by the CRTC in part because that streamer money is “tied up in court.” (The escrowed streamer funds from 2025-26 will have to be refunded to the streamers).
  • The federal $600M will include money for “independent journalism.”

***

There was an unexpected media policy post from Narcity publisher Chuck Lapointe last week that is worth reading.

Narcity is a Canadian news outlet with a heavy bent towards travel content. But it also publishes conventional news content and on a daily basis it re-posts Canadian Press news stories on Facebook in order to draw traffic to Narcity’s websites.

Lapointe can get away with this despite the Meta banishment of news from its Canadian platforms because he signed off a Meta waiver saying his news product is not the kind of content that triggers financial compensation from Meta under the Online News Act, Bill C-18.

Speaking of Meta, Lapointe’s policy post points out how foreign platforms now completely dominate the Canadian market in digital advertising with the well known impact on the ability of Canadian media to monetize their content.

A good policy move, he says, would be for Ottawa to put new federal dollars in the hands of Canadian advertisers on the condition they spend it on Canadian digital platforms. That kind of voucher system might spur innovation by Canadian digital outlets competing for that ad spend.

It’s a smart idea that’s been circulating in various US states for some time now. In Canada, Senator Andrew Cardozo and I included the recommendation of an advertising voucher in our recent report, Making News Media Sustainable.

***

The US Federal Department of Justice has signed off on the blockbuster Paramount-Warner Brothers Discovery merger.

As often happens in government reviews of big mergers, the field of competition is configured to offer a rationale for the thumbs up or down. In this case, the FCC is saying it’s “pro-competitive” for Hollywood studios and streamers to consolidate in order to compete more effectively with Silicon Valley tech/media companies.

The merger story isn’t over. Some US state attorney generals, including California, are banding together to litigate an anti-trust action against it.

The merger also hasn’t been approved by the Canadian Competition Bureau. The European Union and the United Kingdom are also reviewing it: an early approval or the launch of further EU investigations might be announced in July.

***

Back to the Online News Act for a moment and attention all journalists.

An independent researcher from Simon Fraser University is running a survey on newsroom opinions on the consequences of the Online News Act. (She confirmed to me that she isn’t getting funding from foreign platforms. Her research appears to be supported by a federal grants).

English  : The Online News Act and its consequences for Canadian Journalism 

En français : La Loi sur les nouvelles en ligne et ses conséquences pour le journalisme canadien

***

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

This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – What comes after “No Netflix tax”? – British regulator backs news publishers vs Google AI

“Elbows up, eh?”

June 7, 2026

Eight months is a long time in politics and we have come a long way since former Heritage minister Steven Guilbeault proclaimed that “culture is not on the table” in CUSMA trade talks.

Despite Prime Minister Mark Carney vetoing the core ruling of the CRTC’s application of the Online Streaming Act to Netflix and the Hollywood streamers last Wednesday, a wag might suggest Guilbeault has been vindicated. Culture never even got to the table.

If you have any lingering doubts about my view on all of this, you can go back and read my opinion column published last Friday in Cartt.ca. If on the other hand you would rather just soak your head in some sardonic humour, there’s always Mark Musselman’s satiric piece.

Carney may have made his political calculations shrewdly. His cave on streamer contributions to Canadian content and his embrace of the Conservative Party’s “no Netflix tax” anthem wasn’t much more than a one day story in English Canadian media. The Globe & Mail’s television critic Kelly Nestruck stood out as a dissenter.

In Québec media commentators were critical, but not in the hair-on-fire manner you might have expected. Perhaps everyone is waiting to see where the big fat $600 million in public subsidies, tabbed to replace streamer dollars, is going to land. Brilliant stuff sir, keeping your critics hungry like that.

Nobody in the national media, save one journalist, thought to ask the Prime Minister what transpired in his private meeting with Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos a week before handing him a multi million dollar windfall. If the Prime Minister was ever to attend Question Period, an MP might ask him.

Now perhaps there is reason for optimism, or at least less pessimism.

We know nothing about the $600 million. It could be good news.

Also, we haven’t seen the minister’s new Policy Direction to the CRTC that is supposed to guide the regulator’s reconsideration of its government-vetoed ruling.

