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.
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.
***
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
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…
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
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.
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.
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.
***
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
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.
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 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.
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.
***
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
***
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
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.
***
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
The political consensus in Québec on regulating audio-visual and audio content to protect culture and language meant that Bill 109 didn’t spark the controversy that the federal Bill C-11 did two years ago.
But the tinder is dry and the sparks will fly.
The US Trade Representative will add Bill 109 to its list of American grievances over Canada regulating Hollywood streamers and Big Tech, to be tabled in CUSMA negotiations this spring. (When coincidentally the 2026 Québec election might be called).
So too there must inevitably be an impasse between the Mark Carney government and Québec over legislative jurisdiction. Though brief by comparison, Bill 109 is almost a carbon copy of Bill C-11. Until the Supreme Court says otherwise, Ottawa has exclusive jurisdiction over online broadcasting.
Québec’s culture minister Mathieu Lacombe has been pretending there’s nothing jurisdictional to talk about with Ottawa. According to the minister, there’s no conflict, only concurrent federal and provincial powers to do the same thing. Good luck with that. A caveat: he might have a provincial claim to the regulation of home screens on Smart TVs and streaming devices.
The Québec law is founded on a provincially claimed right to cultural discovery —props to that boldness. Importantly, all of the bill’s cultural measures are focussed on French language content, not Canadian French language content, so the political framing is more linguistic than cultural.
Mess with this if you dare, Ottawa.
From here, things will move slowly at first.
Québec will establish the minister’s Discoverability Office and begin drafting streamer requirements for French language content.
The CAQ’s Lacombe will find out if the streamers are willing to take up his offer to negotiate bespoke agreements in order to avoid cookie cutter regulations set by the province.
On video streaming, he will no doubt benchmark his regulations or voluntary agreements with streamers against the outcomes reached in France since 2021.
Despite a framework EU law that proposes a 30% catalogue minimum (numbers of shows), the French implementation of that policy focusses instead on production investments in French language content, based on a range of 20% to 25% of a streamer’s national operating revenues. So far, the result has been bigger budgets rather than a proliferation of mid-budget shows.
On other hand Lacombe could just stick with catalogue quotas, as the CRTC is expected to announce its own federal expenditure quotas soon.
As the Québec legislation doesn’t require the cash contributions to Canadian media funds that the streamers hate so much in the federal scheme, a deal with Netflix focussing on French language video catalogues doesn’t seem out of the question.
A deal with Spotify to do something dramatic to increase rock bottom consumption of French language music would be tougher.
Unless Lacombe’s process moves at lightning speed, CUSMA talks and the Québec election will intervene.
***
If you don’t have school age kids, you might have missed the seismic Big Tech event that just shook Australia: its government has banned social media accounts for children under age 16.
The Australian communications minister Anika Wells is the first politician in a liberal democracy to tell social media companies, “time’s up.” Apparently so, even Elon Musk says he will obey the law.
There’s a brief explainer in the New York Times on how harmful social media can be for teens and how we got to the point that Big Tech’s safety half-measures have worn out the patience of legislators.
Still, a ban. Wow. As our federal justice minister Sean Fraser eyes a revised online harms bill, what would be interesting is an opinion poll on a ban, taken from Canadian parents of tweeners and teenagers, parsed out separately for age and gender of the children.
***
In last weekend’s post, I speculated that Donald Trump would have some fun with the $87 billion USD Netflix-Warner Brothers merger deal, given his donor ties to the losing bidder, Paramount.
The next business day after Netflix officially announced its winning bid, and media analysts had their say on the prospects for Netflix obtaining the Trump administration’s anti-trust vetting, Paramount unveiled its Plan B: a $108 billion hostile takeover bid for all of Warner Brothers Discovery properties.
Warner Brothers has a week to respond but Paramount CEO David Ellison has already signalled an improved second bid is ready to go.
Among Paramount’s financial backers are the CEO’s dad and second richest man in the world, Larry Ellison, and various gulf state sovereign wealth funds. Oh, and President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The Ellison-Gulf-Kushner bid includes Warner Brothers’ television entertainment channels and the cable news network CNN.
Ellison-the-younger’s Paramount recently bought the CBS news network and appointed the Free Press’ Bari Weiss as CEO. Pa Ellison is also the key investor in the bid to buy TikTok’s US operations.
