What is a Canadian Program? (It Depends on Who's Asking - and Why)

Ask most Canadians what a “Canadian program” is and you’ll get a reasonable answer. Something made here. Something made by Canadians. Something about us. Perhaps with a Toronto streetcar or Montreal’s Olympic Stadium appearing in a shot … or at least one character who apologizes constantly.

Ask a production lawyer the same question and you’ll get a different answer entirely - or rather, several different answers, each technically correct, each incomplete, and each contingent on which government body or international client is doing the asking and what financial benefits are at stake.

That gap - between the intuitive meaning of “Canadian program” and its myriad legal, regulatory, and commercial meanings - is what this series is about. And it turns out the gap is a lot wider, and a lot more consequential, than most people realize. So if you’re interested in understanding a bit more about how we, as a country, define “Canadian” in the context of film and television production, read on ….

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Canada has one of the most elaborate systems of cultural incentives in the world. Federal and provincial governments, the CRTC, Telefilm Canada, the Canada Media Fund, and a constellation of broadcasters and streaming platforms all operate under rules that require, reward, or prefer “Canadian” programming. We are talking about access to many hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits, production funds, and regulatory obligations - all of which turn on whether a given film or television program qualifies as “Canadian.”

You would think, given the stakes, that “Canadian” would have a single, clear, agreed-upon meaning.

It does not.

There are several distinct and mutually conflicting certification systems operating in Canada simultaneously, each with its own definition of what counts as Canadian, each administered by a different federal body, each conferring different benefits on qualifying productions - and each exploitable, in different ways, by producers who want the money without necessarily delivering the cultural goods the system was designed to encourage.

My dissertation research at the University of Ottawa examines whether Canadian content regulation actually does what it says it does - whether it fulfills a genuine nation-building function or whether it operates primarily as industrial policy wearing cultural clothing. The certification architecture is where that question becomes most concrete, and most uncomfortable. And it is a subject I have been watching from inside the industry for over thirty-five years: as a practising entertainment lawyer, as a production executive, and now as someone attempting a more systematic analysis of what we’ve actually built and why.

This series is an attempt to explain that essential architecture - accessibly, honestly, and with some attention to what it reveals about the gap between the rhetoric of Canadian cultural policy and the reality of how the system actually operates.

Over the next several instalments, I’ll walk through three of the most common certification pathways - from the most modest to the most lucrative - and then pull back to look at the system as a whole. Here’s a short roadmap of where we’ll go …

Instalment One will examine CRTC certification: the “C-number” system administered by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which is the oldest and in many ways the most revealing pathway - because it confers the least financial benefit while still technically making a production “Canadian.” It will surprise you how many programs hold a C-number, and how little that number actually means in terms of public support. The CRTC’s public database currently lists over 61,000 certified programs. Most Canadians have never heard of the system that produced that list.

Instalment Two will turn to certification by the Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office and the Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit - the federal tax credit that is, for most independent producers in Canada, the financial heartbeat of the Canadian production system. This is where the real money is, and where, not surprisingly, the definition of “Canadian” gets considerably more demanding - and considerably more gameable.

Instalment Three will examine Canada’s official co-production treaties: bilateral arrangements with over fifty countries that allow a production to qualify simultaneously as “Canadian” and as a national production of a treaty partner. This pathway is the most sophisticated and the most explicitly international in its orientation - and it raises some of the sharpest questions about what “Canadian” is actually supposed to mean.

Instalment Four will address the streaming era: how Bill C-11’s Online Streaming Act has thrown the existing certification architecture into flux, and what the CRTC’s recent decisions on a modernized “Canadian program” definition actually change - or fail to change - about the underlying incentive structure.

Instalment Five will be the one where I will probably become less diplomatic. It will look at how producers deliberately structure their productions to capture certification benefits while minimizing genuine Canadian creative or economic substance. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is, in many respects, a rational response to a system whose design invites exactly this kind of behaviour. Understanding why requires understanding everything covered in the previous instalments - which is why I’m saving it for last.

The capstone instalment will step back and ask the normative question: if the certification system is primarily an industrial policy instrument - and I will argue that the evidence strongly suggests it is - does that matter? What would a certification system actually oriented around cultural identity look like? And what does it mean that we have spent sixty years building something that looks like the former while claiming to be the latter?

I should be transparent about where I’m coming from. I spent the better part of three and a half decades advising film and television producers, broadcasters, and financiers on how to navigate the Canadian content system - which means I know, from the inside, how the rules work, how they’re interpreted in practice, and how they’re worked around. I’ve appeared before the CRTC, CAVCO, and the Copyright Board. I’ve structured co-productions, negotiated broadcaster licences, and worked through the tax credit calculations that determine whether a project is financially viable and, if it’s not, how to work the system to make it so.

I am not writing from a position of naïve disillusionment. The Canadian production system has produced genuine cultural achievements. It has sustained an industry. It has, at various moments, genuinely advanced the kind of storytelling that helps a country understand itself.

But it has also produced a great deal of programming that satisfies every regulatory criterion for “Canadian” while advancing no discernible cultural purpose whatsoever. And the regulatory system, by design, cannot tell the difference. The point system doesn’t ask whether your story is Canadian. It asks whether your production crew is.

That tension - between the cultural claims of the system and its industrial mechanics - is what I’ll be examining throughout this series. But I want to be clear about what this series is, and what it isn’t.

This is not my dissertation. My PhD research at the University of Ottawa will include empirical work - audience research, industry interviews, regulatory analysis - designed to test, rather than simply assert, conclusions about whether Canadian content regulation fulfills its stated cultural purpose. That research is ongoing, and its findings may well complicate, qualify, or challenge the practitioner instincts I’ve accumulated over thirty-five years. I’m genuinely open to being surprised.

What this series offers is something different: a practitioner’s guide to how the certification system actually works, grounded in experience rather than data, and offered in the spirit of informed commentary rather than academic argument. The analytical questions the series raises - about the gap between cultural rationale and industrial mechanics - are real questions, not predetermined conclusions. They are, in fact, the questions my dissertation is designed to answer. Consider this series the plain-language version of why those questions are worth asking in the first place.

More to come...