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Bloc MPs demand federal action on Netflix – Crossing Canadian TV’s financial Rubicon – The policy puzzle of safe social media and age gating

Career musician and Liberal MP David Myles defends the Carney government’s actions (Photo from Myles’ Instagram account)

October 24, 2026

On Thursday, Canadian parliamentarians spent much of the day debating a Bloc Quebécois motion to do two things: expedite the Liberals’ promise of $600 million for the cultural sector but also restore the CRTC’s rulings that required a 6.5% of revenue cash levy on Netflix and other Hollywood streamers as well as an 8.5% investment quota for Canadian content.

MediaPolicy has previously covered those issues here and here.

The Liberal MPs’ rebuttal was blunt.

First on her feet, ex-Google staffer Leslie Church suggested the Bloc didn’t sincerely support culture because it voted against the Liberals’ 2025 budget.

More on point, the Liberal Parliamentary Secretary for Heritage, David Myles, said it was expedient for the Carney government to overrule the CRTC because the Californian streamers had so effectively tied up the payment of the cash levies in Federal court. He repeatedly said the $600 million was coming “very soon,” presumably a reference to the November 5th federal budget day.

Whatever cultural funding gets announced by the Finance Minister in two weeks’ time, it should clear up the confusion created by the Liberals touting their 2025 cultural spending (including a $150 million boost for the CBC) while at the same time tabling their February 2026 rollback of that increase in their “main parliamentary estimates.”

The Bloc motion was submitted by cultural critic Martin Champoux who put the case for restoring mandatory CanCon contributions by US streamers:

The only way … is to have a funding system that is not subject to the government’s whims.

The government cannot say that, this year, when it scrapped the [CRTC] levies, it replaced that with $600 million, as promised.

The government might say that this is great news because, next year, it intends to do the same thing and even index the amount.

Next year, the amount would be $800 million. The government believes this should please the cultural sector. However, the year after that, the amount might drop to $200 million, which might put everyone into a bit of a pickle.

Then, the year after that one, another government might be in power that is not interested in culture and might decide to get rid of it. We would be back at square one. It is unacceptable for the government to take this approach. It is important to create a system that reassures all cultural sector stakeholders. This means fair funding for culture and a significant contribution from big tech.

In response, Myles was enigmatic about the CRTC levies: “It is not that the tax has been abolished (ce n’est pas que la taxe a été abolie), but we are going to take some time to find a new policy direction, because the tax was not working.”

And as reported by The Wire Report, Liberal backbencher Juanita Nathan added to the veiled messaging that “all broadcasters, whether traditional or online, should make a meaningful contribution to Canada’s broadcasting ecosystem.” That was probably a reference to the CRTC’s 8.5% investment quota that was suspended by the government in June.

On a related point, Myles also cited the work going on with the government’s advisory committee on video production, reviewed by MediaPolicy here.

The policy picture should come into better focus after budget day, but what is shaping up is this:

The federal budget clarifies when and how the $600 million in cultural spending is to be allocated.
That includes the fate of the apparent spending cuts for the CBC, the Canada Media Fund, the Canada Book Fund, Canada Music Fund, Canadian Periodical Fund, and the French language TV5.
The government is then cleared to publish its policy direction to the CRTC on what it wants to see in terms of streamer contributions to Canadian content. The CRTC will have to decide whether to hold another round of lengthy public hearings and written submissions or to cut to the chase and simply rewrite the rulings that the Carney government appears to have vacated.
The government will also have the opportunity to publish its revised policy governing the structure and mandate of federal video production tax credits, the Canada Media Fund, Telefilm, and the National Film Board.

A vote on the opposition motion is due Monday.

***

It’s possible that the Carney government’s policy direction to the CRTC will also reconsider the Canadian content contributions from Canadian broadcasters. Those domestic commitments are set at 25% of revenues, a full 10% higher than the CRTC fixed for foreign streamers.

The argument advanced by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters isn’t just that the contribution gap between domestic and foreign competitors in the Canadian video market is too big, but that the 25% figure (which was lowered from 30% in the CRTC’s vacated ruling) is no longer aligned with the industry’s profit and loss.

In its 2026 update on the metrics of that profit and loss, the CAB reported that the industry’s anticipated crossing of the financial Rubicon took place in 2025. The total television profitability that combines network local television and specialty channels (e.g. Bell Crave or Rogers Sportsnet) is finally negative.

***

I recently attended the International Institute of Communications’ annual Canadian conference and listened attentively to the panel on Bill C-34, the Liberals’ Safe Social Media Act. That legislation currently awaits second reading in the House of Commons followed by the detailed debate and tabling of amendments in the Heritage parliamentary committee.

One of the IIC panelists, Dr. Charlotte Moore Hepburn from Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, provided a reality-check of how social media products precipitate child suicide and enable the sexual predation of minors. As the doctor put it so clinically, our timidity in regulating Big Tech’s toxic side effects contrasts unfavourably to our rigorous regulation of other unsafe products, such as phamaceuticals.

Another panelist, Josh Tabish of the Tech-friendly Chamber of Progress suggested the Liberal government should reconsider the regulatory sequence implicit in the bill. That sequence provides for age-gated social media accounts by default until the platforms submit an acceptable child safety plan to the digital regulator to be set up once the legislation is approved.

As Tabish suggested, this regulatory sequence pretty much guarantees a lengthy period of age gating with the risk, however manageable, of bad actors hacking the private information of children and adults.

Age gating of social media platforms will capture an estimated 80% of all Canadians, (although that number will be diminished by age verification based on publicly available data). The way to avoid that higher level of privacy risk, says Tabish, is for the government to establish its own interim rules for child safety features instead of age-gating while the social media companies’ safety codes are developed and approved.

If the government followed Tabish’s advice, it would still have to permanently age-gate adult viewers of pornography —an unknown percentage of the population— in order to block underage access to those websites. However that would entail age-gating porn viewers, not all Canadians.

The government’s current regulatory sequence has the merit of delegating the detailed and controversial policy task of safety codes to expert regulators instead of front-loading those codes through members of Parliament.

The bill as drafted makes a head start on these specifics with clear measures expected of the social media apps:

There must be blocking tools for users to shut out noxious harassers and child predators.
There must be user tools for flagging harmful content to bring to the attention of platform.
The social media companies must label “synthetic” content (deep fakes).
Bot-driven content must be labelled once it is discovered.
And there must be a public facing “resource person” to deal with user concerns.

That still leaves the social media companies and the regulator with a lot to do. It’s a tricky policy task, no matter how you look at it.

***

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The Prime Minister, the Netflix tax, and the vox populi

(AI illustration)

October 6, 2026

As I said when Canada-US trade talks broke off in August, the public got there first. Carney got there later.