***
A significant AI content licensing deal has been struck between the IP-rich Disney and OpenAI, the developers of Chat GPT and the video-creation app Sora.
The deal will allow Sora subscribers to create videos with Disney’s classic animated film characters. Imagine making a birthday video card for your kids featuring them with their preferred cuddly creature or action hero.
As reported by The New York Times: “Sora users will be able to make videos with more than 200 characters from Disney’s library, including from “Encanto,” “Frozen,” “Moana,” “Toy Story,” “Zootopia,” “Inside Out” and other animated movies. Animated or illustrated versions of Marvel characters like Deadpool, Iron Man and Black Panther will also be available, along with “Star Wars” characters like Darth Vader and Princess Leia.”
Given all of the chatter about AI companies scraping copyrighted content, the Disney-OpenAI deal will set expectations that licensing deals are the way for Big Tech to make peace with content producers, especially the biggest ones. (Oddly the reporting on the deal noted Disney’s $1B USD investment in OpenAI but was mum on the value of licensing payments that Disney can expect).
The Hollywood Reporterhas a good analysis of the deal, the gist of which is Disney isn’t going to rest on its IP laurels while other content companies get rich on AI monetization.
More broadly, the slow drip of licensing deals between AI and content companies might, in the news journalism space, begins to look like the years leading up to Australia’s NewsMedia bargaining code and the Canadian Online News Act: AI companies cherry pick the biggest and most popular news outlets for licensing deals while those left behind look to governments for action on content scraping and monetization.
***
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
MediaPolicy previously made the observation that while Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault rejects any further trade concessions to Donald Trump on cultural legislation, we haven’t heard from Mark Carney. And probably won’t. The PM is shying away from those kind of red lines as he transitions rhetorically from “elbows up” to bended knee.
Those of you who recall your history might remember that, according to reports, Canada’s theatrical film legislation was the very last thing on the negotiating table when Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan agreed to Free Trade deal number one in 1987. It didn’t go our way.
It’s good to educate ourselves in anticipation of similar cliffhangers. Last weekend the Globe and Mail’s arts staff writers went all out with a collection of stories about the challenges for Canadian artists and media producers as Canada’s trade relationship with the United States wobbles.
Kelly Nestruck wrote about how television production, stage shows and museum exhibitions are going to manage when access to their main export market, the United States, could be up for grabs.
Brad Wheeler invitedRheostatics’ Dave Bidini to riff on his new album, as well as elbows-up nationalism (“Bumper sticker nationalism is not interesting to me,” says Bidini).
Josh O’Kane looked at the desperate state of Canadian-owned book publishing.
Eric Andrew-Gee explained the warm hearth of Québec’s cultural nationalism to anglophones (“The price of having a culture to protect is constant fretting about the state of that culture”).
And last of all Barry Hertz broached the sensitive topic of whether collectively we are up to supporting Canadian culture at all.
The poll says that 87% of Canadians now support the Liberals’ Online Streaming Act Bill C-11 (up from 67% in May 2022). As for having a fight over Canadian culture with Trump, 68% of Canadians say yes, only 13% say throw it under the bus (the rest don’t know).
It’s true that half of Pollara’s respondents had no clue about C-11 in the first place, but the pollster’s “statement” polling below suggests Canadians’ values are nevertheless strongly aligned with defending cultural legislation.
***
In last weekend’s post, MediaPolicy summarized CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard’s plan for reinvigorating the public broadcaster. Her two biggest points were “more local” and “more diversity.”
Bouchard’s line on ‘more local’ —-she keeps using the word “proximity” to capture both geography and audience affinity with content —- is that digital technology means the CBC can pivot back to local without having to build new stations.
Sitting next to Bouchard, CBC’s Regional Services GM Jean Francois Rioux also emphasized affinity. Canadians want to see people “like me” or “like us” on CBC. They also want other Canadians to see and hear their concerns on the national stage that CBC provides.
There are others who have a different take on affinity, and they mean ideological affinity, code for “more conservatism” on CBC.
Bouchard treads delicately on this one, although in her Commons appearance she thoughtfully suggested that the CBC’s retreat to major cities as a response to budget cuts in the 1990s probably meant that coverage skewed to metropolitan values, which can feel “more centre and left” to anyone living in the “more centre or right” hinterland of Canada.
