About this series

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.

A note on what this series is - and isn’t

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.

Recap

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.”

A Little Bit of History

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.

The Online Streaming Act

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.

What the CRTC changed, and what it didn’t

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

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.

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.

What’s next

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

Last Tuesday, on holiday in Scotland, my daughter and I spent the day at the Inveraray Highland Games – held every summer, on the third Tuesday of July, in the grassy fields below the Duke of Argyll’s castle on the shore of Loch Fyne. The closest thing to a description is “loosely organised chaos.”

There is no single thing to watch – there are a dozen, and they are all taking place at once. Sprinters and distance runners race around a grass track. On five shaded competition platforms set side by side, twenty Highland dancers at a time spring up and down as if percussion to the single piper. In the fields beyond the track, pipers compete one by one before judges – sorted by age, and by the music they play, from the solemn ceòl mòr to lighter marches; in the shady fields beyond the pipers, drummers of every age do the same. Cyclists tear around the same grass track in races ranging from 800 metres to two miles. Nearby, two wrestlers clasp each other around the shoulders and heave, each trying to put the other on the grass – every crashing fall followed by a handshake. Every so often, with no apparent schedule, a pipe band marches onto the track and makes a slow loop – most drawn from across Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom, one all the way from Chicago: the Stockyard Kilty Band. And in the middle of it all, on a timetable entirely their own, the heavy events grind on – men (giants) hurling objects that have no business being hurled, then slapping each other on the back between throws like old friends at a barbecue. Under all of it runs the low, continuous drone of the pipes, as if the whole event – the ground itself – were humming with an energy of its own. Nobody directs your attention anywhere; you stand in the noise and the colour, wander aimlessly, and take in what you can.

Watching it all – the crowd on the grass, six deep at the ropes, gathered around the track, the dancers, and the piping and drumming stages – I realised I was watching a culture reproduce itself in real time: the old teaching the young the same steps, the same tunes, the same throws they had once been taught. There was no committee, no plan, no one visibly in charge. It was simply happening, as it had happened every summer before.

Take the dancers. They ranged from about six years old to grown women, and to my eye every one was the same girl – the same kilt in different tartans, the same coordinated socks and vest, the same white blouse, and, most striking of all, the same hair pulled back tight and wound into the same hard little bun. Each was dancing alongside three others on her platform, before a judge, the same dances her mother danced, and her mother’s mother before that. Not one of them seemed to think any of it was particularly special. No sense of occasion, no nerves, no self-consciousness at all – just a thing you do, because it is what’s done … because it is what “we” do.

The same was true everywhere I looked: the small boys and girls on their practice chanters; the older boys finally trusted with the pipes; the teenagers behind their snare drums; the wrestlers tripping and toppling over each other; the men in their kilts; the vendors selling their whisky, their toffee, and their clan crests – the whole regime of pipes and tartan and tradition, played out on the same Tuesday every summer, in the same field, exactly as it always has been.

I envied it.

What I thought I was seeing was Michael Billig’s banal nationalism – about which I’ve written before (The Air We Breathe – On the “Sense” of Being Canadian) – the identity nobody notices they’re performing, running so far in the background that it becomes like water you swim in. It looked effortless, a culture reproducing itself without a committee, a commission, or a subsidy.

Because back home we do it the hard way. Where the Scots simply are what they are, we define our identity, legislate it, fund it, and fret over it endlessly. We keep a points system to decide whether a television show is “Canadian” enough; a separate formula – the MAPL system – for whether a song is; a spreadsheet with sixty thousand entries of officially certified content, and a habit of holding hearings about whether our culture exists at all – and for all that machinery, we are still not sure whether it works.

Canada goes shallow and wide: welcoming to every origin, extremely anxious about the centre. Inveraray goes deep and narrow: one tradition, handed down undiluted, with no apparent effort. One way looked exhausting and uncertain; the other looked easy, and confident.

Two days later I read the final results – and things got a bit complicated.

The heavy events – about the most Scottish things on the field – were swept, top to bottom, by a Czech. Vlad Tulacek won all eight heavy events: both stones (16 and 27 pounds,1 both hammers,2 both weights for distance (28 and 56 pounds),3 the 56-pound weight heaved over the bar,4 and – the greatest of all – the caber.

The caber is the premier event of any Highland Games – saved for the end of the afternoon, the climax – and the caber at Inveraray carries a further distinction: the contest here is the World Caber Championship itself, one of the biggest cabers on the circuit, drawing the strongest men in the world to a single field in Argyll.

A caber is a tapered log the size of a telephone pole; the one at Inveraray runs to over 20 feet and more than 140 pounds. A competitor stands it upright against his shoulder, takes a short staggering run, and heaves it so that it flips end over end – and is judged not on distance but on straightness: a judge behind him imagines a giant clock face and calls how near the small end lands to a perfect twelve o’clock. The finest throw goes almost nowhere.

