Netflix – MediaPolicy.ca

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

July 5, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alternatively, Brady could raffle it off.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

Still, the podcast is well worth your time.

***

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

Here are a few in the recent past:

TikTok spun off its American operations with Oracle founder and billionaire Larry Ellison taking control.
Ellison is the money behind Paramount’s take-over of Warner Brothers Discovery, leaving Netflix as the jilted suitor flush with an unspent dowry.
The Murdoch family’s Fox Entertainment has bought Roku, combining Fox’s content empire with Roku’s extensive home distribution network.

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Huzzah.

***

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

June 14, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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.

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – a Netflix tax? – Fawcett defends boss, subsidies – the Online News Act v. 2.0.

The Leader of the Opposition gets his sunglasses stuck in his teeth

May 30, 2026

Last week I published my take on the CRTC’s latest ruling on how much Netflix and the Hollywood streamers will have to invest in Canadian programming and how they will make that content highly visible on their platforms.

As for what the Commission did for Canadian broadcasters, I was harshly critical of the decision to relieve them of minimum investments in English-language dramas and documentaries based on the sanguine hunch that US streamers might do it for them. I wish I could be harsher.

I highly recommend a Substack column by Derrek Lennox who casts cultural sovereignty as a project of building an infrastructure of empathy among Canadian communities. Worth the short read.

***

Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre is calling for the federal government to cancel the CRTC’s Netflix ruling on the grounds that it will cause subscription prices to rise —he’s calling it “a Netflix tax”—and goad the Trump administration into even more trade retaliation.

As yet, Poilievre isn’t recycling his old accusation that the Online Streaming Act’s promotion of Canadian content is “government censorship….pro-government, liberal-leaning, boring, statist content that is approved of by the establishment crowd in general and the liberal glitterati in particular.” Ouch!

Indeed according to Poilievre, the legislation is a Liberal tool intended to “favour certain kinds of pro-government content online while discouraging content that the government does not want us to see, in some cases taking that content off the Internet together.”

Sticking to the better messaging point, he says the new CRTC ruling is a consumer tax because the streamers will pass along regulatory charges to the public.

Poilievre isn’t wrong about that being possible, but here’s some context.

Netflix upped the price on its standard plan from $14 monthly to $15 in 2020. Then to $16.50 in 2022. Then to $19 in 2025. That was twice the rate of inflation.

As for the CRTC ruling, the cash cost to Netflix and the Hollywood streamers is not the 15% of Canadian revenues set as an overall investment in Canadian content, mostly in their own shows on their own platforms.

The out of pocket cash cost is not the 15% but an included 6.55% of revenues, paid to Canadian media funds supporting news, entertainment, and a short list of public service programming such as APTN, Omni multilingual, Ugavut TV or CPAC.

The streaming market —the highly concentrated streaming market— will determine how much of this 6.55% cash levy that Netflix can pass along to subscribers.

Still, you would expect at least some of that 6.55% levy to drive the 2028 price increase higher. As much as, I dunno, twice the rate of inflation?

***

Kudos to Max Fawcett, the National Observer columnist who stepped up to take one for his team.

It began with a Blacklock’s Reporter story reporting on the journalism subsidies collected over the last ten years by the Observer from the three major federal programs. That wouldn’t be especially newsworthy except for the fact that Observer publisher Linda Solomon Wood is one of five news publishers sitting on a panel that decides which news outlets get a piece of the Local Journalism Initiative.

A past recipient of the National Newspaper Award for best columnist, Fawcett went on Ryan Jespersen’s Edmonton talk radio show and gave a scorching elevator speech defending the Observer and the federal programs.

He didn’t address the point raised by Blacklock’s reporting that maybe his boss should not be sitting on the panel that carves up limited funds in the federal Local Journalism Initiative.

Wood and the other members of the judging panel did recuse themselves when their own publications were reviewed. The Observer was awarded two out of the 700 one-year job subsidies this year and three last year.

Still, Canadian Heritage would do well to consider putting academics and retired journalists in charge of the LJI disbursements, as it does for the QCJO program.

On the general topic of journalism subsidies, I came across a parliamentary brief that Torstar just submitted to the Heritage committee’s investigation into the state of news journalism. I confess to a love-hate relationship with Torstar (I was the Unifor union rep at the Toronto Star for many years) but I found this submission has a lot of policy gravitas.

Torstar Submission to CHPC – FINAL Download

***

The Online News Act, directing Google payments for news links, is under threat. But not just from looming CUSMA trade negotiations, rather from AI technology.

