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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Trust cascading Canadian journalism – Paramount wins the anti-trust battle – California signs off on news subsidies

October 4, 2026

Millions of students use AI to cheat on their assignments, or so we’ve heard.

So it is no surprise that someone claiming to be a independent journalist would use AI to deceive reputable news agencies.

“Daniel Robson,” now exposed as an alias, succeeded in publishing articles in a string of Canadian news and opinion outlets including The Ottawa Citizen, The Hub, Policy Options, the Montreal Gazette, Open Canada and the Western Standard while faking his identity with an AI photo illustration. He also used an AI large language model to write articles and his e-mail correspondence with editors.

Some of the editors had telephone calls with a human voice calling himself Daniel Robson.

But as the editor of Policy Options Les Perreaux confirmed after discovering the deception :

In reviewing our correspondence and the six other submissions the writer sent us which we did not publish, we have identified signs of AI assistance throughout. Image-analysis tools raised questions about the veracity of the photograph he supplied to us. Last October, he also declined an honorarium we occasionally offer to journalists who write for us – an unusual step for an emerging independent journalist.

We should have undertaken more verification before publication. I relied too heavily on the fact that work under Daniel Robson’s name had already appeared in other Canadian publications – a form of trust cascade in which publication itself becomes a credential.

The Globe & Mail, which noted it did not accept stories pitched by Robson, has a comprehensive news story here.

A more salacious story appears in the English-language Türkiye Today which alerted the duped Canadian news outlets. The gist of the story is that the mysterious Robson might be a Moroccan intelligence agent engaged in foreign interference with Canadian news outlets.

None of the Canadian news outlets are accusing the writer of civil or criminal fraud.

What struck me about the reporting on “Robson” was what I would call missing the forest for the trees.

This kind of deception —-including the most serious allegation of state-sponsored planting of stories—-is as old as analog. Large language model AI tools make it easier. Burned once by a “trust cascade” of successful publication elsewhere, newsroom editors will wise up. It’s a warning shot. We forgot that AI can do more than create deep fake videos for Russian bot farms to post on Facebook.

What should really concern us is a failure of our human imagination. A lesson is to be learned from the recent website hacking by autonomous AI agents that escaped their sandboxes at OpenAI and other companies.

In the context of journalism, contemplate a rogue “frontier model” AI agent, or an army of state sponsored AI agents, tirelessly probing with sophisticated array of audio, video, text and photo tools until it can pull off an undetected Robson-at-scale penetration of publishing software at multiple news outlets.

***

Prime Minister Mark Carney recently told the New York Times that one of the good things about building stronger Canadian ties with the European Union was that “the Europeans aren’t going to tell us what we have to put on our landing pages of Netflix or Spotify or whatever, and that stuff matters.”

That called for a MediaPolicy drill down on how the Europeans regulate Netflix and the Californian streamers. You can read about it in my post in Cartt.ca.

Also, I recently teamed up with Stephen Stohn to write in the Toronto Star about the importance of Carney standing up for the Online Streaming Act.

***

This week a US federal judge charged with hearing the anti-trust lawsuit brought by California’s Attorney-General and ten other states against the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger signed off on their out-of-court settlement.

The consensus opinion of the deal is that Paramount, owned by David Ellison and debt-financed by his friend-of-Trump father Larry, was the hands down winner.

You can read the bullet-point analysis in Axios. Deeper pieces are available from the New York Times or The Hollywood Reporter.

The settlement features only “behavioural remedies.” That means promises of post-merger good behaviour but no asset divestitures.

For example, the deal blesses Ellison’s ownership of competing cable news networks CBS and CNN on the condition that Ellison convene an editorial board to protect newsroom autonomy.

The outcome was a bit of a surprise.

California’s AG Rob Bonta held high value cards in this poker game. In court he could persuasively tell a judge that the merged studios would unfairly dominate competition between Hollywood studios, supported by major portfolios in cable television, news, and streaming video. He could win.

Bonta also figured to use Ellison’s financing against him in any settlement talks.

Not only is a big piece of the merger debt held against Ellison pater‘s personal fortune, the Ellisons were on the hook for $7 million daily payouts to Warner shareholders, beginning on October 1st, for any delay in getting court approval for the merger. The trial wasn’t even set to kick off until March 2027. That would be at least a $1.7 billion pill for Ellison to swallow.

But Ellison matched Bonta’s chips, smiled, and raised him. He made a bare knuckled threat to move Paramount studios and a successfully merged Warner Brothers out of California to another state. Bonta described this as “blackmail” and initially dug in.