And Vlad Tulacek won it. The places behind him went, again and again, to another Czech, Tomas Suchopar, and a Dutchman, Pieter Bouma. The local men – Shaun and Jamie Gunn of Halkirk, Craig Winslow of Dumbarton – kept coming third or lower, on their own soil, at their own game. Nobody minded in the least (although, to be honest, I decided not to ask either of the Gunn boys from Halkirk).

The people of Inveraray have taken Vlad as one of their own – he has held the title here three years running – and the affection runs both ways, you could see it in the way he moved through the crowd, greeting people – friends – he knew. A man from Central Europe, loved in Argyll for being magnificent at the most Scottish thing there is!

I noticed something though. Vlad never asked the Games to change for him – no new event, no rule tweak, no Czech tradition wedged in alongside the Scottish one. He simply turned up and got better at their thing than they are: excelling at another people’s tradition, on its own terms, and loving the effort of mastering it. The deal at Inveraray is simple enough: come and master our tradition exactly as it is, and we will take you into our hearts. But we will not change our tradition to accommodate you.

Which brought a few absences into focus. There were no ceremonial acknowledgements – no nod from the Duke, himself a Campbell, to the contribution made to Scottish culture by the MacDonalds, the Macleans, or the MacGregors, each a clan the Campbells did much to displace. No parallel festival to make other countries’ sports, traditions, or knowledge visible. No working group on whether the giants’ caber or the dancers’ Fling5^[5] should be reworked so other traditions felt equally seen. The tradition simply kept its usual shape, open to anyone who cared to master it.

Canada would have done at least three of those things before lunch and called it “equity” or “justice” … and perhaps it is. The Scottish way is narrower: deep, not broad; fixed, not up for negotiation. And a narrow thing can shut people out. But it is also still here – a thing that has come down the centuries intact, still alive and confident, still handing itself down to a six-year-old girl with her hair in a hard little bun, and a red-faced boy of twelve puffing into the pipes’ tartan-covered bag.

On Tuesday we fly home – from a country that has never wondered whether it was Scottish enough, to one that convenes a CRTC hearing every time it passes a mirror. And I’ll land in Toronto with a question I can’t answer. At keeping a culture alive – passing it on, drawing immigrants in – which of us has it right: the broad, anxious country that can’t stop asking, or the deep, confident one that never thought to?

About this series

Instalment 3 of six on how Canada defines a “Canadian program.” This one covers Canada’s international co-production treaty regime - what it is, and why a producer would choose it over a purely domestic certification option (CRTC or CAVCO) in the first place.

A note on what this series is - and isn’t

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

Treaty Co-Productions

The series’ first two instalments were, underneath the paperwork, running essentially the same test through two different agencies. The CRTC’s C-number process counts points under a ten-point test. CAVCO’s Part A & B process counts the same points with the same test but, if requirements are met, results in a cheque. Each asks whether enough of the production costs and crew is Canadian. Meet the tests for costs and crew and - poof - you’re “Canadian.”

Treaty co-production asks something else: in lieu of a points test, certification asks whether the producers from two (or more) countries share in the project’s production, financing, and ownership in proportion to what each contributed - this time with Telefilm Canada’s Co-Production Office responsible for assessing and issuing a co-production certificate for the Canadian side of the equation.

Why a producer chooses it

Structuring and papering a treaty co-production is a much more complex and expensive exercise than a straight CAVCO application. So why would anyone do it? Producers take it on because co-production structures can solve financing, casting, and budget problems that a domestic certification can't.

Financing is the most obvious of the three. National treatment means the production is recognized as fully Canadian at home and fully French, and/or Irish, and/or German, and/or Australian, at the same time. It’s like quantum mechanics(!), and it makes the production’s budget eligible for the incentive stacks and domestic cultural support systems of each co-producing country.

Take a real example. Qualify a feature under the “Film and Video Co-production Agreement Between the Government of Canada and the Government of the Kingdom of Denmark,” and you and your Danish co-producer can draw on all of the Canadian incentives on the Canadian share - the CPTC and provincial tax credits (Instalment Two), Telefilm’s Canada Feature Film Fund ($106.3 million in production and development funding in 2024/25),1 the Canada Media Fund ($346 million for the 2025/26 fiscal year),2 elevated broadcast licence fees (Instalment One), and provincial agencies like Ontario Creates and SODEC (Quebec) - and the full run of Danish support on the Danish share - the Danish Film Institute, the pan-Nordic Nordisk Film & TV Fond, etc. Two governments, two funding ecosystems, one production budget - with neither side needing to pretend the other doesn’t exist to get its cheques.