Three months earlier on June 3rd the Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that he was going to override the CRTC’s decisions to slap Netflix and the Californian streamers with a CanCon cash levy fixed at 6.5% of revenues, paired with the Commission’s 8.5% investment obligation. He tried to sell this preemptive strike to Canadians as cancelling a Netflix tax they would otherwise see on their monthly subscriptions.

It was a weird political moment because “Netflix tax” began its rhetorical life as Conservative Party mantra, circa Stephen Harper. Back then, the Trudeau Liberals initially agreed with the Conservatives. No Netflix tax. But later they changed their minds and passed the Online Streaming Act.

Carney’s revival of the “Netflix tax” vocabulary was surprising. It was also disingenuous in the moment. Overruling the CRTC was a sop to the US streamers and a gullible concession to American trade pressure. To be fair to the Prime Minister, it was possible that Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos had privately threatened him in late May with a retaliatory Canadian price increase.

As I have written previously, much of what constitutes a Netflix tax is imaginary, contrived for political effect.

The CRTC’s 8.5% compulsory streamer investment in Canadian shows is for shows commissioned or licensed for distribution on their own platforms and paying subscribers. Even a large chunk of the Commission’s 6.5% cash tithe that is destined for Canadian media subsidies gets recycled to the streamers’ bottom line because it lowers the cost of the Canadian shows they license for their services.

But at least in theory some of the “Netflix tax” represents a regulatory cost the streamers would prefer to avoid. The likelihood of any amount of it being passed along to consumers depends less on what Netflix would like and more on how subscribers respond to it, what we call price elasticity. In other words, how likely is it that Netflix can succeed in passing along regulatory costs to subscribers?

The answer is that it would depend on the options Netflix subscribers have at their disposal. Those consumer options include paying up, dropping Netflix and leaning into competing services, stepping down in price tier to the streamer’s ad supported service, saving money by rotating on and off a monthly subscription, and so on.

What do Canadians think about a Netflix tax? There have been fewer public opinion polls on our willingness to pay than you might think.

In 2017, OpenMedia polled Canadians on a hypothetical 5% cultural levy on Internet service bills being passed along in its entirety to subscribers. Predictably, the poll found overwhelming hostility. The poll also asked Canadians what they thought about paying HST on their monthly subscriptions —yes, the federal sales tax wasn’t implemented until 2021— and less than a majority of Canadians were okay with it. Such is the power of pocketbook politics.

Now that Carney’s June pivot on the Online Streaming Act has provoked the Netflix tax question again, a new Pollara poll sponsored by the CMPA put it to Canadians.

Vox populi: Canadians are okay with a Netflix tax by a margin of four to one.

Who knew? Certainly not the Prime Minister.

Before your natural skepticism takes command, be advised that parsing the details of the question and polling results doesn’t change the four-to-one indictment of the Carney policy move. But they are worth summarizing anyway.

The main question about a Netflix tax included some editorializing in the question, but overall I think respondents knew what they were voting on:

Some people say the OSA will lead to higher prices, as streaming companies may increase their prices citing the required investments in Canadian shows/movies. Others argue that streaming companies have been raising their prices in Canada without any obligations under the OSA. Since these companies have raised their prices consistently, they have the revenue to meet the Act’s requirements. Others also point out that these companies operate on an international scale and already invest in Canadian shows and movies, suggesting they have both the resources and existing infrastructure to do more.

Given this, would you support or oppose the Government of Canada requiring foreign streaming companies to invest a meaningful, predictable and enforceable portion of their Canadian revenue to develop Canadian shows and movies – even if there is the risk this may lead to them raising prices?

The results are here:

Take note. The combined “support” is 67% and the combined “oppose” is 15%. Hence the four to one margin among decided respondents.

I was intrigued by the unusually high “not sure” number of 19%. It suggests to me that many respondents were honest enough to suspend judgment because of what we don’t know about price elasticity, the amount if any of a potential price increase, or what price increase Netflix thinks it could get away with.

What’s also evident from the polling results is the intensity of support, measured by “strongly support” against “somewhat support.”

That 25% “strong” versus 42% “somewhat” measurement of intensity in support on a pocketbook issue isn’t especially low, but it’s less than the high intensity of support for several other propositions about supporting the Online Streaming Act included in the Pollara poll.

Those other propositions break down into two points. The first is about support in principle for the Online Streaming Act as a tool of cultural policy. The other is support for the OSA in the face of US trade aggression.

On the policy tool itself, Canadians were asked if they support or oppose the OSA’s goal of requiring foreign streamers to “invest a portion of their Canadian revenues into the production of Canadian shows and movies, the same way traditional broadcasters must support Canadian shows and movies.”

Posing the question that way, respondents might have been thinking about the principle of equitable treatment (foreign streamers should not get a free ride) or the intrinsic merits of supporting Canadian shows and movies with the tools provided by the OSA.

Either way, polled support for the Online Streaming Act can be fairly described as overwhelming:

Strongly Support: 41%

Somewhat support: 45%

Somewhat oppose: 9%

Strongly oppose: 6%

This cumulative 86% support for the OSA, which is consistent with findings from other pollsters over the years, is not what you might have guessed by following the coverage of the OSA in the Canadian media whom over time have given full voice to news-making critics of the legislation.

A footnote to the bottom line 86% number is that this support is spread across all Canadian regions and partisan voting blocs. In fact support for the Online Streaming Act is nearly unanimous among Liberal and Bloc Québécois voters, north of 95% in each case. Carney trifles with that at his peril.

The other analytical point in the poll flows from a series of questions responding to the Trump trade war. You can see below that Pollara probed Canadian views on defending the Online Streaming Act and Canadian culture through questions posed on “Buy Canadian” and the swell of national pride in the global success of CanCon exports:

Three other more consequential questions were put to respondents.

When asked if Canada should “stand firm” on the OSA even if it “complicates” trade negotiations, the outcome was:

Strongly support 42%
Somewhat support 32%
Somewhat oppose 10%
Strongly oppose 5%
Don’t know 11%

The cumulative 74% support versus 15% oppose is similar to how the question was answered as year ago in a previous Pollara/CMPA poll. [Correction: The earlier version of this post mixed up the numbers for strongly and somewhat support and drew an inaccurate conclusion about waning intensity within “support.”]

Another related question in the poll tests public opinion on Carney’s alternative cultural strategy, i.e. rolling back the CRTC tithes on US steamers and replacing them with $600M in federal dollars for CanCon production:

As it turns out, Canadians are a big meh on this.

Offered the policy choice, there is majority support of 56% for the CRTC’s tithes and only 20% for Carney’s $600M solution. The high rate of “not sure” suggests the final numbers could change over time.

Lastly, the poll asked what trial lawyers call a leading question.