Blackmail or no, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass begged for settlement. The big Hollywood unions split: IATSE and the Directors Guild for settlement, the Writers and Screen Actors Guilds opposed. The heir apparent to Gavin Newsom in the governor’s mansion, Xavier Becerra, was said to have been swayed by Ellison’s threat.

What tipped the balance was that Californian Democrats blinked. Perhaps eyeing the Democratic Presidential nomination for 2028, Newsom brokered the deal between Ellison and the states.

The deal does not oblige Ellison to keep Paramount Warner in California.

The whole episode was high drama and, for Canadians, reminds one of the Rogers-Shaw merger where the CRTC was sympathetic to Rogers’ pro-merger argument that shifted the focus away from market power wielded against rivals Bell and Telus and towards the creation of a stronger Canadian player fit to take on the media colossi of Netflix, Disney and YouTube. This was the same argument made by the Trump Department of Justice in supporting the Ellisons’ merger.

On a final note: US media is not saying anything about AG Bonta submitting to Governor Newsom. I’m no expert in Californian state law but it appears that the state’s Attorney General does not enjoy the same degree of autonomy from the Governor as we might expect in Canada.

***

As MediaPolicy noted three weeks ago, Californian Democrats pushed a news journalism state subsidy for local news through the state legislature.

Governor Newsom waited until the September 30th deadline and signed off on the bill despite some reservations.

In-state publishers and broadcasters with at least 33% of coverage of Californian current affairs are eligible.

The Californian Community News Act tracks Canada’s federal labour tax credit for hiring and retaining journalists although slightly skewed in favour of smaller news outlets. The Californian dollar amounts are comparable to the Canadian program: $20,000 (USD) per head for the first five journalists and $15,000 thereafter.

California’s projected budget allocation is $40M USD ($57M CDN), covering an estimated 2,600 journalists employed at 600 local news outlets. That is less than Canada’s $75M CDN program for news publishers, covering 3,900 journalists.

In the Californian bill, any new hires that grow the size of the newsroom are supported at $35,000 per salary, a feature rewarding newsroom expansion that Canada’s federal program does not include.

***

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Mark Carney, Canada’s cultural export

September 24, 2026

In this historical moment, Prime Minister Mark Carney has become our greatest cultural export. He is considered in his pronouncements, good natured and unflappable. He is the global anti-Trump.

Occasionally, the imperious CEO gets loose. In a rare appearance in the House of Commons for Question Period, Carney was obliged to grind out the parry and return of Opposition barbs.

Having gamely returned service to Pierre Poilievre’s first serves on issues of affordability, Carney swivelled to meet the incoming from Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet on the PM’s repeal of the Digital Services Tax and Netflix cash contributions to Canadian media funds.

“Mr. Speaker,” said Blanchet, “the Prime Minister personally cancelled contributions of any kind by tech giants to the economy or the arts in Quebec and Canada, including through taxes or content creation, simply to appease the American President. The effort fell flat. Although I remain unconvinced, the Prime Minister claims to have walked away from the negotiation table for language and culture-related reasons. Since the effort failed, should the Prime Minister consider reinstating the digital services tax and allowing cultural contributions by the web giants?“

After a reply offered in banal Parliamentary vocabulary, the Prime Minister steadied for Blanchet’s follow up volley.

Blanchet suggested that Carney’s strategy to build closer ties to the European Union meant that Canadian alignment with the EU’s bolder approach to digital taxes and streamer contributions would make sense after breaking off trade talks.

The Prime Minister stood up and delivered a curt, “No, Mr. Speaker.” And sat down. Pointe finale.

Now it helps to watch this on video so you can appreciate the dismissive tone and body language. The clip also captures the bemusement rippling through the Bloc MPs seated behind Blanchet.

As the Prime Minister probably appreciated afterwards, that kind of answer won’t cut it in Québec, a province that loves legislation regulating streamers so much it has two.

***

With the House of Commons sitting again, Parliamentary committees picked up from where they left off in the spring.

In the modern age of an all powerful Prime Minister’s Office, these independent committees frequently resemble teenager house parties when the parents go out of town. Don’t destroy the place and you can do much pretty much anything you want.

The Finance committee is chaired by Karina Gould, the Toronto–area MP and former cabinet minister who made an impressive run for the Liberal leadership in 2025. This week Gould delivered the Liberal committee majority’s report on public submissions for the upcoming 2026 budget.