The PMO’s lawyers will be hard at it, drafting the new Policy Direction so that it stays on the legal side of the line that separates “advice” from “command.” A PMO dictat to ban streamer cash contributions to Canadian media funds will be tricky. As will any bottom line demands on direct streamer investments in Canadian programming.

As well, we have to wait to see if the new Policy Direction quietly delves into other parts of the CRTC’s ruling that the government may or may not like.

Rethinks of copyright partnerships, priority treatment for English language dramas, and funding for “services of exceptional importance” are possible.

And of course, the biggest conundrum that seems to escape all notice is what to tell the CRTC to do with respect to the yawning gap between foreign streamer contributions to Canadian content and those made by Canadian broadcasters.

After all, the law that Parliament passed requires the regulatory load be spread “equitably” and the first CRTC ruling did that (with fingers crossed behind back) by fixing a 15% (of revenues) CanCon spending quota for streamers and 25% for broadcasters.

You can expect Canadian broadcasters to tell the CRTC that they want the deal that Netflix got.

Well played, Mr.Prime Minister.

[Update: “Ottawa to roll back implementation of the Online Streaming Act, an irritant in US trade talks” – Globe & Mail, June 7, 2026]

***

I like to track below-the-radar stuff for you.

Here’s one: the British Competition and Markets Authority just ruled that Google must reveal to news publishers whether it’s ingesting their content into its AI models and give them a window into who is engaging with their content. According to Press Gazette, the CMA will require Google to:

“– provide publishers with effective controls over the use of their search content in generative AI

“– publish clear, comprehensible and user-friendly information explaining how publishers’ search content is used by Google in its generative AI

“– provide publishers with clear and detailed metrics on user engagement with their search content in search generative AI features

“– take reasonable steps to ensure that search content is attributed clearly and accurately in general search, and that end users have a clear means to access that search content.”

The CMA also says that it plans to force Google to let news publishers opt-out of AI ingestion of their content and —this is a big one— stop Google from forcing news publishers to de-index their linked snippets from appearing in Search as the condition of withholding their content from the maw of Google’s AI models.

Said the regulator, “Publishers will now have effective tools to prevent their content being used to power AI features in search, such as AI Overviews. This will put publishers, like news organisations, in a stronger position to negotiate content deals with Google.”

Keep in mind, the CMA’s move is a competition remedy to an anti-competitive practice by a single monopoly tech player. On another continent. By a public regulator that could be overruled by elected officials. Although as we know, that so rarely happens.

***

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.

Mark Carney’s big pivot on the Online Streaming Act: Elbows Up, this isn’t.

June 5, 2026

This week’s announcement by Culture and Identity minister Marc Miller that the federal government is striking down the CRTC’s ruling on streamer contributions to Canadian content is perhaps more shocking in its timing than its substance.

After all, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has an appetite for jettisoning government policy that he considers unwanted baggage. Recall the climb down from the Digital Services Tax, the carbon tax, and the suite of Trudeau-era environmental policies…

Continue reading at Cartt.ca

***

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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Meta’s “Faustian bargain” – Paramount, so much winning – Millennial beer buddies have at it on ‘Elbows Up’

February 28, 2026

Meta’s ban on Canadian news and the rumour mill about the federal government being interested in fixing it has dragged on for several months. 

It seems that Meta and Ottawa are talking about something that touches upon licensing of news content for Meta’s AI tools, age verification for social media accounts, the Online News Act, and Meta’s news ban on Facebook and Instagram.

Earlier this month, Meta spokesperson Rachel Curran was invited to a ten-minute spot on David Cochrane’s CBC news hour to discuss Meta’s pitch to have the federal government impose age verification responsibilities on app stores (Google and Apple) rather than apps (Meta).

At the eight minute mark they pivot to the news ban and Meta’s recent chats with the Liberal government.

“We would love to have news back,” said Curran, which doesn’t exactly square with her adamant position that as an advertising-driven business they get no commercial value from news content.

Her read-out of Meta’s talks with the Liberals was that the government agreed with Meta’s view.