“With Canada under threat from the United States, is it more important than ever to defend Canadian culture?”

The response was 52% in strong support, 28% somewhat support, 7% somewhat oppose, 6% strongly oppose and 7% don’t know.

That cumulative 80% in support versus 13% in opposition is not only sweeping in its judgment, but the intensity of support (strongly vs somewhat) suggests that when the Carney Liberals return to the bargaining table with Donald Trump they do not have a mandate to finesse or circumnavigate cultural sovereignty.

***

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

Between regulatory opposites, Carney must plot a new course for the CRTC

October 2, 2026

Prime Minister Mark Carney recently granted the New York Times an hour-long interview about where he is taking Canada.

Canadian journalists, who would have loved that kind of access to the prime minister, were irked. What ever happened to Canadians telling Canadian stories?

But to heck with cultural irony. There’s an American audience to be educated about Canada.

An interesting item that emerged from the Times coverage was Carney’s candour about Canada’s warming relationship with the European Union. According to the reporting, Carney is well aware of the EU’s economic anemia and does not see a future in which the EU is more important to Canada than the US economy.

But Carney touts the value in trade diversification and stronger geopolitical bonds with Europe. What might interest readers is his illustration of the point with a cultural policy issue…

Continue reading at Cartt.ca

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Support for the Online Streaming Act is up – the story of Global News – California waits for Governor to sign a QCJO bill

September 12, 2026

A new Nanos poll commissioned by Bloomberg News finds increased support for public policy requiring US streamers to contribute financially to Canadian content.

Support rose from 67% to 73% since Nanos last tested the waters four years ago while the Online Streaming Act was being debated in Parliament.

Detailed results from the new poll have not been released other than Bloomberg reporting them in a news story. Assuming it’s the same question as the May 2022 poll, respondents were asked whether they believe US streamers should contribute financially to the creation of Canadian content “in the same way” as Canadian broadcasters.

As an indicator of the intensity of that support in 2022, the 67% yes vote was divided between “support” (39%) and “somewhat support” (28%). Eleven per cent were unsure. Until we get a peek at the full Nanos report, it’s unknown how much those numbers have changed. (Update 14/8/26: the full report shows increased intensity of “support” (48%) and “somewhat support” (25%). The “unsures” are down to 9%).

In any event the new 73% number is a jab in the ribs to Prime Minister Mark Carney who allowed US trade pressure to push him in the opposite direction. In June the Prime Minister overturned the CRTC’s order that the streamers contribute 6.5% of revenues in cash to media financing funds and another 8.5% to their own investments in Canadian shows. Domestic broadcasters contribute a total of 25% of revenues to Canadian content.

The Carney government is now deliberating its guidance to the CRTC on a new framework for streamer contributions. Even prior to Carney’s intervention, the text of the Online Streaming Act and the CRTC’s implementation of it expected less of foreign streamers than Canadian broadcasters.

At the time of their intervention, Carney and cultural and identity minister Marc Miller claimed that overruling the CRTC wasn’t a response to US trade pressure but rather their sensitivity to subscription pricing.

On that note, the Hollywood Reporter has published a sassy story about escalating streaming subscription prices in the US where streamers have been steadily raising prices well above the rate of inflation. The content-lean Apple TV has tripled its price since launch in 2019. Netflix Premium is up 125% since 2013 (while inflation was 38% over that period of time).

***

For those that still admit to having ever met Justin Trudeau (I did, he’s tall!), you’ll be interested to know that the drama teacher has become a drama producer.

No wisecracking, ‘kay? The former PM is going into the independent movie making business with his old sidekick and chief of staff, Katie Telford. Nom de guerre of the new enterprise is Hope and Hard Work.

I will let his press release do the explaining.

***

Steve Faguy has written a well informed and balanced account of the gradual demise, possibly fatal, of Corus Entertainment and its Global News television subsidiary.

He sizes up the various culprits: the Shaw family’s restructuring of its various business divisions and debt loads, the CRTC’s astonishing lethargy, the federal government’s inaction, and Rogers’ cutthroat raid on Corus’ profitable US programming. Like the collective assassins of Julius Caesar, it’s hard to pin the crime on one suspect alone.

Now a penny stock loaded with debt, here’s hoping that Global can survive.

One point Faguy doesn’t make, and it could make all of the difference to Global’s survival, is that the federal government’s Online News Act injects $3.9M annually into the television network. If culture and identity minister Marc Miller follows through with his promise to extend “QCJO” journalist labour tax credits to broadcasters, that’s roughly another $8M.

In 2025, Global spent $119M on television news programming. According to Unifor, Global has laid off 173 union members since early 2024.

If the QCJO money materializes, it should be announced in the Fall budget.

***

It’s intriguing to follow Californian media policy from afar.

As the home turf of Big Tech and Hollywood, you might expect corporate interests to dictate public policy.

Not necessarily.

When five Democratic federal congress representatives from California joined House Republicans in condemning Canada’s Online Streaming Act, the remaining 47 congress representatives did not. Neither did the state’s two Senators.

At the state level, the legislature is Democrat-controlled from top to bottom and elected officials insist on lobbing hot potatoes in the lap of Governor Gavin Newsom.

Over the course of twenty-four months culminating this August, Newsom endorsed, gutted and then revived the state Assembly’s modest Californian knock-off of Canada’s Online News Act, based on matching $20 million contributions from Google and the state.

Now the legislature has overwhelmingly passed AB2222, the Community News Act. The Canadian policy analogy would be the federal labour tax credit on journalist salaries. Newsom has until the end of the month to sign it, or it dies.

The Community News Act tracks our QCJO labour tax credit for hiring and retaining journalists. The dollar amounts are comparable: $20,000 (USD) per head for the first five journalists and $15,000 thereafter. Any new hires that grow the size of the newsroom are supported at $35,000 per salary.

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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.

Running on contact: Something Else for CanCon financing

AI photo illustration

September 6, 2026

As long as I can remember, Canadian critics of the Online Streaming Act and the last sixty years of regulatory measures supporting Canadian culture have rarely articulated what they would do differently, were it left up to them.

The thinking behind the critique of Canadian cultural policy must be one of two things.

It could be a steadfast belief that Canadians deserve a free and unregulated market where Canadian art and artists compete with American content without assistance.

Maybe in this wide open North American market we would choose lots of Canadian content, maybe not. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer recently described this as “letting capitalism do its thing and let people choose.”

If not this open borders strategy for culture, the argument that there’s an alternative to the Online Streaming Act remains an unspoken “something else.”

The Carney government is preparing to do something else. In the most Carneyesque way.