It’s not all that newsworthy when the Finance Committee reports on its “pre-budget” consultation. Its MPs make loads of budget recommendations in policy areas already covered by fellow MPs sitting on other Parliamentary committees like Canadian Heritage. And in a Budget that remains in the tight fisted grip of the Finance Minister and the PM, the Finance MPs’ recommendations are far from being a first draft of the final Budget.

On culture, the Finance MPs made eleven recommendations.

Some are guaranteed never to see the light of day.

A recommendation that Internet Service Providers (i.e. Bell, Rogers, Québecor) begin paying the same five per cent culture levy that their cable divisions pay is a non-starter.

Recall how in June 2017 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau humiliated Canadian Heritage committee chair and fellow Liberal MP Hedy Fry by holding a pre-emptive news conference to dismiss out of hand her committee’s recommendation favouring an ISP tax.

Other recommendations may be under more serious consideration by the PMO. For example, this omnibus recommendation on public spending on news journalism captures several of them:

Support the sustainability and growth of newsroom jobs by maintaining the Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit at the current 35% rate and expanding eligibility criteria to include owner-operators, employees in broadcasting, and partners in news businesses. Budget 2026 should also direct at least 25% of federal advertising spending toward private-sector Canadian news outlets, address disparities in tax treatment for advertising, and extend the Local Journalism Initiative indefinitely to support the creation of original civic journalism in underserved communities.

The other recommendation that caught my eye was the strengthening of the intellectual property rights of news organizations in response to the ingestion of their content by AI large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude:

The committee further recommends that the Government of Canada protect Canadian news publishers’ intellectual property in the context of artificial intelligence by requiring government AI suppliers to commit to the principles of transparency, consent, and attribution when using copyright-protected content, requesting that the Competition Bureau examine competition issues in search and AI markets, including crawler practices.

And here is a companion recommendation that applies to any kind of Canadian media:

Ensure that artificial intelligence (AI) developers obtain permission and provide compensation for the use of copyright-protected works in training data, reject any new or expanded copyright exceptions for text and data mining, and require transparent disclosure and record-keeping of training sources to support a functioning licensing market.

There are many public policy issues packed into those two paragraphs.

But to news publishers, the issue is simple. They want to be compensated (or even asked permission) by the AI giants for ingesting their content, first for the “training data” that birthed the LLMs’ vocabulary and gave them the context to understand news content, and also for the “output” summaries that LLMs provide to inquisitive users like you and me.

The news publishers’ claim is that AI ingestion is not only without permission and compensation, it’s grabbing intellectual property that news publishers might use to make their own LLMs in open-sourced applications. As well, the LLMs are using ingested news content to create de facto news outlets that directly compete with the news publishers.

Faced with litigation from news publishers, the AI global giants have signed off some pick-and-choose deals with top news outlets.

It’s reminiscent of what happened ten years ago in news hyperlinking by Google and Facebook, ultimately leading to the Online News Act C-18. The web giants made a few deals on the cheap with big news organizations and stonewalled the smaller news publishers.

To those unlucky news outlets, the web giants offered instead free distribution of their hyperlinks in order to draw traffic to their websites. Even if that quid pro quo was ever adequately remunerative to publishers big and small for hyperlinks, it’s not on offer from AI companies for ingestion, including again Google and Meta.

That’s because the notion of an exchange value of “content for traffic” doesn’t apply to AI ingestion of news content that is killing traffic referrals from web platforms to news outlets, as the graph below indicates.

So what next?

There is already litigation over ingestion that will end up in the US Supreme Court and maybe our’s too. The Trump administration has lined up in support the ingesters. The Carney government is sitting on the fence.

His MPs on the Finance committee are recommending he get off of it.

finarp04-e Download

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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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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 – Will Carney’s Netflix tax play in Chicoutimi? – is the Liberal kids safety bill safe from Trump? – Paramount Warner Bros trial date

(satiric AI photo illustration)

August 9, 2026

It’s likely that the standout moments of the Mark Carney chapter in Canadian history books will include the Gordie Howe Bridge and his repeal of the digital services tax.

I’m not 100% sure how the Prime Minister will be remembered in English speaking Canada for his duck-and-cover on the Online Streaming Act, Bill C-11. But I’m a lot more certain how he will be remembered in Québec.

At the end of July, days after Carney announced three federal by-elections that include the swing-riding of Chicoutimi-Le Fjord, local Bloc Québécois candidate Caroline Dubé held a press conference to denounce Carney’s plan to eliminate the CRTC’s imposition of Canadian content contributions by Netflix and other US streaming giants.