Then there’s who can be in front of and behind the camera. On a wholly Canadian CAVCO production, either the director or the screenwriter, and at least one of the two lead performers, must be Canadian citizens or permanent residents - and the six-of-ten points minimum leaves little room to attach an internationally acclaimed director or A-list actor without risking certification itself. A treaty co-production removes much of that constraint. Because the production is recognized as national in both countries at once, the director’s chair and the lead roles can go to a Canadian or a national of the co-producing country. And where that co-producing partner is itself an EU member state, the treaty typically extends the same treatment to nationals of any other EU member state as well. So on a Danish co-production, a German director or an Italian lead performer counts as fully eligible Danish talent. That’s a considerably wider casting pool than a Canadian producer working alone would ever have access to - and often the difference between a cast that can justify the budget and attract the financing that is required.

There’s more room, too, in where the money actually gets spent. In the absence of a co-production, both the CRTC’s C-number regime and CAVCO’s certification for the domestic tax credit requires a large majority of production spending to be paid to Canadians or in Canada (75% of production service costs to Canadians, and at least 75% of post-production/lab costs for Canadian-rendered services), full stop. A treaty co-production spreads those spending requirements across Canada and the co-producing country(ies) instead, in proportion to each side’s financial contribution. None of this is unlimited, and the proportions are fixed by the treaty and audited closely. But compared to a wholly domestic production, where obligations focus on Canadian spend, a treaty co-production gives producers real room to put the budget where the production actually needs it to go.

What it costs

None of that comes free, and the cost is as much structural as it is financial. Two or more government agencies run their own reviews and apply their own process. Two or more sets of treaty terms have to reconcile with each other. And because money and copyright are split proportionally rather than owned by one producer, the deal needs its own administrative layer on top - a collection agreement and an independent collection agent, just to pay everyone out in the agreed recoupment and profit participation order.

Each co-producer also brings its own counsel, accountants, tax advisors, and financing bank - complete with the bank’s own counsel and fees. Every additional co-producer adds a full professional-services roster, not just a signature, and the fees scale up accordingly.

Most of those costs are fixed, largely indifferent to whether the budget is $2 million or $20 million - which is why treaty co-productions tend to cluster at the higher end of the budget continuum. Below a certain budget, the transaction costs simply outweigh what the structure buys you.

In Practice

Over the past decade, Canada certified 508 treaty co-productions with total global budgets of $3.5 billion, of which $1.5 billion (43%) was the Canadian share.3 This is big business. Five countries account for well over half of that activity: France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, and Belgium alone made up 307 of the 508 projects.

The output runs from prize-worthy to disastrous to simply forgettable, and the treaty doesn’t distinguish between them. Room (Canada-Ireland) won Brie Larson a Best Actress Oscar off four nominations and nine Canadian Screen Awards. Brooklyn (Ireland-UK-Canada) picked up three Oscar nominations including Best Picture. Being Julia (Canada-UK-Hungary), produced by Robert Lantos and directed by Istvan Szabo, earned Annette Bening a Best Actress Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe win.

At the other end: Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (Canada-Germany) is a franchise entry nobody will remember fondly, and The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (Canada-U.K.) is a genuine catastrophe – an expensive, star-loaded mess that shed an entire Jessica Chastain performance in the edit and landed at 19% on Rotten Tomatoes. And a long trail of treaty co-productions never aim higher than a paint-by-numbers Christmas romance, destined for a seasonal broadcast slot or a streamer’s bulk-buy and nothing more.

Not all of these drew on Telefilm or provincial agency funding – those are separate, competitive applications – but every one of them cleared the same proportionality test and carries the same certificate, CPTC tax credit eligibility included.

One small bit of foreshadowing: nothing about this certification requires that a production be about Canada, or relevant to who we are as a people or a nation, to earn that certificate. The treaty asks only whether the money, the copyright, and the credit were shared in the right proportion. Whether the result adds anything to how Canadians see or understand themselves is a different question - and perhaps not one this certification pathway was ever built to answer.

About this series

Instalment two of six on how Canada defines a “Canadian program.” This one covers certification by the Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office (CAVCO) - which results in qualification for tax credits - real money.

A note on what this series is - and isn’t

I’ve spent thirty-five years inside Canada’s certification system and I have opinions about all of it. Those opinions are for another day.

This series just explains how the system actually works - who administers what, what each pathway requires, and what each is worth. I want to tell you why a producer picks one regime over another, where the incentives lie, and where they quietly diverge from their stated cultural purpose.

That’s what gets you ready for the harder conversation - whether any of this works, or needs fixing, or needs to be torn up. That conversation is coming, elsewhere.

Where the Money Starts: Enter CAVCO

Instalment one ended with a badge that costs little and pays nothing: the CRTC's C-number - a certification system all about meeting broadcaster obligations around their support for Canadian content.