In August, Heritage Canada quietly circulated a series of seven discussion papers to a select list of industry stakeholders in Canada’s audio-visual world. No one claims authorship but the unpublished PDF document was generated by Lisa Gotlieb, Heritage Canada’s Manager of Audio Visual Policy.

The proposal is to build up Canadian film and television production companies that make visibly themed Canadian film and television content, exploit AI technology in both production and distribution, retain their copyright and intellectual property for future growth, and cultivate audiences loyal to the brand that producers nurture.

Reduced to a baseball analogy, the idea is to field a contact hitting offence like last season’s Toronto Blue Jays. A team that steadily generates baserunners and rejects the swing, miss and home run strategy.

The current model of funding Canadian content doesn’t get a warm applause in these documents. In fact it gets politely disparaged as “project by project” funding of CanCon shows that doesn’t adequately incentivize or reward IP-based branding, iconically Canadian content, growth and audience.

The policy narrative scans strongly binary —old system bad, new system good— and I suggest they be read with a critical eye. Part one of seven is available here.

1 – Harnessing Homegrown Intellectual Property – EN Download

In these documents, Heritage expresses dissatisfaction with an ecosystem of modestly capitalized independent Canadian producers running in place on a project-by-project treadmill without a clear path to growth.

Less fundamentally, shade is thrown on the traditional “headcount” formula that ties government and industry financing to productions hiring mostly Canadian producers, writers, directors, actors and film crews but without a formal commitment to visibly Canadian terrain and screenplays.

In the new world, Canadian film and television producers would become a feisty We-the-North of scaled up studios that would not sell off library rights or global first release to US streamers. That might induce Canadian producers to stop putting quite so much American cream in their CanCon coffee (think of the nationally androgynous Schitt’s Creek).

Relentlessly throughout the policy papers, the authors tout a growth agenda. That rhymes with Carney’s banker vocabulary of investment, building, growth, global markets, and a measurable return on public investment.

Once you get past Carney vibe, there are some engaging ideas.

The most fundamental is to restructure the current funding model that combines money and gatekeeping rules from four federal agencies, the CRTC, the Canada Media Fund ($216M in federal spending), Telefilm support for cultural exports ($150M), the National Film Board ($72M) and the federal government’s CAVCO production tax credits ($540M).

As industry insider Brad Danks explained back in June in a MediaPolicy interview (or see a refreshed version in Broadcast Dialogue), the current funding system places all bets on production financing of shows and none of it on rewarding success. Success is defined as the build out of Canadian platform distribution and audience development. Or the aggressive adoption of AI technology. It’s a strategy for cultural sovereignty that is implicit in encouraging producers to tighten their grip on cradle-to-grave distribution rights instead of cashing out these rights piecemeal to Netflix and other global platforms.

Somebody has to quarterback this reformed funding model. The authors of the Heritage documents explicitly endorse an expanded National Film Board (perhaps merging the 300 staff of the Heritage CAVCO office, the Canada Media Fund and Telefilm into the much larger NFB).

The policy papers go out of their way to laud the NFB’s unique combination of policy expertise and in-house content production. I’m guessing authors regard Telefilm and the CMF as the guardians of the old system that Heritage wants to disrupt.

The papers also moot the possibility of the federal government treating the audio-visual industry as a major investment opportunity worthy of a reliable stream of earmarked infrastructure cash from ISED or regional development funds. Although the authors don’t mention the $600 million pot of cultural cash that Carney announced in June, that is also a possible source of recalibrated program spending in the new model.

Most of these policy ideas can be traced back to ex-Deputy Minister Isabelle Mondou’s recommendations to former culture and identity minister Steven Guilbeault who approved them before leaving cabinet in late 2025. The policy momentum within Heritage is in place and the Prime Minister’s “build it” philosophy would seem hospitable to the change. Take note: Mondou now works in the PMO.

The trade war is also an accelerant to change. President Trump has his eye on Canada’s share of global streamer film and television productions. He is supporting Hollywood’s request that US Congress legislate a federal film and television production tax credit to draw more work stateside.

If Congress acts, film and television producers in Canada, the United Kingdom and European countries could all lose some production volume to Hollywood and other US states.

That would make Heritage’s “build it” agenda for home grown CanCon production a more pressing matter. According to Heritage, foreign film and television production in Canada is ten times the spending on Canadian content although only half of the total hours of industry employment.

It’s no coincidence that Deputy Minister Mondou warned minister Guilbeault that “the balance between Canadian content and Foreign Location and Service Production [in Canada], has shifted in favour of Foreign Location and Service Production which is vulnerable to the current tariff threat and other protectionist measures coming from the United States.”

We will see if the Heritage proposal gels in time for November’s federal budget.

Source: CMPA Profile 2025

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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.

The Trump carpetbaggers pillaging Canada

Satiric AI illustration based on Thomas Nast’s Harpers Weekly illustration, 1872

September 2, 2026

The epithet “Carpetbaggers” has an evocative history in the United States.

It was how post-Civil War white southerners described opportunistic northern merchants who descended upon the war-devastated former slave states.

The same vitriolic insult was conferred upon the corps of northern abolitionists and office-seekers who arrived to mobilize the Black vote for newly created state legislatures, the entire chapter in American history known since as the Reconstruction era.

After Reconstruction ended in the 1876 sell-out of Black civil rights and the wage re-enslavement of African Americans, the term Carpetbaggers became more generic. Wikipedia describes it as “denot[ing] people who move into a new area for purely economic or political reasons despite having no ties to that place.”

Lately the California-headquartered streamers operating in Canada have earned the Carpetbagger sobriquet.

The streamers don’t own our broadcasting market, not yet. Canadian owned television and radio broadcasting is slowly diminishing but it remains significant. Our cable and satellite-borne audio visual signals reach 9 million out of 15 million Canadian households.

But Netflix reportedly reaches about 9.8 million Canadian subscribers. With the grey market in password sharing, that is probably well over 10 million households. The other US streamers Amazon Prime (7.5m), Disney (6m) and Paramount (5.3m) are all ahead of the HBO-boosted Bell Crave (5m). According to the CRTC, three out of four Canadians reported subscribing to an audio-visual streaming service, compared to a little over half of Canadian households (58%) subscribing to a traditional television service.

That dominant American share of our streaming market means that Canadian subscriber dollars, advertising revenues, and reinvestment capacity generated by Canadian profits all flow south.

As a caveat to that generalization, there is a debate (impoverished by the lack of data) over how much money Netflix and the streamers voluntarily invest in English language Canadian content as equity partners. Canadians are also familiar with the occasional appearance of Canadian themed Netflix originals such as the upcoming Below or Amazon’s The Sticky.

But the yawning gap between how much Canadian broadcasters are required by the CRTC to invest in Canadian content —-30% of their revenue—- and the goose egg obligations for streamers can only be described as Carpetbagging.