Along with sitting Bloc MPs Mario Simard and Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Dubé teed off on Carney for ten minutes. The lead talking point was that Carney was letting global streamers off the hook for $200 million annually and turning to taxpayers to fill the funding gap: Canada’s first “Netflix tax.”

Another Bloc talking point was more visceral: the Bloc MPs were grinding their teeth over a Liberal double cross on a bill that the Justin Trudeau cabinet had managed to steer through the “psychodrama” of a minority Parliament in 2022 thanks to the Bloc. The Québec nationalist party’s lead on the file, MP Martin Champoux, had successfully negotiated several Bloc-sponsored amendments to the bill with Liberal MPs but Trudeau’s successor as Prime Minister appears to be taking steps to gut it in appeasement of Donald Trump’s trade aggression.

Last week Le Devoir published an opinion editorial co-written by leading Québec legal scholar Pierre Trudel (also one of the authors of the 2020 federal report that set the table for Bill C-11) hitting the same talking point on the risk of replacing regulatory contributions by streamers with federal budget dollars.

“Canadian cultural industries are condemned to a chronic dependence on public funds,” wrote Trudel and Jean-François Gaudreault-Desbiens in French. “That means creative activities are at the mercy of budgetary mood swings. At the same time, foreign companies that derive juicy income from the cultural consumption of Canadians get a pass….

“[Policies in implementation of Bill C-11] are at the heart of what allows Canada to be considered a different country from the United States.”

The op ed was endorsed by the signatures of an impressive list of Québec scholars. Open letters don’t always constitute a news worthy event, but this one will discomfit the Québec branch of the federal Liberal Party which, between the surrender of the digital services tax in June 2025 and this climb down on the Online Streaming Act, has lost the room in Québec on the cultural file.

The Chicoutimi by-election is August 31 and there are more to follow: two Montreal federal by-elections that the Prime Minister must call to fill the departures of Steven Guilbeault and the NDP’s Alexander Boulerice as well as the provincial election on October 5th.

***

If the Carney government continues down this path of gelding its own cultural legislation it may soon have to consider the fate of its online safety bill, The Safe Social Media Act Bill C-34, tabled in the House of Commons on June 10th.

At the time, the culture and identity minister Marc Miller publicly stated that C-34 would be shielded by the Liberals from US trade pressure because it involved the protection of children. “Kids just aren’t on the bargaining table, hard stop,” he added.

The Safe Social Media Act would regulate harmful content available from AI chatbots, social media, and porn sites. While there are specific safety features required by the bill, the centrepiece is a newly created legal “duty of care” requiring digital platforms to create safety plans, subject to approval of a new federal regulator, that minimize harmful content and feature safer digital design.

On the theory that Carney government has no appetite to stray further from what the Trump administration will tolerate in the regulation of US-headquartered digital platforms, it is worth noting that two years of stalemate in US Congress over online safety might be coming to a head.

Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn’s “KOSA” (Kids Online Safety Act) has passed the Senate a second time and was referred to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

House Republicans, however, still do not like KOSA’s “duty of care” strategy because they fear digital platforms will comply by “censoring” conservative-friendly content. As White House executive order on AI phrases it: “Congress should prevent the United States government from coercing technology providers, including AI providers, to ban, compel, or alter content based on partisan or ideological agendas.”

The House watered down the KOSA duty of care in the first version of the Senate bill. However it appears that Blackburn and a bipartisan Senate have drawn a line in the sand on the their version.

The White House has yet to pick a side, perhaps reluctant to make unpopular policy choices between protecting children and conservative speech on gay and transgender kids in the run-up to November’s mid-term elections.

Politico reported another wild card on this file; where Meta stands in all of this.

Meta lobbied against the earlier Senate version of KOSA two years ago because it didn’t support the Meta position that age gating or parental consent check-offs for minors accessing social media should be imposed on the Apple and Google app stores, not on Meta and other digital apps and platforms.

Meta is advancing the same position on age-gating in Canada, having pitched its case to the public on CBC. Meta has also been lobbying the Carney government on this issue.

It’s reasonable speculation that Meta might be prepared to both reinstate Canadian news on its platforms and pay publishers for it if it got something in return on the Safe Social Media Act.

***

A quick update on the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger that MediaPolicy has been tracking.

A federal court judge sided with the plaintiff state governments, who oppose the merger on anti-trust grounds, who asked for more time to prepare their case. A twelve-day trial will begin March 27, 2027.

***

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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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On Canada-US Friendship Day

August 1, 2026

On July 28th the Toronto Blue Jays suited up for nine innings against the Washington Nationals on “Canada-US Friendship Day.” The game was played in the US capital, home to the Nationals, the onetime franchise of the Montreal Expos. The friendship day was sponsored by the Canadian embassy in Washington, partnering with the Nationals’ organization.