That’s an astonishing claim —not denied by the government as yet— given that the Online News Act was built on precisely the opposite foundation, the government’s policy conclusion that Facebook monetizes news content and exploits its commanding market position in social media to shortchange news publishers in what would otherwise be a fair market in licensing payments for news snippets and hyperlinks. 

A more nuanced answer from Curran might have been that Meta is willing to pay for news content from some news publishers, but not from most others, and therefore a mandatory licensing regime doesn’t make sense. 

The idea that some news content generates ad revenue for Meta, but some content does not, is a value proposition that could be true but it has never been proven one way or another and Meta has no intention of putting it to the test.

The Online News Act gave Meta a chance to prove such a claim by negotiating different price points for different news outlets. But prevented by the Online News Act from cherry picking news outlets, Meta instead chose the nuclear option of a news ban.

Now we’re back to “Go” on the Monopoly board and Meta wants to cherry pick deals with chosen news outlets for the ingestion of news content into the training of its AI tools.

Curran tried to obscure the cherry picking by making the shamelessly false statement that the Online News Act is preventing Meta and news outlets from engaging in negotiations over AI content (the Online News Act only regulates “making news available” to the public and would require amendments to apply to content licensing for the training of AI tools). 

Alternatively, Meta wants news content in order to offer AI products that mimic search engines and embed news links in its chat replies. Yes, that might well be covered by the Online News Act and so Curran would be right, the Online News Act is an obstacle to implementing Meta’s evolving global model of monetizing third party content without licensing it.

But the important take-away here is that Meta is pitching a deal to Ottawa: repeal the Online News Act, let Meta cherry pick a few Canadian news outlets for licensing deals, and in return Meta will allow news publishers and their content back onto Facebook and Instagram.

The President of the Canadian Association of Journalists Brent Jolly dubbed this “a Faustian bargain,” but a more descriptive characterization would be “total capitulation by Ottawa.”

Removing the news ban would certainly help some news publishers, especially start-ups, who are still willing to put their business faith in Meta-controlled distribution. But the political value of the Liberals of taking such a lop sided deal seems minimal.

***

The battle to buy Warner Brothers Discovery is over.

This week the WBD board accepted Paramount’s improved $31 per share offer as “superior” to its tentative deal with Netflix, which declined to bid higher. It’s an $111 billion USD deal in the end.

You could spend the rest of your weekend reading analyses of the dramatic bidding war. For something short and punchy, here is Aakash Gupta’s X post. 

The deal is supposed to catapult Paramount into a far better competitive position with the streaming thoroughbreds Netflix, Disney, YouTube and Amazon, improving upon its current also-ran position. With a mountain of debt financing sitting on Paramount’s post-merger balance sheet, major layoffs and studio production cost controls are a good bet. 

Prior to the improved share bid, Paramount tried to satisfy the WBD board and its major shareholders with a key promise to buy its laggard cable assets (including CNN) and other guarantees around break-up fees and the reliability of its debt financing. In the end, it had to pay more.

Netflix didn’t want to pay more and may have been listening to the chorus of critics who thought they were overpaying, even with a lower per share price and Netflix stock swaps for WBD shareholders.

One interesting view was that Netflix might get more bang for its buck buying Spotify instead of a bigger share of the video streaming market through WBD’s prestige HBO content, WBD’s other IP brands and its massive movie archive.

Paramount is ultimately owned by Larry Ellison, third richest man on the planet and tight-with-Trump. The New York Times has a useful overview of Ellison’s budding media empire in technology, movies, cable news, and TikTok USA. 

There will be at least two story lines for MediaPolicy readers to follow once the deal is closed. 

The first is what happens to CNN News. In less than a year, Ellison has acquired control of CBS News and now CNN. 

CBS News is already being repositioned towards a more conservative audience. 

CNN —disparaged for years by Republicans as the “Clinton News Network”—  seems a good candidate for being starved for cash, stripped for parts or transformed into Fox News 3 unless Ellison is shrewd enough to hang on to a centre-left audience for advertisers. Certainly his friend in the White House expects a conservative CNN.

On the latter point, Ellison may have jotted down notes on Jeff Bezos’ business misjudgment in humbling the Washington Post to appease Trump.