The federal government has taken a couple of stabs at remedying that extraction of value.

One attempt was the ill-fated $1 billion per year Digital Services Tax on the streamers (but also other digital businesses like Uber).

When this kind of tax was developed a decade ago in Europe, it was a counterweight to American Big Tech’s avoidance of local corporate taxes by parking their profits in tax havens. By the time Canada got around to legislating our own DST, the federal Liberals never clarified whether it was plugging the corporate tax hole or simply reshoring a share of the streamers’ revenue extraction from Canada.

As you know, Prime Minister Carney gave the DST away in June 2025 when President Trump demanded it. I am sure Carney now regrets that as a bad bet on the President’s intentions.

The second attempt to remedy the California streamers’ value extraction was the Online Streaming Act.

You know the story here. The latest chapter is that in 2024 the CRTC imposed a five per cent cash levy on the US streamers, the same that Canadian cable companies pay. Those levies feed the Canada Media Fund and a number of similar production funds that finance Canadian content shows. Those shows are made by independent Canadian producers who license them back to Canadian broadcasters and (once the three-year old Online Streaming Act is actually applied) to US streamers. The key point is that the shows are licensed at a lower price because of the media fund money that gets invested up front.

Not good enough for the Carpetbaggers. Even after Mark Carney overruled the CRTC and rid them of the levies, they weren’t satisfied. That was confirmed when the streamers were able to get the White House to push for the evisceration of another Online Streaming Act tool, the surfacing of Canadian content on US streaming platforms, on the very last day of trade talks.

The reason that the streamers deserve the unsavoury Carpetbagger label is because they have worked so hard to earn it.

Before Donald Trump began his second term in 2025, a more compliant Netflix told the CRTC they could live with a two per cent cash levy (provided none of it went to news). Canadian cable companies pay double that, at 4 per cent.

Ah, but that was then and this is now. At the moment, the Netflix position in Canada is no regulation, no obligations. Full value extraction from Canadian subscribers and advertisers.

And to make this happen, the streamers have been able to insinuate their influence into the ground zero of trade talks.

Writing about this back in 2024 in Cartt.ca, I noted the Netflix “strategy appears to be oppose, appeal, and get the attention of the next U.S. president, U.S. Congress and U.S. trade representative.”

And here we are.

***

One of the trade files that went quiet for the last few months was Donald Trump’s threats beginning in 2025 to put a tariff on US movies shot in Canada, destined for the American, Canadian and global markets.

That’s not what the streamers and big studios wanted from him. They like shooting some of their shows abroad in the UK, Canada, and Europe, all of which have world-class production clusters and a Rolidex of trusted production partners. The analogy of the integrated US-Canada automotive market applies here.

The industry backdrop to this is that, post-pandemic, Los Angeles has endured a substantial drop off in its market share of American film and TV production, losing work to other US states and other countries. The end of the “streaming wars” and its profligate spending is also a factor. Some states, like California, have aggressively stepped into the subsidy space in order to reclaim work. But US Congress has not.

It looks like months of federal lobbying has paid off for the streamers because this week President Trump came out in favour of a federal film production tax credit. While California and other US states have increased their own subsidies, the US does not have a federal counterpart. In Canada, we combine federal and provincial production subsidies made available to both Canadian and foreign studios making shows here.

Canada has been smart about building a world class audio-visual production industry. It is in fact our domestic industry’s financial ballast.

To the extent that a US federal subsidy succeeds in American studios reshoring production, that will impact us.

***

MediaPolicy has been following the big Meta settlement with 48 US states (Florida is not settling) on the product liability lawsuit against Instagram and Facebook.

There is a good post-game analysis in the New York Times.

Meta’s lawyer is C.J. Mahoney. He was the US Deputy Trade Representative during the 2018 CUSMA talks (isn’t that an interesting connection between Big Tech and the Trump White House!).

The Times story reports that Mahoney stick handled his client’s settlement with the states after individual plaintiffs won the precedent setting jury trials in California and New Mexico resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars of damages awarded against Meta.

Those trials and related litigation proved that Meta can not successfully hide behind the “free speech” shield in the famous section 230 of the Clinton-era Communications Decency Act.

From there, it was all downhill sledding for the state Attorneys General.

And importantly for Canada, despite binding ourselves to Big Tech’s section 230 defence in the 2018 CUSMA digital chapter (clause 19.17.2), the reversal of Meta’s fortunes means that the federal Safe Social Media Act Bill C-34 is in principle not a violation of that agreement, vindicated by rulings in the American courts.

Another backbone moment in this story was demonstrated by the state Attorneys General who rebuffed Mahoney’s offer to settle for damages only. They held out for the product safety changes to protect children logging on to Facebook and Instagram. Credit the parent groups and children’s advocates who fought for that and made the states accountable to them.

According to the Times, the settlement’s die was cast before last month’s big trial even began but it took some time to line up agreement from the various states. The key was coming up with a fair allocation of the $18B USD in damages that will go to children’s mental health programs.

In the end, all 49 states fell into line except Texas (which settled separately shortly afterwards) and Florida.

The Florida suit will proceed as will many others, but one would expect that judges will engage in some extraordinary arm twisting in chambers with the plaintiffs’ lawyers to get them to fall in line with the Big Settlement.

Two remaining Big Questions are whether the Meta settlement gets adopted by competitors YouTube, TikTok and Snap and whether the safety upgrades helps Congress get to a deal on federal legislation.

***

Oops.

In my last post I wrote that “a leaked page grab from an internal Canadian Heritage document suggests that the $600 million will cover the $134 million in foregone streamer payments to Canadian audiovisual media funds for broadcast news and Canadian content.”

I made a mistaken assumption about the document’s authorship based on Globe & Mail journalist Barry Hertz’s tweet about the allocation numbers and Heritage Canada failing to confirm or deny to me when I asked if it was a Heritage document.

I have now discovered that the document in question is in fact an industry stakeholder’s summary of what the stakeholder was told verbally by a Heritage Canada source. The stakeholder contacted me this morning to clarify.

Hertz’s tweet indicates that according to Heritage the numbers cited in the stakeholder document were “not final.” I will leave it there.

***

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“Knowing those [streamer] players as we do, they were not going to say, ‘Thank you very much. We’re done.’ They were only going to regard that as the appetizer.”

August 29, 2026

The how and why of last Friday’s breakdown in US-Canadian trade talks preoccupied us for most of last week.

The Canadians weighed in on why things went sideways after Trump announced a “deal” several days before the deadline. The Americans spun their narrative in the other direction. Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick’s performance is not to be missed.

It would help to know what was in those negotiating documents that will never become public. Or to start demanding polygraphs that will never be taken.

Without those here is my take, based on what negotiators said and what might have happened.