Bouchard was also interviewed by CBC reporter Jayme Poisson on her October 16th Frontburner podcast. Poisson poked reasonably hard on a number of sore points. On ideological diversity, Poisson pointed out that although CBC’s “trust” rating tops the charts, CTV and Global score better with conservative listeners. Maybe more opinion coverage is what’s needed?
Bouchard didn’t immediately bite on the suggestion —- avoiding a debate over whether big-c Conservatives are treated fairly in CBC coverage— but said what was needed was consistent inclusiveness in CBC content:
Well, I mean, there’s all sorts of ways to make people feel reflected and included. It starts by being in the communities where they are. It also means including a more diverse set of points of view. If that’s possible. And it’s also about being constant about it. Not just during an election period or during a specific period of time. It’s just to have that reliable approach to a diversity of points of view.
That sounds like a shift in content curation as a conscious effort. The execution will be the hard part.
***
A public broadcaster that offers affinity as broadly as possible (my new description of being “highly trusted”) is something we need to keep our democracy glued together. It’s important that everyone is motivated to check in with at least one media source that tells them about all tribes, not just their own.
Wikipedia does something similar. The popular website is quietly just there in our Google Search results. If you read it critically, you’ll get both the uncontroversial facts and the contentious points, the latter helpfully linked to content that you can read and then draw your own conclusions.
That’s unless Wikipedia is a woke, left-wing mind control machine, which is how it gets disparaged these days by the MAGA movement. To that point, Elon Musk says he’s about to release his politically recalibrated competitor to Wikipedia.
Here’s an interesting read from the Washington Post about the political campaign against Wikipedia lead by co-founder Larry Sanders.
***
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
The ka-ching is the responsibility of the Google-appointed gatekeeper, the Canadian Journalism Collective, to decide who gets what.
The conservative website The Hub gets $22,248 and is donating it to the March of Dimes charity. The Western Standard, operated by former Wildrose Party MLA Derek Fildebrandt, is down for $68,377. Rebel News didn’t apply.
None of that is surprising. The Hub and the Western Standard were previously vetted by the Canada Revenue Agency as Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations, becoming eligible for federal news subsidies or reader tax credits (but not necessarilycollecting them). Rebel Newswas not.
An unusual outcome of the Canadian Journalism Collective’s distribution was that the CJC approved the licensing cash for the current affairs website The Conversation (sub nom the Academic Journalism Society) after the CRA rejected it as ineligible for the QCJO subsidy program. The CRA’s rejection (on the recommendation of its independent advisory panel) was upheld by the Federal Court of Appeal in 2024.
The difference in result appears to be how the CJC is interpreting what it means to produce “original news.” That’s a requirement under both the CRA guidelines for QCJO and the Online News Act regulation 2023-276 for Google news payments.
But the difference seems to be that CRA guidelines explicitly require first-hand news gathering “such as independent research, interviews, and fieldwork. For example, a news article orreport about an event would be original if it is written or reported by a journalist and is based on first-hand knowledge that journalist gained by conducting independent research, attending or witnessing the event, or interviewing people who organized, attended, or witnessed the event.”
The CJC guidelines are far less precise. Tersely, “news content should be original, produced on an ongoing basis.”
I did my best to get the Canadian Journalism Collective to explain how it arrived at a different assessment than the Canada Revenue Agency of whether The Conversation is now producing original news with first hand reporting, or if the CJC rules are somehow more forgiving.
All I got was that the CJC’s eligibility criteria was applied and the news content submitted by The Conversation, like all applicant news organizations, will be reviewed each time there is a new cash distribution.
The Conversation’s parent organization, the Academic Journalism Society, has an unusual structure. Its newsroom consists of staff editors who collaborate with university professors who do the writing, based on the academic work of others or their own scholarly writing.
AJS funding comes 80% from participating universities and 20% from readers, philanthropists or government programs. But its financial structure is not an obstacle to qualifying for either QCJO or Google funds. It still comes down to whether the content is original. The QCJO program requires first-hand reporting but it’s unclear if the Google cash distributed by the CJC requires it. In the end I couldn’t get a satisfactory answer.
