The Bill Comes Due

Something significant happened this morning, and it deserves more than a few hours in the current news cycle.

The Liberal government announced that Cabinet will issue a new policy direction to the CRTC on the implementation of the Online Streaming Act - effectively killing the Commission's recently published contribution framework. Less than two weeks after the CRTC released a decision requiring Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, and Spotify to contribute 15% of their Canadian revenues to Canadian content, the government moved to override it. As a bridge (and a peace offering) while a new framework is considered, the government is writing a $600 million cheque to Canada's audio and audiovisual sectors.

As a taxpayer, I’m paying for a policy failure the government won't admit to. As a broadcasting and cultural policy wonk, I’m not surprised.

Critics had been warning about this legal exposure for years. The government proceeded anyway, because the sector demanded it and the politics of cultural sovereignty made it easy to say “yes”.

University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist has the best contemporaneous analysis of the mechanics, published this morning here. His core point: governments do not unwind CRTC decisions within a few days unless they’ve concluded the decision cannot remain in force. And since Cabinet doesn’t have the power under the Broadcasting Act to simply override the CRTC’s decision, the government is now forced to achieve through a new policy direction what it can’t do by decree. Geist also notes what the government’s press release conspicuously leaves out: the real driver here is trade. I know, the announcement never mentions CUSMA, the United States, or the threat of retaliatory tariffs. Culture Minister Marc Miller framed everything around “consumer affordability”. That’s not dishonest - the 15% framework was always going to trickle down to Canadian subscriber fees - but it is incomplete in ways that matter.

The trade pressure was certainly not a surprise. The US Trade Representative had already named the Online Streaming Act a formal irritant. American streamers were in Federal Court challenging the Commission’s interim 5% levy before the Commission’s subsequent decision to triple the pain was even drafted. A Republican congressman had introduced legislation promising retaliatory tariffs. Critics - Geist prominently and persistently among them - had been warning about this legal exposure for years. The government proceeded anyway, because the sector demanded it and the politics of cultural sovereignty made it easy to say “yes”.

Which brings us to the actual lesson of today, and it isn’t about Donald Trump.

The $600 million now flowing is not a cultural investment in any meaningful sense - there are no conditions attached to identity outcomes, no measures of what it will produce for Canadians’ sense of shared life or national belonging. It’s just another cheque drawn on our joint account to support the film & television production industry.

The 15% framework didn’t collapse because the Americans are aggressive, or because the government lacked nerve, or because cultural policy is impossible in a globalized world. It collapsed because it was built on a foundation that was always too weak to hold the weight placed on it: legally fragile, diplomatically exposed, and designed more to satisfy the demands of industry advocacy than to survive contact with economic and geopolitical reality. This is the bill coming due on years of magical thinking about what Canadian cultural regulation can accomplish, and how.

I have written here before - in “Who Gets the Billions” and “The Hearings Have Begun. The Thinking Has Not” - about the gap between the language Canadian cultural policy uses and the work the policy actually does. The hearings that produce these frameworks speak the language of identity: Canadians “seeing themselves on screen”, Canadian “voices” protected from American dominance, “cultural sovereignty” protected and affirmed. The decisions that emerge from the CRTC always speak the language of industry: contribution percentages, certified spending categories, fund allocations, ownership thresholds. My point is that these are not the same conversation, and pretending they are brings real costs. One of those costs arrived today.

The problem isn’t that industrial objectives sneak into cultural policy - the Broadcasting Act has always married the two, and it does so legitimately. Jobs, investment, domestic ownership of intellectual property: these are all worthy goals. The problem is that when a framework is sold as cultural necessity but designed as industrial subsidy, it becomes vulnerable in exactly the way today’s decision illustrates. The cultural justification does the political work of building the framework. But it cannot do the legal, diplomatic, or economic work of sustaining it. When those pressures arrive … and in a trade relationship with the Trump 2.0 United States, they were always going to arrive … the framework has no honest defence, because its honest purpose was never fully articulated.

The $600 million now flowing to the sector is instructive in its own right. It is not a cultural investment in any meaningful sense - there are no conditions attached to identity outcomes, no measures of what it will produce for Canadians’ sense of shared life or national belonging. It’s just another revenue replacement: the money the sector would have extracted from streamers, redirected from taxpayers instead. The title of Geist’s piece captures it precisely - “From Making Web Giants Pay to Making Taxpayers Pay”. Canadians are entitled to notice the difference between cultural policy and an industrial subsidy with some lame cultural wrapping.

The question requires honesty about what the system is for, what it has produced, what it has failed to accomplish, and what it is genuinely capable of producing. It does not have an easy answer. But it is, finally, the right question.

None of this means Canadian cultural policy is futile, or that the industrial sector’s concerns aren’t real. A small market beside the largest cultural producer in human history faces a few genuine structural pressures! The instinct to defend domestic creative space is not wrong. But a worthy defence requires a strong foundation. It requires policy that is honest about its purposes, resilient under scrutiny, and designed to produce outcomes that can actually be measured against the cultural goals it claims. What it cannot survive - as today demonstrates - is being built primarily on meaningless advocacy slogans and political convenience, then sent out into a world that has no interest or obligation to play along.

The new policy direction Cabinet will issue represents an opportunity that the sector and the government would be unwise to waste. The question is whether anyone involved is ready for the harder conversation that opportunity requires - one that starts not with “how do we restore what was lost today” but with “what does a cultural policy framework actually need to be, in order to endure?”

I honestly doubt there are few so inclined - because that question requires honesty about what the system is for, what it has produced, what it has failed to accomplish, and what it is genuinely capable of producing. It does not have an easy answer. But it is, finally, the right question.