Canada is in the middle of a live tariff fight over steel, aluminum, autos, and lumber, trying to land a renewed CUSMA – worth roughly $720 billion a year in goods. The government has committed to spend 5% of GDP on defence by 2035. The Bank of Canada is holding interest rates steady in a currency that’s been sitting near a two-year low against the U.S. dollar. Housing remains unaffordable by any historical measure, and Ottawa’s debt-servicing bill now rivals what it transfers annually to the provinces for health care. These are serious times. Canada is recalculating what it can afford and what it can’t.
Against this backdrop, fifty Canadian film- and television-sector organisations have published an “open letter” demanding that the Prime Minister re-commit to guaranteeing their industry 15% of everything Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime and the rest earn from Canadian subscribers – an amount the CRTC estimates at roughly $2 billion a year. The August 13th demand doesn’t try to defend the numbers – instead, it argues “principle”. That principle … is “sovereignty.”
Hold the line, it says, on what’s formally known as the “Canadian Programming Expenditure” requirement (CPE): keep it in place, don’t water it down in the policy rewrite Ottawa promised back in June, or Canadians will be “left watching from the sidelines as foreign content increasingly defines what Canadians see on their screens.”
The whole exercise, by these principled organisations, in the letter’s own principled words, is Canada “reaffirming its economic and cultural sovereignty.”
“Sovereignty” is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting, so let’s ask what it’s actually trying to lift.
The CPE fight glows brightly on Washington’s CUSMA radar, along with some other heavy hitters: Canada’s supply-managed dairy system, softwood lumber, auto “rules of origin,” and provincial alcohol bans pulling U.S. liquor off Canadian shelves. The U.S. Trade Representative has confirmed the CPE requirement as one of the issues considered most antagonistic. A Republican bill in Congress would direct his office to investigate it as an unfair trade practice and retaliate, tariffs included. Carney’s government backed off the CRTC’s 15% decision on June 3rd, in part, to keep the issue from blowing up his larger negotiation.
But fifty organisations are now demanding the Prime Minister walk that retreat back, mid-negotiation, on one of the most contentious issues on the table – one the Americans have told him they’re watching … closely.
The demand’s language is meticulous, and convenient. It calls the government’s recent $600-million annual pledge of additional sector support “appreciated and welcome,” then spends a paragraph explaining why it’s not nearly enough: it’s discretionary, it’s subject to “budget and external political pressures,” and it’s no substitute for something “durable” and “legally enforceable.” According to the domestic film and television industry, gratitude comes with a lot of fine print.
Curiously, nowhere does the letter say what happens to Ottawa’s $600 million if the 15% obligation on foreign streamers is restored. Does it disappear once Netflix et al. are put back on the hook, or does the sector expect to keep both? It’s an obvious question, and the industry’s “open letter” leaves the question … open.
Each of the fifty names on the demand has an interest, directly or indirectly, in the system the letter is defending. They consist of (a) ten national and regional producer/industry trade bodies – whose members are the direct commercial recipients of tax credits, federal agency financing, and mandated contribution dollars; (b) ten unions and guilds - who represent workers who are paid when contribution-funded productions are made, their members’ income structurally tied to production volume; (c) nine identity and equity advocacy bodies – who administer, lobby for, and advocate for their particular constituency’s slice of the same contribution pool; (d) twelve regional film festivals – whose pipelines and programming depend on the health of a domestic production sector; and (e) nine other cultural/industry bodies – representing a mix of talent agencies and exhibitors whose relevance and revenue track the volume of contribution-funded Canadian productions.
Fifty signatories, one financial interest[1].
What no other industry gets
Strip away federal and provincial tax credits, Telefilm, the Canada Media Fund, the provincial sector-supporting funds, the mandated licence-fee and CPE obligations imposed on broadcasters and streamers, and a loonie that’s spent most of 2026 trading in the low seventy-cent range against the U.S. dollar – effectively a discount on every Canadian production paid for in U.S. currency – and it is not an unreasonable proposition that most of English-Canadian film and television production, as currently constituted, would not exist as a business.
The Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA) itself likes to compare the sector’s footprint to auto manufacturing, oil and gas, and mining – which are real comparisons, worth taking seriously. All three have also received subsidy – Ottawa’s $34-billion outlay on Trans Mountain, the exploration tax credits baked into mining and oil and gas financing for decades, the more recent multi-billion-dollar EV battery plant deals. What separates them is proportion.
Per CMPA’s own Profile 2025, tax credits, the Canada Media Fund, and mandated broadcaster fees together account for roughly two-thirds of all English- and French-language television financing. Nobody argues two-thirds of automotive or oil and gas investment traces back to government programs as the baseline assumption of how those industries get financed. Yes, they get subsidies, sometimes large ones, usually tied to a specific crisis or a specific plant. But those industries are not built, from the ground up, around the assumption that the public purse is a committed partner in every project’s financing plan. The Canadian film and television industry is.
The industry’s own numbers keep undercutting its “sky is falling” messaging: CMPA’s Profile 2023 put total production volume at $12.19 billion for 2022/23 – the high-water mark on record, reported just two years prior to this most recent demand for help. Last year, the sector’s $10.17 billion in production volume was a partial rebound from a U.S. production strike-driven dip. There is no crisis, yet fifty organisations are demanding the Prime Minister to treat their commercial interests as a five-alarm fire.
Others have also questioned the veracity of these claims. Professor Michael Geist of University of Ottawa. Geist first wrote an article in 2017 entitled, not subtly, “No Panic: Canadian TV and Film Production Posts Biggest Year Ever.” In 2020 he made a similar case (“Why There is No Canadian Content Crisis”) and again in 2022, when he described the state of the industry as one of “record production, record Cancon production, record French-language production” against a backdrop of lobbying claims he called “wildly exaggerated.”
None of this is a scandal. Cultural policy has always subsidized things markets won’t fully fund on their own, and there’s a real argument for why that’s worth doing, particularly in a country like Canada. But that’s an argument the letter never raises, because raising it plainly and publicly invites the obvious follow-up question: after sixty years of government underwriting this industry, and a recent record year on the books, what is the argument for locking in a permanent, escalating annual claim on government or streamer revenue – as the thing standing between Canadian culture and its erasure?
Put this all together and the strategy is clear. An industry substantially financed by taxpayers is demanding the government add roughly $2 billion a year to the pot, making the case in the language of sovereignty – a choice that isn’t accidental. Call something a matter of sovereignty and it stops being a cost-benefit question. Nobody ever asks whether sovereignty is a “good deal.”
But sovereignty isn’t a word that’s free to use this year. The government is already spending its sovereignty capital on a trade negotiation where this file is front and centre, a $35-billion Arctic and NORAD build-out, a new $24-billion submarine fleet, and an F-35 fighter-jet order currently valued at $27.7 billion. Those commitments get weighed against everything else the country needs, in public, argued over, traded off, year after year.
That’s the bar: not whether something sounds like sovereignty, but whether it survives being weighed, repeatedly and in public, against everything else the country needs. If the CPE fight genuinely belongs in the sovereignty category, it must clear the same bar: is a new $2-billion-a-year obligation on streamers really where the country should spend its sovereignty capital right now?
The letter never asks that question, because it wants the exemption sovereignty issues grant without the scrutiny sovereignty issues demand. Either this is a genuine sovereignty question, in which case it belongs in the same conversation as tariffs and NATO commitments and has to be weighed against them honestly – or it’s a commercial ask dressed up in a flag, and should be judged like one: on the numbers, on the return-on-investment, against the sector’s own record year, in a country with rather more pressing uses for the word “sovereignty.”
Fifty organisations read the room perfectly. The industry’s room. Not the country’s.
[1] Friends of Canadian Media (FRIENDS) is the exception. The organisation is both non-partisan and donor-funded – not a recipient of production funding, and closer to citizen advocacy than the others. However, FRIENDS ongoing relevance depends on the advocacy battles it wages in support of “the protection and promotion of Canadian voices in news, culture, and entertainment.” It has a different kind of interest than its co-signatories – just not no interest.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.