This has been known for some time. Google’s Search’s AI Overviews and AI Mode offer comprehensive answers to questions, before you get to the page after page of ten blue links.

Google’s referral traffic to news sites has already plummeted and it will get worse as late adapters get comfortable with AI tools. If the Online News Act was intended to compensate news publishers for populating Google’s blue links, that intention is being steadily eclipsed.

The next AI wave is now hitting Google Search which enjoys a 90% world market share. You can read the long versions at TechCrunch or in Press Gazette, but two of the new features of an overhauled Google AI mode stood out to me.

The first is what you already get on most AI chatbots: Google Search will engage in a conversation with you, deducing your research mission and offering help. Its response will be gussied up by creating multimedia answers to your question. Clicking through hyperlinks to original news sources, even if these are still offered, will be for suckers. I will remain one of those suckers, but I expect most will not look the gift horse in the mouth and let AI mode take over their brains, although maybe not for the more discerning news consumers who still want to check the underlying reporting.

But the truly revolutionary AI feature will be creating autonomous research agents that become your auto piloted research apps for the next days, weeks or years and periodically bring to your attention breaking news and developments relevant to your search query.

At some point, I may break down and create an AI agent for “what is happening in Canadian media policy.” Just as a science experiment, mind you. Right now, I read e-newsletters offering links to media news.

The point is, the new Google may well kill Search referrals to original news sites. Kill them dead.

That appears to be the goal, anyway. And with that death goes any Google argument that its intermediation of hyperlinks, as they currently argue, makes them a benefactor to the news industry whose content they ingest.

On the other hand, the alternative (and unofficial) government intention behind legislating the Online News Act was not just compensating news outlets for their journalism, but effectively levying an anti-competition fine against Google Search for its oligopoly power over advertising in the absence of any action by the federal Competition Bureau. Google isn’t able to exercise that kind of monopoly power in the AI market, at least not yet.

As for the impact on the Online News Act, any retreat from offering news hyperlinks means Google will certainly buck against renewing its $100M/yr deal to fund news journalism that expires in 2030.

That’s how much time the federal government has to wake up and acknowledge that Google and the other AI bots are ingesting Canadian news by scraping their websites without a license. What is needed are amendments to an Online News Act v.2.0, starting with a new definition of a “digital news intermediary.”

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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.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – media funding in Québec – innovation in news journalism – The Netflix Effect

Québec culture minister Mathieu Lacombe

May 18, 2026

There’s an election upcoming in Québec this fall and the politics of media and culture can be expected to get a lot of attention.

This past week media titan Pierre-Karl Péladeau delivered his remarks about Québécor’s most recent quarterly report by celebrating the strong growth in his expanding national telco business. He then tacked on a threat to cut more jobs and programming in his money-losing television business unless he gets what he wants.

Péladeau has cut 800 television jobs in the last four years and 20% of original programming. Citing a 14% drop in ad revenues over the last year, he told reporters that he has done his part by cutting jobs and programming, bringing his media division back to break-even after years of losses (owing to his cuts and stronger broadcasting revenues from Montréal Canadians hockey).

Now Péladeau wants to squeeze his suppliers. By that he means price reductions from independent producers who make his TV content and wage concessions from the crews that shoot them.

From the provincial government, Péladeau wants more television production tax credits and the removal of tax deductions for Canadian advertisers patronizing foreign tech platforms. His explicit “or else” is more job cuts and replacing original television content shot in Québec with foreign acquisitions.

The new CAQ Premier Christine Fréchette didn’t take the bait from Péladeau, the former leader of her rival Parti Québécois, preferring to reflect that her government “is closely monitoring developments in the cultural sector and in relation to digital media.”

But her culture minister Mathieu Lacombe, not so much. He was annoyed by Péladeau’s ultimatums, reminding the him that the province —which just increased its $50M annual budget to supplement federal contributions to French language television production—won’t overcommit to television programming on a “dying” cable television network. Salting it some more, Lacombe suggested that following Péladeau’s logic the province was being invited to go down the path of “nationalizing” Québécor’s TVA network.

Also, Lacombe might not appreciate Péladeau’s public demands just two months after his government’s March 2026 budget that delivered on extending Québec’s journalism labour tax credit to licensed television and radio stations at a cost of $40M annually. At the time, Péladeau commented that “while we have been calling for this for many years, the Québec government’s decision represents a major step forward.”

***

The Québec government’s decision in March to extend journalism tax credits beyond print media to include television and radio stations did not get much attention in the English language press. The federal government is now considering the same move.

Under the radar, the Québec budget began its three-year phase out of an eight-year-old $8M/yr spending program for digital transformation of legacy media.

