What is a Canadian Program? Instalment Four: New Platforms, Same Question

This is instalment 4 of 6 on how Canada defines a “Canadian program.” Here we focus on the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission’s attempt to update its sixty-year-old approach to certifying film and television productions as “Canadian” – a system that, until now, had applied only to Canada’s legacy broadcasters.

I’ve spent thirty-five years inside Canada’s certification system, and I have opinions about it. Those are for another day. This series just explains how the system actually works - who administers what, what each pathway requires, why a producer picks one regime over another, and where the incentives quietly diverge from their stated cultural purpose. That’s what gets you ready for the harder conversation: whether any of this works, or needs to be torn up. That conversation is coming, elsewhere.

Instalments 1, 2, and 3 each cover a different administrative regime running a different test to decide whether a production is “Canadian.” While the details of each regime differ, all three essentially ask a version of the same question: who made this?

• The CRTC’s C-number process counts whether enough of the key creative roles are filled by citizens or permanent residents. Hit the count, and the production is “Canadian.”

• CAVCO’s certification process asks essentially the same question, with copyright ownership requirements added to the mix. Hit the count, and the production is “Canadian.”

• Telefilm Canada’s certification process examines treaty co-productions to confirm whether the arrangements were split proportionately between the Canadian side and the international treaty partner. Hit the split, and the production is “Canadian.”

The CRTC’s old certification test never had to do the whole job of defining “Canadian” on its own. It worked inside a bundle of conditions the Commission could impose on broadcasters because each one needed something scarce: a broadcast licence. Licensed broadcasters had to be Canadian-owned and controlled, were required to air a minimum volume of Canadian content (i.e. “quotas”), and obligated to contribute real money towards the making of film or television content – obligations that did the real heavy lifting around cultural policy. The CRTC’s certification test’s only job was bookkeeping: counting who worked on a given program so it could be credited against those quotas.

Streaming platforms needed none of that. Since reaching audiences over the internet doesn’t require competing for scarce broadcast spectrum, they never had to apply for a licence – and without a licence application in front of it, the CRTC had nothing to attach conditions or obligations to. Worse, the Broadcasting Act, as written before 2023, didn’t even define streaming services as “broadcasting undertakings” in the first place. The CRTC’s problem ran deeper than leverage: it had no jurisdiction over streamers at all.

That gap mattered more every year. As Canadians shifted their viewing from licensed television broadcasters to streaming platforms, a system that only regulated the licensed side of the industry was regulating a shrinking share of what Canadians actually watched – and, with it, a shrinking share of the money that had historically funded Canadian production. Rather than force streamers into the old licensing regime, Parliament redefined who counted as a broadcaster.

That’s what the Online Streaming Act did. It came into force on April 27, 2023, amending the Broadcasting Act to give the CRTC authority to regulate services that broadcast over the internet rather than over licensed airwaves. The amendment added a new term to the Act’s definitions: an “online undertaking” is now “an undertaking for the transmission or retransmission of programs over the Internet” – a category that puts Netflix and Disney+ in the same regulatory bucket as every other licensed broadcaster.

With streamers finally inside the system, an obvious question followed: what does an international streaming platform actually owe the system that gives it access to Canadian audiences, and why? The government’s answer centred on the audience, not licensing. Broadcasters have long been required to reinvest in the system because they draw revenue from Canadian viewers, and streaming platforms draw revenue from those same viewers – so, the CRTC’s reasoning went, they should now carry the same obligation. Working out how much, from whom, and how has taken most of the three years since, and still isn’t finished. This instalment covers the first stage: how the Commission redefined what counts as a Canadian program in the first place.

In November 2025, the CRTC issued Broadcasting Regulatory Policy CRTC 2025-299 (the “New Rules”), which updated the points-based test that Instalment 1 walked through – the first change to it in a generation – and extended it to streaming platforms.1

Whether the new framework delivers anything meaningfully different for Canadian culture – or just replicates sixty years of process in a new distribution environment – is a question that still has no answer.

What the CRTC’s own vice-president of broadcasting said at the news conference announcing the decision is worth quoting directly: the new definition “maintains the same approach as the previous one by using a points system” based on the number of Canadians in key creative positions. Depending on where you sit on the issues, this statement was either a reassurance or an admission that two years of proceedings, a public hearing with 78 appearing parties, and 480 written submissions had produced only a recalibrated version of the test the CRTC first adopted in 1984.

But what really changed? Four points stand out:

• More roles count, and the scoring bar shifted to match: the roster now includes showrunner,2 a combined costume/make-up/hair department-head credit, and visual and special effects directors. Because the maximum available points varies by production (a given production may not have a showrunner or a special effects director), the CRTC replaced the fixed six-out-of-ten minimum with a 60% threshold of whatever points are relevant to a production.

• Three new bonus points reward Canadian content markers. A production can earn extra points for identifiable Canadian characters or settings, for adapting a Canadian written work, or for using majority-Canadian pre-existing music – on top of, not instead of, the points earned for who worked on it.

• A Canadian copyright ownership requirement, on a sliding scale. Below 20% Canadian copyright, a production is not eligible for CRTC certification at all. Between 20% and 50% Canadian copyright ownership, it needs 80% of the available points, and both the director and screenwriter must be Canadian. Above 50% Canadian copyright ownership, the bar drops to 60% of points and only one of the director and screenwriter needs to be Canadian.

• Looser nationality rules for producers, in exchange for shared copyright. Where copyright is shared with a non-Canadian partner, only half of the producer-related roles now need to be Canadian, reduced from all of the producer-related roles.

The underlying logic held steady: a production still needs no connection to Canada beyond the points themselves. Nothing in the New Rules introduced a content requirement, a thematic threshold, or any test of whether the resulting work has a meaningful connection to or resonance with Canada. That was true before this decision, and it remains true after it.

With streamers finally inside the system, an obvious question followed: what does an international streaming platform actually owe the system that gives it access to Canadian audiences, and why?

What the new framework did do is widen the gate. The expanded eligible production roles, the flexible 60% scoring floor, and the introduction of a shared ownership mechanism reflect a trade-off between investment and control: the Commission loosened its grip on exactly where Canadian involvement has to sit, in exchange for pulling in the streamers (and their investment dollars) who’d never been part of the system. A production can now clear the scoring floor while concentrating its Canadian involvement in less creatively central roles. The bonus points for Canadian characters, settings, and adapted Canadian works are optional: in theory they reward a Canadian connection but do not require one. And the copyright floor is set at 20%, not the 100% that CAVCO certification demands in order to access tax credits.

A producer who wants a Canadian program certificate from the CRTC now has more flexibility to do so than at any point in the system’s history. The next instalment examines at what that flexibility actually looks like in practice – and at how each of the CRTC’s, CAVCO’s, and Telefilm’s tests can be satisfied by a production whose only Canadian quality is the passport of the people who made it.3

So the CRTC has updated its framework, however whether the new framework delivers anything meaningfully different for Canadian culture – or just replicates sixty years of process in a new distribution environment – is a question that still has no answer.

The next instalment asks a different kind of question: not how the system works, but what a producer can choose to do with it.