This instalment is about another badge, one that actually involves access to money. CAVCO, the Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office, is the federal gatekeeper standing between a film or television production and Canada's film and television tax credits. If you get certified by CAVCO, the Canada Revenue Agency cuts a cheque. If you don’t, you're just another show that happened to get made here.

But before any of that, there's a wrinkle that’s important to note: CAVCO doesn't just administer one certification regime - it administers two. They’re designed differently, they are philosophically distinct, they have different objectives and requirements, they pay-out differently to producers, and a single production can never qualify for both.

Two Credits, Pick a Lane

The first is the Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit (CPTC). It runs on an ownership test: Canadian-owned production company, Canadian copyright ownership, a minimum share of Canadian creative personnel. Meet the test, and the producer gets a refundable tax credit worth up to 15% of the budget.1

The second is the Production Services Tax Credit (PSTC). It runs no ownership test at all: a foreign-owned production, led by foreign nationals, with foreign-owned copyright qualifies the same as anything else. In practice, that's why Hollywood productions come north, paying in Canadian dollars, hiring Canadian crews and working out of Canadian studios, chasing the labour credit rather than the ownership one. The credit is smaller, 16% of Canadian labour costs, but there's no cap on how much a production can claim.2

As noted, a single production cannot collect both, and this is not a technicality. The CPTC is a reward targeted towards Canadian producers who produce film and television content which they own: the company has to hold the copyright, control the creative decisions, and keep a real financial stake in how the production performs. The CPTC exists to serve Canadian cultural policy, which means it is built to benefit Canadian producers specifically, not producers in general.

The PSTC, in contrast, is a reward for Canadians producing film and television content for someone else: the Canadian crew and Canadian companies are simply providing their services, not owning the result, and the credit makes no attempt to serve a cultural policy at all … its objectives are solely economic..

And the value of the credits? The CPTC throws off a richer return than the PSTC - and that’s intentional. A credit meant to advance Canadian cultural policy cannot pay a foreign-owned production the same as, or more than, a Canadian-owned one; if it did, it would be subsidizing Hollywood's use of Canadian labour more generously than it subsidizes Canadians building their own industry, which no government could sell as a legitimate cultural policy. So a production company has to pick one regime and stay in it.

Four Productions You’ve Probably Seen

This sounds abstract until you put real titles next to it.

Schitt’s Creek is the textbook CPTC production: shot in and around Toronto, owned by a Canadian company, Canadian creative team running the show, eligible for Canadian content tax credits because it actually qualified as Canadian content, not because Toronto stood in for somewhere else. Same goes for Kim’s Convenience, a Toronto-set, Toronto-shot, Canadian-owned sitcom about a Regent Park family. Both shows are “Canadian” - at least the way the CPTC defines it - owned here, made here, profits flow here.

Deadpool, on the other hand, is a textbook PSTC production. Twentieth Century Fox owns it. The story is set in New York. None of the creative decisions were made in Canada. But it was shot in Vancouver, using Vancouver crews and Vancouver soundstages, because the PSTC and its provincial counterpart’s top-up made that labour cheaper than shooting the film in Los Angeles. The Handmaid’s Tale follows the same pattern: an American-owned production, based on a Canadian novel but controlled by MGM and Hulu, shot almost entirely in and around Cambridge (my home town so it gets a shout-out here - woo!) and Toronto for the same reason. Vancouver and Toronto get the jobs, the spending, and the soundstage bookings either way.

What Does This All Cost Us?

The value of these credits, when taken together, are not a rounding error on the government’s financial statements.

The CPTC and its provincial counterparts contribute close to a billion dollars a year to Canadian television production alone, before counting feature films: $951 million in combined federal and provincial tax credits financed Canadian television production in the most recent reporting year, English and French combined.3 That's the minimum price tag of the "Canadian content" credit, the money that flows specifically to productions that cleared CAVCO's ownership and labour content test. Stack the federal CPTC with its provincial counterparts (Ontario and BC both offer 35 percent on top of the federal rate) and a producer can cover a serious share of a production's budget before a single dollar from a theatre, a broadcaster, or a streamer is secured, in either the domestic or international context.

The PSTC's cost to the public purse is a separate, and, for this series' purposes, a secondary question. It funds a different thing entirely: the foreign-owned, foreign-copyrighted productions that never claim to be "Canadian" in the first place, currently running at $5.32 billion in production spend attracted to Canada annually.4 One might legitimately ask whether Canada gets good value for its PSTC film subsidies generally... but it isn't public money spent on the question this series is asking, which is what "Canadian" means and the value of that designation. The CPTC's billion dollars buys an answer to that question. The PSTC's spending doesn't try to.