Québec has always been more aggressive than the federal government about supporting digital innovation through subsidies, both as one-of tech projects and the inclusion of IT staff in its labour tax credit.

As Senator Andrew Cardozo and I wrote in our recent report, La Presse credits Québec’s support for digital innovation as making a big contribution to its successful digital transformation as well as its ability to retain software developers who might otherwise abandon their employer for better paying jobs in the tech ecosystem.

But in the March budget, the province eliminated the IT salary subsidy and began the wind down of the digital transformation grants.

***

“Innovation” holds a magical place in media policy.

Some see innovation and government subsidies as binary: one cancels out the other. The assumption is that the opportunity for innovation to grease the skids of transition from legacy media to a successful new business model will be stymied so long as news outlets can fall back on subsidies.

In our report “Making News Media Sustainable,” Senator Cardozo and I see innovation and subsidies as complimentary. We wrote a longish part of the report on innovation and observed that the nation’s best adapters to digital —the Globe & Mail, La Presse, Village Media— draw journalism subsidies.

On either view, realizing the potential of innovation probably comes down to corporate leadership, something I think Ariel Freiman described well in this recent piece in J-Source.

It’s possible that if innovation and subsidies can elbow each other out, it will probably depend in part upon the particular market in which news outlets operate. Is that market national, regional, local or hyperlocal? What is the audience demographic? How saturated is the competitive landscape? What are the opportunities for scale? And so on.

We also tend to think about innovation as “tech.” There’s been plenty of that, with the above noted news outlets all hitting it out of the park by developing proprietary publishing software.

Another innovation theme that keeps emerging in media commentary is “the bundle.” That refers to the digital reimagination of the old newspaper formula of packaging news content together with an array of local information, buy-sell classifieds, pastimes, and invitations to community participation.

Village Media is a constant innovator on this score, as the Senator and I discuss in our report. Last week I stumbled upon a good e-newsletter on news innovation written by a German journalist Ulrike Langer, located in the US. Her latest is an interview with Richard Gingras, the former Google VP who now serves as chair of CEO Jeff Elgie’s board of directors at Village.

After describing the ways in which Village is putting together its content bundle, Gingras is at pains to describe Village as a “community impact platform” (or alternatively a “community operating system”) that includes news publishing in that bigger bundle.

Gingras also thinks that as AI tools automate writing and publishing, the “human element” (journalists?) will increasingly be directed at gathering information and forming the community bonds and sources to provide it.

In the course of the interview, Gingras let the cat out of the bag by revealing that the 27-location Village network is about to expand to 15 locations in the US with an American partner.

When I asked Elgie where and when, he replied in an e-mail that he isn’t ready to announce the move yet.

***

I will plead guilty to the charge of indulging, from time to time, in bitter sarcasm. Most often in response to the hubris of the Big Tech elite. You may have noticed.

Netflix is the object of my disaffections this week.

The studio-streaming colossus has some claim to my better angels and maybe your’s as well. After all, Netflix isn’t a social media platform that floods the digital airwaves with poisonous content.

Just ask Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos. According to him, Netflix is a benevolent force for good in the world. In a riff on the adage “what’s good for General Motors is good for America,” Sarandos dropped this pearl last week, modestly dubbed “the Netflix Effect”:

Over the last decade, Netflix shows and movies have consistently shaped what people read, buy, listen to, eat, wear and play. We’ve pushed old songs back up the musical charts, helped niche sports go mainstream, and boosted sales…Now we have a responsibility to keep that flywheel going. That’s why, while other entertainment companies pull back, we’re leaning in — spending tens of billions of dollars on content every year, investing in production facilities from Spain to New Jersey, and growing the entertainment industry through training programs that have reached over 90,000 people across more than 75 countries.

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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.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Québec’s Netflix-Spotify bill is in play – social media ban for teens – hostile bid for Warner Bros and CNN – OpenAI’s Disney video app

AI generated image from OpenAI

December 13, 2025

This week the Québec National Assembly unanimously passed Bill 109, its version of the federal Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act.

MediaPolicy has been following this file since the CAQ government commissioned a blue-ribbon committee to recommend how to reverse the low availability and consumption of French language content on global streaming platforms. In reverse chronological order, you can update yourself on this story here, here, here and here.

The CAQ bill is a policy response to the federal cabinet’s and the CRTC’s hesitancy to implement the “content discoverability” provisions of the federal bill as written by Parliament.

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.

Social media companies are expected to rely on age estimation technology but also photo ID.

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 Reporter has 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.

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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.

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