Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where regulation requires American companies to help save our culture, homeless people have rights too (lots of them!), and numbers can look good and bad at the same time. Let’s jump in!
Netflix helped turn Vancouver into Hollywood North. Amazon, Disney, and Apple poured money into Canadian productions, employed armies of Canadian crews and creative types, and helped Canadian artists reach audiences far beyond Canada’s tiny domestic market.
The Canadian government seems to have looked at all this and thought: How do we tax and regulate it?
Online streaming services, ranging from the four American companies I just mentioned to Swedish audio streaming giant Spotify, will have to hand over 15 percent of their Canadian revenue under a decision announced last week by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The money will help subsidize parts of the media system considered culturally important by the government, especially French-language programming, indigenous content, and local news.
A 5 percent “base contribution,” to use the CRTC’s term, has been around since 2024. (Most normal people would call it a tax.) It was imposed as a result of 2023’s Online Streaming Act, which then–Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government sold as a patriotic effort to make streaming giants “pay their fair share.”
Of course, no one can really define what “Canadian culture” even means—least of all Trudeau himself, who infamously described Canada in 2015 as a “postnational state” with “no core identity.” And as I reported in 2023, the Online Streaming Act was never simply about bringing online broadcasters under similar rules as Canada’s traditional broadcasters. It was about dragging Canada’s old, protected broadcasting model into the internet age—and expanding the CRTC’s authority.