A Simplified Example of How it Works

Here’s what makes this different from most government subsidies: a producer can build a financing plan around the CPTC before a single frame is shot. The federal credit and its provincial counterparts aren’t discretionary grants a producer applies for and hopes to win. They’re formula-driven, statutory entitlements. If a production meets the ownership, spend, and labour content tests, the credits are owed, not awarded. That predictability is worth more to a producer than the dollar figure alone suggests, because it means the credits can be budgeted, borrowed against, and built into a financing plan from day one, rather than treated as contingent funds that show up if the producer gets lucky.5

Here’s an over-simplified example: take a $10 million scripted Canadian television production shot in Ontario, with a reasonably typical 60% of the budget (i.e. $6 million) going to eligible Canadian labour.

In practice, the federal and provincial bases interact, since government assistance from provincial credits are netted out of the cost figure used to calculate the federal. That netting brings the real combined yield down from the 36%, but production accountants and financiers routinely model this kind of production in the 30% to 35% of budget range once the interaction is accounted for. Either way, the arithmetic is the same: a Canadian producer can start financing conversations with roughly a third of the budget already covered, before a single dollar is secured from other domestic and international industry participants and/or financiers (distributors, sales agents, broadcasters, streamers, banks, private equity, regional funds, government subsidies, etc.). You can see that tax credits are not subsidies that offer producers a few extra dollars around the margins. In fact, they’re the foundation on which the rest of the financing structure is built.

Credit Origins - a/k/a “How to Game a Cultural Policy”

The CPTC exists because the thing it replaced was a catastrophe, a catastrophe worth describing not for nostalgia but because it’s the cleanest example this series will find of something worth watching for throughout: a well-meaning cultural policy, built to encourage Canadian storytelling, getting gamed by people who had no interest in Canadian storytelling at all. It was comically naive in its design, and tragically predictable in its outcome. Every certification regime this series covers runs some version of the same risk. This one just ran it first, and ran it worst.

In 1974, Ottawa raised the Capital Cost Allowance for Canadian feature films from 60%to 100%: an investor could deduct the entire amount invested in a certified Canadian film from taxable income in the year it was spent, whether or not the film was ever finished, distributed, or seen by a single paying customer. Hundreds of doctors, dentists, lawyers, and business owners piled in, not because they had any interest in Canadian cinema (though it was impressive material for banter at fancy cocktail parties) but because a promoter could hand them a full and immediate write-off on money they were otherwise going to lose to the taxman anyway.

Production went from three features in 1974 to a peak of 77 in 1979, and the results told you exactly what the incentive was actually rewarding: a horror boom that ran from Cannibal Girls through Prom Night and Terror Train, and a run of teen sex comedies that peaked with Porky’s, the era’s biggest commercial hit, films built for cheap production and easy foreign resale, not for anyone’s idea of Canadian culture.6

Along the way, a cottage industry of investment brokers, tax lawyers, and accountants installed themselves between the investor’s cheque and the producer’s budget, and by most contemporary accounts they were the ones who actually got rich: production budgets were inflated less by artistic design or creative necessity than by the fees owed to the people who structured and sold the shelters’ limited partnership units.7

By 1980, the pattern had become impossible for the government to ignore: more than half of the 66 feature films produced in Canada in 1979 were never released to audiences at all.8 In other words, the tax deduction had already been banked but the film was optional!

The CPTC, introduced in 1995, was the structural fix: a credit pegged to qualified labour expenditure rather than capital invested, refundable to the producer rather than deductible by the investor, and requiring an actual completed, distributed production rather than an investment existing only on paper. It closed the loophole that let a producer collect a write-off without ever making a film. What it didn’t close, and what no formula can fully close, is the underlying incentive: wherever public money is attached to a cultural definition, someone will eventually ask not “how do I tell a Canadian story” but “how do I qualify.” That cynical question doesn’t disappear when the mechanism gets smarter. It just gets quieter, and harder to spot. Whether it’s still being asked inside today’s CPTC and PSTC, dressed up in a points system instead of a shell company, is exactly my concern.

How Canada Compares

It will come as no surprise that many of Canada’s competitors don’t bother with a CPTC-style content test of nationality at all, and the reason isn’t a design oversight. A jurisdiction only builds a domestic content test into its film incentive if it’s trying to grow a domestic industry that “tells its own stories”. Most American states aren’t trying to do that. Georgia, for instance, offers a 30% credit with no content test whatsoever because Georgia isn’t in the business of cultivating a Georgian film industry with Georgian ownership and Georgian stories; it’s in the business of hosting other people’s productions and collecting and taxing the labour spend. The same is true across most of the American incentive map: the credit exists to attract production, period, with no cultural mandate attached because no cultural mandate was ever the point.