Carney and Trump talked on the Tuesday night. Clearly they agreed on something. Probably it was some high level numbers on key tariffs. Looking for a public win, Trump couldn’t restrain himself and rushed to announce a deal the next morning. The key thing is that Trump thought he had hooked Carney by giving him enough and that the US would then steamroller the Canadians on the fine print and all of the remaining issues. Saying there was already a deal was part of his strategy.

That is the bargaining dynamic that often occurs when one negotiating party has, or believes it has, the hammer. Trump expected to run the table. If there was any truth to the rumours of the impending demise of the Online News Act, the Canadian team was half expecting the same.

But Trump miscalculated and overreached. On trucks and pickups. On culture. On Canada’s options to make other trade deals without Trump’s permission. This provided an opportunity for Ontario premier Doug Ford to signal Carney that he was about to go offside. Manitoba premier Wab Kinew already was. The Bloc Québécois was making noise about cultural concessions.

When CBC interviewed Trump’s trade envoy Jamieson Greer on Thursday he claimed that the cultural issue embedded in the federal Online Streaming Act —-repeatedly and narrowly confined to “the discoverability of French language content”—- was, shucks, never a big deal for the US.

“It’s the furthest thing from a red line,” Greer told CBC host Rosemary Barton. “We highlighted [it at the end] yes, but our view is you should let capitalism do its thing and let people pick. We know it’s important to people in Quebec….We would not have let it get in the way of a good deal.” (Roll the video from the nine minute mark).

Slick and slippery, yes. But more likely a sign that Trump thought the Canadians were already hooked and would swallow anything to get a deal across the line.

Greer still found time to have another moan to CBC’s Barton about streamer cash payments to Canadian media funds: “What we don’t like is a situation where Canada forces American tech companies to take their earnings to give a percentage to their competitors.”

Putting aside that mischaracterization of how cash payments to media funds get recycled to all contributors, Carney had already taken them off the table three months ago by overruling the CRTC.

Yet here Greer was still fixated on them, raising them on both Canadian and US television networks, even after the breakdown of talks and in the same breath in which he claimed that “the French language” issue raised by the federal Online Streaming Act and Québec’s counterpart Bill 109 was no big deal.

Canada’s trade envoy Dominic Leblanc responded to Greer’s claims tactically. He publicly thanked the Americans for taking the streamer issue off the table.

While Leblanc was thanking Greer, the Canadian cultural community was effusively and publicly thanking Carney for fending off the Americans.

Every iota of that effusiveness was proportional to a residual mistrust that the Online Streaming Act and the Online News Act are off the table for good, or that a Prime Minister who would give away the digital services tax for nothing, humiliate the CRTC by overruling their implementation of cash payments, and for Pete’s sake would even submit to a shameless Trump shakedown on a bridge we paid for, might yet fold again on culture.

Reynolds Mastin of the Canadian producers’ union CMPA, which has emerged as the de facto spokesperson for the English-language cultural community, described the near-death of the Online Streaming Act as “an inflection point” for Canadian culture and trade talks.

Mastin also politely chided the Carney government if it had indeed assumed that its climb down on the streamer payments in June had sated the US streamers’ hunger to get rid of the OSA altogether. “Knowing those players as we do, they were not going to say, ‘Thank you very much. We’re done.’ They were only going to regard that as the appetizer.”

This weekend Mastin’s CMPA and another 40 cultural organizations took the time and expense to express their gratitude to Carney “for standing up for Canada’s cultural sovereignty” in full-page newspaper ads. Newsmedia Canada’s Paul Deegan did much the same on the Online News Act.

In Québec, the Coalition for the Diversity of Cultural Expression went a step further, calling for Carney to throw it into reverse gear and reinstate the $200 million in audio-visual and audio streamer payments.

Carney is now in a pickle of his own making.

The Americans may or may not have let go of the cultural concessions. All it would take to revive them is an American reporter asking Trump the question.

Canadians have increasingly seen cultural issues as a defining issue of our dignity and resistance to Trump humiliation, at high levels of support that were already elevated according to year-old public polling.

Meanwhile Carney has his $600 million pot of cultural spending that, contrary to MediaPolicy’s initial skepticism, might actually be doing something more than taking the sting out of his climb down on cultural issues.

A leaked page grab from an internal Canadian Heritage document suggests that the $600 million will cover the $134 million in foregone streamer payments to Canadian audiovisual media funds for broadcast news and Canadian content. But the document also suggests that the remaining “unallocated” $467M is earmarked for “additional audiovisual stabilization funding” and the “audio sector.”

The vagueness of this $467 million commitment may sustain skeptics like myself. But other internal documents from Heritage suggest an earnest and far reaching rethink of how to spend not only the $467M but all of the $850 million in various federal programs for audio visual production on a growth and export strategy for Canadian content.

I’ve buried the lede here. More to come on that.

***

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – The $600M waterhole – Australia’s new C-18 – Paramount merger drama continues

August 22, 2026

I was pleased with myself this week to be quoted in a news story that described the Carney government’s promise of $600 million annually for cultural spending, in replacement of the CRTC’s $200M levy on foreign streamers, as “the world’s biggest lollipop.”

So clever, but ultimately the wrong metaphor even though the soporific effect of a big wad of federal cash was meant to take the edge off of the angry reaction among Canadian producers, broadcasters and the public at large after Carney overruled the CRTC.

No, the right metaphor is “the $600 million watering hole.”

I say that only because the Prime Minister and cabinet minister Marc Miller have been so coy about where the money is headed. After all, $600M is three times the overruled $200M. It’s not just a Netflix bailout.

But we’re still in the dark about the destination of those federal dollars. Members of the minister’s newly appointed advisory committee on audiovisual production have been sworn to secrecy, according to the Wire Report’s story about signing NDAs. The Wire Report story quotes one member of the committee as saying we will not see the product of their deliberations “for a few months.”

I would expect that the producers (CMPA), the broadcasters (CAB), and news publishers (Newsmedia Canada) are engaged in an all-hands-on-deck lobbying effort to influence where that $600M gets spent. If the government is telling them anything useful, no one is talking.

Ergo, let’s give uninformed speculation a try. Some of the additional $400M might be new spending. Some of it might relabel existing federal cultural dollars.

Government Priority 1?: Media Funds

Presumably the first $200M of the $600M is to do what minister Miller promised: replace the CRTC’s 5% cash levy on audiovisual (Netflix et al) and audio (Spotify et al) streamers.

The $200M figure came from the CRTC’s 2024 estimate and is now two years out of date. Of the total, the CRTC earmarked $140M for additional CanCon contributions to the Canada Media Fund for entertainment and children’s programming, the Independent Local TV News fund, the Indigenous Screen Office and a variety of smaller production funds that finance shows by and for diverse communities and official minority language communities.