The Jays won 6-3 and “Canada” came before “US” on the centre field jumbotron. How sweet it is.

Only as you can see above, the event was also sponsored by Google, Amazon, and Netflix, three of the Big Tech and Hollywood companies that have mobilized US Congress to demand the gelding of Canada’s Online Streaming Act. A spokesperson for the Canadian embassy told MediaPolicy that the Nationals arranged the corporate sponsorships.

Our cross border friendship was celebrated the same week that the Wire Report broke a story about the federal Attorney General’s court filing on behalf of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government. The AG advised the Federal Court of Appeal that it was rolling back every cent of the CRTC’s five percent cash levy on Netflix, Google, Amazon and the rest of the foreign streamers and replacing it with federal cash.

That’s old news of course, but the court had asked for clarification with an eye to dismissing the streamers’ appeal to strike down the CRTC levies on the grounds that the outcome no longer mattered. The court hearing was thirteen months ago in June 2025 and the final decision on a matter of pressing national importance remains outstanding. It sounds like the judges are looking for a back door to the courthouse.

Even though it was old news, the revelation that the government would instruct the CRTC that its streamer cash levy must be set at zero caused a stir because Culture and Identity minister Marc Miller had explicitly told reporters on June 14th that the cash levy would be lower but not zero, chastising the Opposition Bloc Québécois for suggesting otherwise. That sounded plausible because even Netflix had agreed to a two per cent levy back in 2023.

But now confusion reigned. A brief statement given by the minister’s office to the Globe and Mail misdescribed the levies. The Canadian Association of Broadcasters publicly expressed surprise at “zero” because it had been quietly advised otherwise in the past few weeks.

The Carney government keeps assuring the public that in due course it will publish its official policy direction to the CRTC on what it wants to see in place of the 15% streamer contribution to Canadian content (currently set at 6.5% cash contributions to Canadian media funds and another 8.5% in licensing or commissioning Canadian content for its own services).

Carney also told reporters that the government would meet with the CRTC commissioners “in the coming weeks” to “discuss” Canadian content.

In a formal sense, a “policy direction” and “discussion” is not as blatant a transgression against the CRTC’s independence from government as it seems.

The Broadcasting Act contemplates the federal government issuing to the CRTC “directions of general application on broad policy matters with respect to…any of the objectives of the regulatory policy set out in section 5(2),” a laundry list of broad regulatory goals.

But the statute does not permit a cabinet policy direction to overrule or modify the specific orders of a CRTC decision concerning streamers. Ironically, in drafting the Online Streaming Act the government intentionally denied itself this more direct power to second guess CRTC rulings in application to foreign streamers, while retaining the kill switch for rulings that involve licensed Canadian broadcasters.

So given the government’s self imposed restriction on the legal power to overrule the CRTC and the necessity to rely entirely on policy directions of “general application on broad policy matters,” how can the Carney and Miller instruct the CRTC to set cash levies at zero? And how can they dictate a specific number other than 15% for direct investments in Canadian content?

In the Broadcasting Act‘s formal process for issuing such a “broad” direction, minister Miller gets an otherwise forbidden face-to-face with the CRTC commissioners because of the federal cabinet’s statutory duty to “consult” the CRTC before publishing its marching orders in the Canada Gazette. It’s an opportunity for, um, candour that might not be appropriate in a published policy direction. Let’s not expect the meeting to be open to the media.

Depending on how this all plays out, it’s possible that some interested party might sue the Carney government for stretching too far the meaning of a “direction of general application on broad policy matters.”

There’s already litigation on the very same point. Telco provider SaskTel has gone to Federal Court of Appeal to challenge the federal cabinet’s very specific directions to the CRTC on requiring SaskTel and other telcos to rent out aggregated high-speed access on its wireline network to other Internet retailers. The legalese of the Telecommunications Act on “policy directions” is the same as the Broadcasting Act.

The majority Carney government probably is not agonizing over potential lawsuits. To speak plainly, the Liberals say they have an annual budget of $600 million in their pocket to replace $200 million in streamer levies and otherwise make supporters of Canadian content happy.

All of this is in the name of rewarding American trade pressure and the constant ratcheting threats of more American trade pressure.

Last November, members of a key US Congressional committee expressed their thanks to Canada for repealing our digital services tax and asked us to do the same with the Online Streaming Act.

Now that’s what I call friendship.

***

***

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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

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