The other story is Canadian: will Ellison renew or let the HBO  licensing deal with Bell Media expire and offer HBO as a stand-alone streaming service in Canada (in a bundle with Paramount Plus, or separately). (Update 2/3/26 – Paramount has announced that HBO and Paramount Plus will be merged into one streaming service.) 

If Bell loses the profitable HBO content stream, its entire broadcast enterprise becomes very weak, possibly an intolerable drag on its bottom line. 

This merger drama started by WBD CEO David Zaslav isn’t quite over of course. There are anti-trust hurdles for Paramount, even with a friendly government in Washington DC. 

The Attorney-General of California Rob Bonta is talking out loud about challenging the deal. But anti-trust is notoriously a long shot both in timeline and chances of success.

Regardless, the deal may not close for a year, an election year,  and the Congressional Democrats are not going to let this merger go gently into the night.

***

In December I wrote about the book Elbows Up, an anthology of centre-left English Canadian and Indigenous voices responding to Donald Trump’s annexation threats.

I wasn’t deeply impressed by the book and said so. But I recommend an entertaining follow up: The Hub’s Harrison Lowman video interview of the book’s editor, CBC Radio host Elamin Abdelmahmoud.

Lowman had the same problem with the book that I did: no conservative voices and more than a generous dose of settler-state vocabulary that seems at odds with forging the ecumenical political bonds and links required for resisting US hegemony.

His guest had no good answer for the parochial exclusion of conservative perspectives on a common Canadian challenge, the threat of annexation: he weakly implied a lack of interest from conservatives to meet his time sensitive call-out for contributions. 

But Abdelmahmoud is quick-witted to say the least, and he did a good job of explaining the importance of Canada and Canadians integrating the Indigenous perspective of dispossession, domination and death into our national consciousness of who we are, what we want to be, and, as pointed out in the book, why Trump’s threats provide a perfect opportunity to advance our reconciliation project.

Lowman and Abdelmahmoud, conservative and progressive bookends, are good friends in their private lives and listening to the interview is like sitting back and appreciating a robust argument over beers. That makes it an almost perfect metaphor for the national conversation we might have. 

***

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Europe indicts TikTok – Age verification bill S-209 clears Senate committee – Bezos and the WAPO layoffs – CPC frenzy over “the Canadian media summit”

February 8, 2026

The European Commission has fired a shot across the bow of TikTok, and by implication other social media, by finding the social media giant culpable of addictive algorithm design and inadequate safety measures.

The Commission explained its  preliminary ruling, which TikTok can either appeal or fix, as follows:

TikTok seems to fail to implement reasonable, proportionate and effective measures to mitigate risks stemming from its addictive design.

For example, the current measures on TikTok, particularly the screentime management tools and parental control tools, do not seem to effectively reduce the risks stemming from TikTok’s addictive design. The time management tools do not seem to be effective in enabling users to reduce and control their use of TikTok because they are easy to dismiss and introduce limited friction. Similarly, parental controls may not be effective because they require additional time and skills from parents to introduce the controls.

At this stage, the Commission considers that TikTok needs to change the basic design of its service. For instance, by disabling key addictive features such as ‘infinite scroll’ over time, implementing effective ‘screen time breaks’, including during the night, and adapting its recommender system.

The EU finding is made against the Chinese-owned app in the European market, not the American-owned TikTok across the Atlantic. But it will heat up the tension between the US and the EU over the regulation of online harms impacting US-owned apps operating in Europe.

The momentum of regulatory intervention around the globe picked up more steam when Spain indicated its intention to follow Australia and France in banning underage social media accounts. 

As for Canada, Heritage Minister Marc Miller isn’t saying yet if a ban on underage access is part of the online harms bill he is preparing.

Last Monday, the influential Taylor Owen and his McGill colleague Helen Hayes called for a moratorium on underage access to social media while online harms legislation gets tabled, works its way through Parliament, and gets implemented.

Judging from Canada’s last two pieces of media legislation, the Online Streaming Act and the Online News Act, the length of the entire process might be measured in years.

What might advance the timetable at the front end is Senate Bill S-209 that would require age verification for porn sites and possibly any social media site that permits porn. The bill passed committee last week and will likely get approved by the full Senate in the next few weeks, putting the governing Liberals on the spot.