Another $60M of music streamer cash was intended for artist development funds (Factor, MusicAction, Starmaker, and RadioStar). It was also to support Community Radio Fund and the newly established Indigenous Music Office.

There was also money for news reporting in small and mid-sized radio markets.

The audio streamers weren’t part of Carney’s June 3rd quash of the CRTC ruling on video streamers, but a subsequent communication by the federal Attorney-General to the judges hearing Spotify’s appeal to the Federal Court means that $60 million is gone too.

Based on the minister’s public statements, expect these media funds to be the first to drink from the $600M watering hole.

Priority 2?: Reversal of the fake cuts

The next speculative tranche of the $600M is a relabelling exercise: the restoration of 2026 federal budget cuts to cultural funding.

That would reverse the $192M cut to the CBC, the $68M cut to the Canada Media Fund, $13M cut from the Canadian Periodical Fund for magazines and community news publishers, and $2M from French-language TV5 News. Perhaps the Liberals will pick the moment to restore their cuts to the Canada Book Fund ($3.4M) and the Canada Music Fund ($16M). Final tally: nearly $300M.

Ever since the minister tabled these cuts in the “Main Estimates” federal budget back in February, the word on the street was that the CBC and Canada Media Fund cuts would be restored or mitigated in a Supplementary estimate.

Priority 3?: Double counting of budget dollars already announced for broadcaster access to the QCJO journalism labour tax credit

In March 2026 the Liberals announced (by my estimate) a $115M expansion of the QCJO journalism labour tax credit to television and radio broadcasters. The public pressure for policy action hasn’t let up: since then, Rogers and Global News announced layoffs in television and radio as well as closures of several AM radio station. Quebecor has threatened a fresh round of layoffs “if nothing changes.”

If Carney counts this as a piece of the $600M, this is also a relabelling of previously committed federal dollars.

Priority 4?: Replace the CRTC’s recent 1.55% cash levy on streamers and Canadian broadcasters, quashed by Carney’s announcement

The 1.55% would have relieved Canadian cable companies from the obligation to subsidize public service television channels mandated for basic cable TV by the CRTC (e.g. APTN, TV5, CPAC).

When the CRTC announced this cash levy in May I estimated the cost at $42M for foreign streamers and $93M for Canadian broadcasters.

If taken out of the $600M, that’s another $135M draw from the waterhole.

Priority 5?: More money to replace the lower than expected streamer investments in CanCon productions

The CRTC ruling that Carney overruled would have compelled foreign streamers to invest directly in Canadian shows at 8.5% of revenues (the cash levies of 5% and 1.55% made up the remainder of the overall 15%).

We won’t know until minister Miller unveils his new policy direction to the CRTC, but these “Canadian Programming Expenditure” investments could be metered at the same 8.5%, or more or even less. I say with a straight face: it all depends on what Carney promised Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos in that New York hotel room meeting in late May.

If Carney agreed to reduce that 8.5%, I figure it will cost about $28M in federal money to replace each percentage point of the 8.5%.

Priority 6?: the Online News Act

I hate saying this out loud, but others have as a matter of wish fulfillment. Between American trade bullying and Carney’s propensity to cave on cultural legislation, is the Online News Act on the chopping block?

If it doesn’t get thrown under the bus in trade negotiations, should we expect another hotel room meeting where the Prime Minister promises to sunset Google’s $100M news licensing payments to Canadian news organizations which are up for renewal in 2029? (A note here: Apple got an in-person meeting with the Prime Minister on June 11th to talk about the Safe Social Media Act, recorded in the lobby registry).

And if so, is Carney planning to replace Google’s $100M out of the $600M?

Priority 7?: Anything

There is the chance that the $600M includes money for some good public policy, independent of the expediency of the moment.

Not that I am stumping for it, but it would not surprise me at all if the Liberals committed more money to the export of Canadian shows through Telefilm, or special funding for international co-productions with France or other trading partners. It would rhyme with their overall approach to big investments with, um, non-hegemonic trading nations.

If you’ve done the math, that’s a $850M draw down from a $600M waterhole.

If Canadian producers, artists and broadcasters have also done the math, that would explain the flurry of lobbying activity since Miller announced the $600M.

***

While we Canadians speculate on the future of the Online News Act, this week the Albanese government in Australia legislated version 2.0 of its 2021 news licensing scheme, rechristened as the News Bargaining Incentive.

The NBI expands the scope of its 2021 legislation to add TikTok and Microsoft’s LinkedIn to the previous law that required Google and Meta to make licensing deals with most Australian news outlets. Meta refused to renew its deals that expired in 2024. The NBI is the government’s response.

The new legislation sets a price on compliance: the four tech companies must pay 2.5% of their Australian advertising revenues into a news fund.

However, each of the digital platforms can substantially reduce their cost by making licensing agreements directly with at least eight news organizations. The tech platforms get 150% credit toward their 2.5% target by making deals with large news organizations, and 200% credit for agreements made with small and medium sized news outlets.

If there’s any shortfall on meeting the 2.5% target, the government will levy the remainder in cash from the platforms with proceeds banked in a national news fund. That pool of money will be presumptively distributed to news organizations based on a journalist headcount, as in Canada. Unlike Canada, the Australian news fund can tweak the headcount formula to be more generous to smaller news outlets.

I have not seen estimates of news licensing payments the NBI will generate, but the 2.5% figure looks substantially less than the value of the 2021 deals which totalled $190M annually. And if deals get made to offset the 2.5%, it would be worth something closer to 1.5% of ad revenues.

There’s no word yet on when the NBI legislation will be proclaimed by the Albanese government. Not surprisingly, the Trump administration is opposed to the NBI and a spokesperson told the Australian Financial Review back in April that the White House regarded the NBI, which it did not differentiate from a digital services tax, as “foreign extortion.”

***

The Paramount/Warner Brothers merger drama refuses to take a week off.

As you recall, twelve US state attorneys general led by California’s Rob Bonta are contesting the $111B merger under the federal antitrust Clayton Act. A trial date is set for March 2027.

After threatening to move all of its studios out of Los Angeles, Paramount owner David Ellison’s new tactic is to ask the federal judge who granted an interim injunction against the merger to impose a $1.9 billion surety bond on the states. The purpose of the bond is to cover the $210 million per month “ticking fee” that Ellison will begin paying on October 1st to Warner Brothers Discovery shareholders who voted “yes” to the merger.

The judge previously declined to require the bond finding that the states’ lawsuit raises important matters of public policy. As for Bonta, he says Ellison made a grown up’s decision to agree to the ticking fees in the first place.