The UK and Ireland are the exceptions that prove the rule, and worth noting for what they share with Canada: both run a cultural points test similar to CAVCO’s, because both are, like Canada, trying to protect something more specific than “production activity happened here.” They just fold that test into one program instead of splitting it the way Canada does. Canada’s insistence on keeping a real ownership test alongside a separate, no-questions-asked service credit is pretty unique, and the split itself says something: Canada is one of a small number of jurisdictions that still treats “who gets to tell the story” as a question worth asking at all, rather than folding it into a general economic development file.

What Comes Next

Instalment three crosses a border: official treaty co-productions, where a Canadian producer can claim full domestic status (and access Canadian tax credits and other government assistance) on a film made jointly with a partner in places like France, Israel, South Africa, Brazil and North Macedonia. Our next question is: what happens when “Canadian enough” has to satisfy two governments instead of one.

We cover the mechanics of how Cabinet can reverse a decision it has no formal power to reverse, why Marc Miller was considerably more candid in Banff than his own department’s press release, what the CRTC’s chair did and didn’t say in her own Banff keynote address, and the question I think the entire production sector has spent sixty years avoiding: not who pays, but why an industry this developed still needs someone else to.

Geist has been ahead of this file since before the government caught up to its own decision — read his coverage of the reversal and the improv policy point if you haven’t.

🎧 Listen to the episode here.

About this series

Instalment One of six on how Canada defines a “Canadian program.” This one covers CRTC certification - the oldest and least lucrative pathway.

A note on what this series is - and isn’t

I’ve spent thirty-five years inside Canada’s certification system and I have opinions about all of it. Those opinions are for my dissertation, not here.

This series just explains how the system actually works - who administers what, what each pathway requires, and what it’s worth. I want to tell you why a producer picks one regime over another, and where the incentives quietly diverge from the stated cultural purpose.

That’s what gets you ready for the harder conversation - whether any of this works, or needs fixing, or needs to be torn up. That conversation is coming, elsewhere.

A registry built to be invisible

Let’s start with the number. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission - the CRTC, the federal regulator that oversees Canadian broadcasting - has been certifying programs as “Canadian” since 1961. Its registry now lists more than 61,000 titles,1 and every single one carries a “C-number.” Every single one is, in the eyes of the federal government, a “Canadian” program.

That’s one answer to the question “What is a Canadian Program”. It will not be the only one, and it’s the simplest of several we’ll encounter in this series - which is exactly why we’re starting here.

Over the next instalments, the certification regimes get progressively more demanding, more lucrative, and more complicated: a federal tax credit with real money attached, treaty co-productions spanning two countries’ content rules at once, the new streaming-era overhaul, the ways producers work the seams between all of it, and finally the normative question of whether any of this is doing what it claims to do.

CRTC certification sits at the easy end of that continuum. In some ways it asks the least of a production, and it gives the least back - which makes it the clearest place to see what every regime in this series is actually built to do, before the machinery gets more elaborate.

You have likely never heard of the CRTC’s list, but you have almost certainly watched dozens of things on it. That is exactly how the system was designed. CRTC certification was built to be visible to broadcasters, who need a defensible paper trail to prove they’re meeting their Canadian content obligations; and to bureaucrats, who need a tidy statistic - 61,000 and counting - that lets them say the system is working without ever asking whether anyone actually watched. The C-number is bureaucratic bookkeeping - and once you understand what it actually does, you understand why it’s the cheapest door into “Canadian” in the entire system.

An administrative role, not a substantive one

A C-number is an administrative certification, not a measurement. It confirms a checklist rather than evaluates a production. Who’s in which job, whose passport says what, which account paid for the sound boom and location manager. Pass the checklist, get the number, and the production counts as Canadian for every purpose the broadcasting system cares about.

That’s not unique to the CRTC - every certification regime in this series runs its own checklist and calls the result “Canadian,” but they’re all still administrative tests, not judgments. CRTC certification is just the plainest version of the pattern.

It’s also, at once, both small and large. Small, because it gives an individual producer almost nothing directly - no cheque, no tax credit, no fund disbursement. Large, because the certificate it produces is the legal currency the broadcasting system runs on - the thing every Canadian program ultimately needs on file, regardless of which other certification it might also hold.

Exhibit “A” - Some Names You’ll Recognize

The registry is a list of shows and films which have received certification from the CRTC. Most of them you’ll have never heard of. But some of them you’ll have actually watched. The list includes both ends of a real spectrum, from productions that feel unmistakably Canadian to productions that don’t feel Canadian at all, despite being entitled to the identical certificate.

The unmistakably “Canadian”:

• Anne of Green Gables (1986) - the miniseries that’s arguably done more to define “Canadian” in the popular imagination internationally than almost anything else on this list, seven certifications across the franchise 1986-2018.