Last week Senatrice Julie Miville-Dechêne, the bill’s sponsor, obtained committee approval for a series of technical amendments as well as a change that defined porn more narrowly to get at “X-rated” content and scope out the nudity and implied sexual activity common in mainstream drama. The new definition requires the exhibition of explicit sexual activity and exposed genitalia for the purpose of sexual excitement.

As drafted, S-209 still leaves the decision on whether to scope in porn-permissive social media apps to the federal government, either in a House vote on the bill or afterwards. 

***

Last weekend MediaPolicy noted the diverging fortunes of the New York Times and the Washington Post with the Times getting the Trump-bump in digital views and the Post sagging in the other direction. 

Then on Tuesday the Washington Post announced a breathtaking round of newsroom layoffs, 300 of 800 staff. By Saturday, publisher Will Lewis had resigned.

The public reaction was what you might expect: a mix of shock and anger. Former Post Editor-in-Chief Marty Baron posted his condemnation of the layoffs and put at least part of the blame on multi-billionaire proprietor Jeff Bezos’ decision to ingratiate himself to Donald Trump. That included Bezos killing a planned editorial board endorsement of Kamala Harris’ presidential candidacy, which reputedly cost the Post 200,000 subscriptions, as well as vocal support for Trump’s demolition of the White House east wing and making a donation to the ballroom project to be built on its foundations. Recently, Bezos’ Amazon Prime reputedly overpaid the Trump family for the streaming rights to the documentary Melania.

Then American anti-monopoly advocate Matt Stoller published a long Substack post where he suggested that Bezos bought the Post in 2013 as political insurance against the Obama administration taking anti-trust action against his Amazon e-commerce business. The insurance policy, Stoller suggested, has become unnecessary or overpriced as Bezos literally put his money on Trump. 

One piece of context is that while the Post’s declining audience numbers may be attributable to anti-Trump readers voting with their feet, the conservative and pro-Trump Wall Street Journal is experiencing the same decline, although not as steep as the Post.

There were also layoffs in Canadian journalism, suitably smaller in number. Bell Media CTV laid off 60, including 11 television journalists. 

***

The gong show otherwise known as the right-wing frenzy over mainstream media went viral last week when a video clip surfaced of Reynolds Mastin publicly thanking Prime Minister Mark Carney for “having our backs” and gushing that “we have your back too.” 

There it was, proof of the blood pact between the federal Liberal Party and the mainstream news media.

But who the heck is Reynolds Mastin?

Mastin is the President of the Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA), the industry group representing independent Canadian production companies that make entertainment programming. He was chairing the CMPA’s annual Prime Time conference in Ottawa when he made the remarks.

Readers may know, Mastin is not a journalist and he (and the CMPA) has nothing to do with news journalism. He was encouraging Carney to resist American trade pressure on the Online Streaming Act which requires US streamers to contribute to the Canada Media Fund.

Independent movie and television producers draw CanCon subsidies from the Canada Media Fund to make dramas and comedies. The CMF doesn’t spend a dime on news, although some make the mistake of thinking it does.

Nevertheless, the timing was was perfect for frenzy: the Conservative Party was in the midst of its annual convention in Calgary.

Here is Conservative Heritage critic Rachael Thomas MP describing “the Canadian media summit” as a news journalism event:

Thomas’ falsehoods then found their way into Conservative fund raising e-mails.

At that point, some conservative pundits urged Conservatives to do a fact check. The managing editor of The Hub, Harrison Lowman, was as brave as he was blunt:

Now speaking of Mr. Lowman and The Hub, I can recommend an excellent podcast he did in January with ex-New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet. 

In June 2020, Bennet (whose brother is a Democratic Senator) cleared for publication an opinion column from Republican Senator Tom Cotton arguing that Donald Trump ought to deploy the military if necessary to deal with rioting and looting that flared in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd. 

Bennet’s employment did not survive the newsroom uprising that followed. 

A similar newsroom conflagration occurred the same month at Canada’s National Post when columnist Rex Murphy opined that Canada “is not a racist country.” 

In any event, I found myself gripped by the full 35 minutes of Lowman’s interview of Bennet and you may find it worth the time as well.

***

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.

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.

AI

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

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

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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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. 

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

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