It’s important to get that answer, in fact it’s vital.
If there is no requirement for first-hand reporting activity, then news organizations are either aggregators of first-hand reporting done by other newsrooms and contribute nothing of their own, or they are opinion websites.
Opinion is cheap to produce and plentiful in supply. Do we need to underwrite opinion writing, or in the case of the Online News Act, devote Parliamentary bandwidth to wresting cash out of the hands of Big Tech?
In a sea of online opinion, commentary and blather, talk is cheap. Meanwhile the far more costly endeavour of news gathering is the value proposition that journalism offers to the public. Looking in the mirror, MediaPolicy.ca isn’t “original news” and deserves no subsidy or special favour.
And there are more good reasons to draw the line between news gathering and opinion.
The Online News Act was opposed by some as an unwarranted state intervention into the ecosystem of online information that Google and social media platforms have provided.
Sure, the monopolistic platforms Google and Meta exploit their market power in content distribution, stiffing news organizations on fair (or any) licensing payments.
But to critics of the Online News Act, this was justified by the overriding public interest in free information, benefiting both liberal democracy and public education.
On the other hand, what the EU, Australia, and Canada did with their legislative intervention on behalf of news organizations was to carve out news journalism from the unregulated Internet as a special case because of the public interest in, well, political and educational information.
As I said, news gathering is the value proposition of journalism.
I could be wrong of course. When Scott White moved on from his role as editor of The Conversation a year ago, he published acri de coeur on LinkedIn. The gist was that the CRA ruling against his news outlet was narrow minded and rooted in legacy thinking.
In an academic article published earlier this year, Nicole Blanchett and her co-writers suggested that “rigid journalism definitions risk excluding hybrid platforms like The Conversation Canada, limiting innovation and diverse voice in public discourse.”
Not to be coy about it, the authors speculated that the troubles encountered by The Conversation should be seen through the lens of legacy media defending its turf:
Answers to these [research] questions were primarily analyzed through boundary work. Boundary work is at play “when the goal is expansion of authority or expertise into domains claimed by other professions or occupations” (Gieryn, 1983, p. 791). Specific to journalism, it includes “expansion” of journalistic practice that can lead to the attempted “expulsion” of outside actors or inside agitators, as a means to protect the professional “autonomy” of journalists (Carlson, 2015, p. 9). As media startups look to attract the same eyeballs as legacy organizations, “efforts to restrict or extend access to technologies, reporting resources, or press credentials are all acts of boundary work that are simultaneously material and discursive in nature. As such, talk about journalism cannot be isolated from practice and context” (Carlson & Lewis, 2019, p. 132).
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
The Canadian Pressreported last week that the US State Department has an opinion on Canada’s respect for the independence of the press and freedom of expression. And it isn’t good. In fact, we got the MAGA raspberry.
The US produces “country reports” every year to satisfy US Congress that its foreign aid is going to the right place or, in our case, that we’re a suitable trading partner.
Some context first: the Report is a compliance document for Congress. It was not written for us. If the Report’s allegations against Canada happen to line up with Congressional trade complaints against the Online Streaming Act and the Online News Act, that’s part of the compliance.
Trade irritants or not, the Report picks up the vocabulary of Canadian opponents of public broadcasting, federal aid to journalism and any manner of mandatory payments to support Canadian news journalism such as the Broadcasting Act and the Online News Act. It’s “discriminatory,” it’s “censorship.”
The State Department’s special contribution to the debate is it’s view that our federal government’s $10 million enrichment of existing Canadian media funds to support news reporting in minority communities smacks of “DEI” and discriminates against white journalists.
Not that we needed the State Department to remind us, but the Report goes on to list incidents that occurred in 2024 which, in Washington’s opinion, raise “significant human rights issues including credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including unjustified arrests or prosecutions of journalists and activists.”
The Report gets one right, off the top, by reminding us that in January 2024 the RCMP arrested Indigenous journalist Brandi Morin when she refused to leave the federal police force’s inflated “media exclusion zone” at an Indigenous protest she was covering for Ricochet Media. What the Americans might have added was that this is hardly the RCMP’s first offence on media exclusion zones. The Crown withdrew the charges and the RCMP’s Civilian Review committee took Morin’s side and an apology was issued.