  

• Kids in the Hall (1989-1995, plus later revivals) - 5 certifications spanning the original CBC run through later specials and the 2022 Amazon revival, independently produced rather than an in-house CBC show.

• North of 60 (1992-2003) - a CBC drama set in a fictional Northern Dene community, 10 entries across five seasons and several follow-up television movies.

• Trailer Park Boys (2000-present) - 15 certifications and counting, about as far from Anne of Green Gables in tone as Canadian television gets, certified under exactly the same test.

  

• Murdoch Mysteries (2004-present) - 17 certifications and still running.

• Schitt’s Creek (2015-2020) - 13 certifications across six seasons, before it became a global, Emmy-sweeping phenomenon on Netflix.

  

• Letterkenny (2016-2023) - 6 certifications, built almost entirely around regional Canadian vernacular.

The unmistakably “Not-Canadian”:

• Beauty and the Beast (2012-2016) and Reign (2013-2017) - both produced by CBS Television Studios, both certified across all four seasons under an SR co-venture number rather than a C-number. More on what that distinction means, and why it’s about to disappear, below.

  

• Killjoys (2015-2018), and Dark Matter (2014-2017) - here’s the more interesting case. Neither of these is a co-venture. Each is an ordinary C-number certification - fully Canadian under the same test that certified Anne of Green Gables. Yet each is sci-fi/genre television, shot in Canada, with largely Canadian casts and crews, that most audiences would assume - based on tone, setting, and style alone - has nothing to do with Canada. Killjoys is set on a fictional star system called “the Quad”. Dark Matter is set on a derelict spaceship with no memory of who they are or how they got there. Nothing about either of them announces “Canada” the way Anne of Green Gables or Letterkenny does - and the certificate simply doesn’t care.

The strangely absent:

A few of the most iconic, most-watched programs in Canadian television history appear nowhere in the registry at all. Front Page Challenge (1957-1995), This Hour Has Seven Days (1964-1966), The Beachcombers (1972-1990), King of Kensington (1975-1980), and The Fifth Estate (1975-present) - five decades of CBC television, none of it appearing in the CRTC’s C-number registry. Not because any of it failed some test of Canadian-ness, but because the question never came up: all five were produced in-house by the CBC itself, and in-house productions by a licensed Canadian broadcaster are automatically recognized as “Canadian” without ever applying for certification. Contrast that with Heritage Minutes (1991-present) - arguably more recognizable to ordinary Canadians than half the registry’s titles - which has needed 38 separate certifications since 1991, because Historica Canada, the charitable foundation behind it, isn't a broadcaster and gets no exemption. The pattern holds: the CBC's own flagship shows never touched the system's paperwork. The paperwork was for everyone else.

So … that’s 18 titles, three different outcomes, six decades, and every genre from prestige literary adaptation to bounty hunters on a derelict spaceship with “Bad Guys Have Way More Fun” as its tag line. Some needed an ordinary C-number. Some needed the now-vanishing SR co-venture number. Some needed nothing at all, because the broadcaster making them was Canadian. Whatever any of them is actually about - whatever a viewer would say it “feels like,” or whether a viewer ever even got the chance to know it existed - the certification system doesn’t ask. It was never built to.

What CRTC certification requires; and what it buys you

Here’s the deal, put simply: to get a C-number, a production needs:

• A Canadian producer who is the real decision-maker, start to finish;

• A minimum of 6 points out of 10, awarded for key creative roles (director, screenwriter, lead performers, production designer, director of photography, composer, editor) filled by people with Canadian passports;

• At least one of the director or screenwriter positions, and at least one of the two lead performers, to be Canadian; and

• 75% of “production costs” and 75% of “post-production costs” paid to Canadians or Canadian companies.2

Hit those marks and the CRTC issues a certificate (and a C-number) which, in turn, does two separate jobs: it earns a time credit toward the broadcaster’s exhibition quota, and it confirms that the broadcaster’s financial contribution to the budget counts toward its spending obligations - which we’ll get into later.

That’s it.

Unlike other pathways into “Canadian,” there is no cheque available as a result of certification. The CRTC’s certification does not unlock a tax credit, does not trigger a Canada Media Fund disbursement, and does not put a dollar in anyone’s production account. What it does is let a broadcaster check a regulatory box - and that box-check is woven into how the production gets financed in the first place, not something a producer goes looking to cash in after the fact.

Here’s the mechanism: there’s no open market where a finished, certified show gets shopped around for the best price. A Canadian production usually doesn’t get made at all unless a broadcaster is attached before the cameras roll, committing to a licence fee that becomes part of the financing stack alongside the project’s other financiers and sources of funding. That broadcaster will only make that commitment if it can count on the finished program securing CRTC certification - because without one, the broadcaster has no regulatory reason to pay for it.