Meanwhile, the mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass appears to have been swayed by Ellison’s threat of a capital strike and is urging Bonta to make a deal now instead of pursuing the lawsuit. Her challenger in the upcoming municipal election supports going to trial instead.

The Trump administration looms large on the sideline. The White House is close to David Ellison’s father, the world’s second-richest man Larry, who is bankrolling the merger. Ellison Pater’s wealth comes from his Oracle Corporation. Oracle is carrying a lot of debt and is badly exposed in the event of financial instability in the AI industry.

Whether Bonta and the other attorneys-general want a court-ordered restructuring of the merger or just more financial commitments, delay is clearly their leverage.

One gets the feeling that with so much money and so many jobs at stake, a deal will get made long before trial. Late yesterday, California Governor Gavin Newsom expressed interest in an early deal and the Democratic nominee to replace the termed-out governor is also a proponent of settlement.

***

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Film industry throws down on Carney – ambitions for Canadian media tech – Paramount’s runaway shop

August 15, 2026

Canadians, it seems, are not looking for a national moment of humiliation in the face of US trade aggression. Public polling tell us so and hats off to The Line’s Jen Gerson for spelling it out.

“Canada is working to secure some kind of interim deal, and if the leaks are to be believed, we’re going to give the Americans essentially everything they want while they maintain most tariffs on us. It appears to be a shit deal for us, and one that puts us directly in the glide path toward vassal state.”

Visceral, yes. True, also yes.

The film and television production community thinks so too and said so this week, more politely, in an Open Letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s federal government.

The Open Letter published by the Canada Media Producers Association, and signed by 50 industry organizations, restates the industry’s dismay at the federal government’s decision to overrule the CRTC’s cash and investment obligations for US streamers.

The government’s current position is that later this year it will formally instruct the CRTC to strike down media fund cash levies on Hollywood streamers while the federal cabinet dictates a new figure for the direct streamer investments in Canadian programming that will be required. The government says it will dip into federal coffers to make up the difference.

“The government’s $600 million per year pledge, though appreciated and welcome, is not a substitute for durable, legally enforceable contribution obligations,” CMPA President Reynolds Mastin is quoted in the press release. “Discretionary funding is subject to budget and external political pressures; a regulated contribution framework is not.”

The CMPA and the broad spectrum of industry signatories to the Open Letter appear to be a content to stick with the CRTC’s overall 15%-of-revenues benchmark for streamer investments in Canadian content, even if it is missing the cash contributions to Canadian media funds that recycle the money into Canadian-produced programming that becomes available to the streamers through licensing agreements.

The signatories to the Open Letter also appear comfortable with the CRTC’s new investment obligations for Canadian broadcasters, reduced from 30% to 25% of revenues in May. No broadcasters signed the letter.

Notable absentees from the otherwise exhaustive list of signatories include the Los Angeles-headquartered film crew union IATSE Canada and the Toronto International Film Festival. TIFF chair Cameron Bailey was recently appointed by the federal government to represent the media industry on the federal government’s advisory committee on US-Canada trade talks.

***

Flying below the radar, the Canada Media Fund just announced that it has signed an Expression of Interest agreement with the Los Angeles-based Interlink Investment Group. A consortium of Canadian cultural groups signed on to the EOI, including the Vancouver Asian Film Festival, Racial Equity Screen Office, and Muslims in Media.

The CMF exists to allocate production funding, contributed by the federal government and Canadian cable companies, to independent Canadian producers creating and licensing Canadian content for television and streaming broadcast.

The project that CMF CEO Valerie Creighton has in mind is to create a public-private investment fund to support “a new model for international collaboration in the media and technology sectors that would complement Canada’s screen-sector ecosystem, creating new pathways for investment, co-production, technology development, content creation, and international distribution across a range of sectors, including film, television, digital media, gaming, creator economy ventures, artificial intelligence, virtual production, and emerging content technologies.”

Apparently, funding for a Canadian media tech stack.

The text of the EOI agreement has not been made public.

There are a million questions that arise out of the Fund’s surprise announcement. The first is whether this is a freewheeling Creighton floating a trial balloon or, on the other hand, a subtle move by an unseen hand on the federal government’s chessboard of media policy.

Heritage Canada has yet to comment on the proposal and no money has been committed by either public or private investors.

The semi-autonomous CMF is majority-funded by the federal government, seats two government appointees on its board, and reports on its programming activity through the Department of Canadian Heritage.

The Canadian-educated Interlink chairman, Shezad Rokerya, is a member of the World Economic Forum and chairman of the Canada–UAE Sovereign Wealth Fund Council. The Council appears to be an investment platform with personal endorsements from Canadian diplomats but not a formal status within government.

The policy idea of a Canadian owned media technology stack suggested by the CMF press release is consistent with at least two ideas much in general discussion of late: exports of Canadian audiovisual content and Canadian sovereign control over the distribution network for that content.

***

Is Paramount chair David Ellison planning a runaway shop to punish California for challenging its merger with Warner Brothers Discovery ?

After a federal judge sided with 12 plaintiff state governments to delay a trial date for their anti-trust lawsuit until March 2027, Ellison has threatened to move his entire studio operation out of Hollywood to another state if California does not negotiate an out of court settlement with him now.

Paramount begins paying $7 million per day to Warner Brothers Discovery shareholders on October 1st while the merger remains unconfirmed.

***

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Letter from a Canadian: On the meaning of trade ‘discrimination’

August 7, 2026

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!‘”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

***

It’s a post-modern cliché, but there is something to the idea that to name a thing is an expression of power.

Last November, 15 Republicans and 12 Democrats sitting on the House Ways and Means committee wrote to Canada’s trade minister Dominic Leblanc. They thanked Canada for rescinding its digital services tax. Then they called for the repeal of our Online Streaming Act (the “OSA”) because it’s “discrimination.”

Today, news reports in the Canadian press habitually list the OSA as laying square in the US trade cross-hairs.

Now that stop-and-start trade talks are heating up again it’s a good time to separate fact and fiction on the OSA.

Despite our long border and our differing origin stories, Canada and the United States have many things in common. We are democracies and we are neighbours. And we are global traders.

What we also have in common, although it seems to be slipping lately, is that in matters of cross border trade in goods and services, we respect each other’s sovereign decision-making provided they respect principles of fair treatment.

Of US companies operating on Canadian soil, or vice versa.

We wrote it all up in a trade treaty ratified by Canadian Parliament and the US Congress, the 2018 CUSMA deal (“USMCA” to Americans) and the two earlier versions signed in 1988 and 1992.

November’s congressional letter invited Canada to rescind the OSA because, according to its signatories, the OSA is “discriminatory” against US streamers and in violation of USCMA.

The TL:DR version of this post is to say the OSA is neither of those things.

…Continue reading at Cartt.ca

***

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