Another incident cited may or may not clear the bar of a “credible” report of press freedoms violated, that will be up to a judge if lawsuits proceed.
The State Department takes at face value the allegations raised by Rebel News against a venue landlord and a Liberal MP that Rebel was wrongly arm-twisted into paying $37,000 in security costs for a MAGA-themed rally it organized in Toronto, headlined by the US President’s son.
Canada doesn’t do country reports on American freedoms. It’s probably just as well. But the United Nations does. All UN signatories to the Convention of Human Rights participate in a five-year “peer review” of each other that includes press freedoms.
Here are a few items that might come up:
During street protests against the immigration-related arrests in Los Angeles in June, an LAPD officer deliberately aimed and shot an on-camera news journalist with a rubber bullet, hitting her in the foot.
The Federal Communications Commission initiated an investigation of Media Matters, a left-leaning critic of right-wing media, Elon Musk’s X platform and the Republican Party. A federal judge issued an injunction against the investigation on the grounds of 1st amendment rights of free speech.
US Congress withdrew all federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, accounting for 15% of the overall financing of NPR and PBS. House Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene stated that Congress was acting because of alleged liberal bias.
While running for President, Donald Trump proposed that the FCC pull the broadcasting licenses of CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS because of their news coverage of him (although the FCC only licenses local stations, not cable news).
The President also sued CBS, alleging that a 60 Minutes interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris had been edited and sanitized to her advantage.
The Trump lawsuit resulted in a $16 million settlement without any admission of wrongdoing from the network.
However credible news reports suggested that the FCC might have struck down the $8 billion sale of CBS-parent Paramount to Skydance were it not for a last-minute agreement between Paramount and the FCC that the new owners would scrutinize the CBS newsroom for “multiple viewpoints” and abolish all DEI hiring and personnel policies. According to the President, Paramount committed to providing him with $20 million in free advertising and public service announcements although that was refuted by Skydance.
***
As noted above, the State Department Report repeatedly criticizes the Online News Act and the Canadian Press story on the Report states that “Prime Minister Mark Carney indicated last week he is open to repealing the legislation.”
The CP and Post descriptions of Carney’s thoughts on repeal are based on a question and answer session with Kelowna Now.
Here is the reporter’s question:
“Bill C-18 stands in our [publication’s] way to get back onto Facebook and Instagram, are the Liberals looking at an alternative or rescinding that so that we can get that news [about wildfires] back on those platforms?
And here is Carney’s answer:
I’ll say this Steve thank you for the question. First thing and one of the things that we have done —and I will answer your specific question, but let me make a point on something we have done, and you may not like this part of the answer but I am going to give it to you— which is that one of the roles of CBC-Radio Canada is to provide unbiased, local, immediate information particularly in regards in situations such as you are referring to. And that’s why we made the commitment to invest and reinforce and actually change the governance of CBC-Radio Canada to ensure that they are providing those essential services.
Now to your specific question. Personally, this government is a big believer in the value of what you do. I’m going to use you as the representation in local news. And the importance for ensuring that that is disseminated as widely and as quickly as possible. So we will look for avenues to do that and I understand your question and it’s part of our thinking around that, thank you.
If we parse closely, the important nuance here is that Carney said he is “looking for avenues to do that and it’s part of our thinking around that.”
Grammatically, the “that” refers both todisseminating local news (especially in light of his comments about CBC-Radio Canada) and “in response to the question” which refers to “rescinding” and/or “alternatives” (or “avenues”). It’s hard to tell what he meant or whether he intended the ambiguity.
If Trump puts enough pressure on Carney, would the Prime Minister cave like he did on the DST ? Unlike the unimplemented DST, the $100 million in Google money is the bird in hand, not in the bush. The mandatory news licensing payments are already in the bank accounts of over a hundred Canadian online news outlets.
I have a long article to recommend: a New York Times feature that tells the story of Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Paramount’s CBS, the FCC’s approval of the Paramount-Skydance merger and the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show on CBS.
The reporting is based on embargoed access to Paramount owner Sheri Redstone. It’s sympathy for Redstone is not subtle, but it’s an informing read anyway.
***
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page; or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack; or follow @howardalaw on X or Howard Law on LinkedIn.
I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.
This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2025.
MediaPolicy.ca 