So: no public money, but a financing precondition with real value attached to it. That’s pathway one.

Sometimes it’s not even a choice - it’s just the last step

A producer doesn’t always choose CRTC certification over the other certification pathways this series will get into later. Often, they need it in addition to - as the final step.

A production that’s already qualified under one of those other regimes is automatically recognized as “Canadian” by the CRTC. But automatic recognition isn’t the same as the specific paperwork a broadcaster’s compliance file requires. So the producer applies to the CRTC anyway, after the harder work is already done, purely to generate the document the broadcasting system runs on.

That’s a clear illustration of this instalment’s point. The other regimes run different tests, harder tests - fewer points, tighter ownership rules, sometimes a whole international treaty’s worth of detailed conditions. But harder doesn’t mean more “Canadian”. It’s a different administrative test, administered by a different agency - and the system still wants the C-number on top of it, because that’s the specific unit the broadcasting half of the system recognizes. It’s a small role, riding on a much bigger one.

A C-number now does two things

Here’s something that will surprise readers who assume “Canadian content rules” still means a hard percentage of airtime: that’s only half the picture. Since around 2011, the CRTC has required most major Canadian broadcasters to clear two separate bars at once - an exhibition floor (a percentage of broadcast hours that must be Canadian) and a spending floor (a percentage of revenue that must go toward making Canadian content).3 Without a C-number, a program can’t be counted toward either one.

The same number that used to unlock a spot on the schedule now also unlocks a line item on a spending report - which is why this seemingly cheap, low-stakes certificate quietly becomes important across two different compliance regimes at once.

Why a producer would bother

A few more scenarios, beyond the pipeline described above, where CRTC certification is the only path to “Canadian” realistically on the table.

You don’t qualify for the federal tax credit, and you know it

The federal tax credit - covered in Instalment Two - only certifies a narrower list of genres. News, sports, reality television, and most awards shows don’t qualify for it at all, no matter how Canadian the crew is. CRTC certification has no such restriction. A Canadian-made reality series or awards show can pick up a C-number even though it could never qualify for the tax credit or the federal and provincial eligibility that comes with it.

Your co-venture doesn’t fit a treaty - or didn’t

This is where CRTC certification got genuinely interesting, and where the gap between “counts as” and “is” used to show most clearly. “International co-ventures” (co-productions with countries that have no production treaty with Canada … read: the United States), structured as a 50/50 split of financing, control, and profits between a Canadian and a non-Canadian producer - were certified under their own “SR” (special recognition) number, separate from the regular C-number stream. The bar for “co-ventures” was lower, too: at minimum 6 points, with no requirement that the Canadian producer retain any copyright at all.

Reign and Beauty and the Beast, mentioned above, are the CRTC’s own go-to examples of this certification pathway in action - American network, American studio, American money, dressed in just enough Canadian crewing and financing structure to clear a 50/50 split.

In November 2025, the CRTC overhauled its certification framework - the first major rewrite in decades. That decision didn’t just tweak the points system; it killed the “co-venture” model entirely, folding its purpose into a new set of copyright-ownership rules instead. Thus, the SR number, as its own certification path, no longer exists - on paper. And that “on paper” is important, because the new rules aren’t actually in force yet; the CRTC is still processing “co-venture” applications under the old rules until the consequential regulations are finalized.

Here’s how big a deal the SR pathway actually was: smaller than the Reign and Beauty and the Beast examples might suggest. Of the certifications in the CRTC’s registry for actual Canadian and co-venture productions,¹ only 761 carry an SR number - roughly one for every 69 regular C-number certifications. The SR pathway got outsized attention because the productions that used it were often the biggest, most visible ones on Canadian schedules - which is its own small lesson about which part of this system gets talked about versus which part is actually doing almost all of the work.

The CRTC’s registry shows six SR certifications issued after November 18, 2025 - the date the model was supposedly eliminated. Ice Road Truckers picked up a new SR certification in February 2026. The animated feature Zoopocalypse got one in December 2025. Both came through a door the CRTC says no longer exists. That’s what “not yet in force” means in practice. Yes, the CRTC’s rule has changed, but the day-to-day mechanics and pathways have not.

C-Numbers: The floor, not the foundation

CRTC certification is the floor of the architecture - not because it’s a weaker version of a test of “Canadian-ness”, but because it’s the plainest version of what this entire series will keep finding: an administrative process, standing in for a cultural judgment, with no one ever quite asking whether the two are the same thing. It exists because the broadcasting system needs some mechanism to track what counts as Canadian, even for productions that will never touch a federal tax credit, and even for productions that already cleared a harder test somewhere else and just need the paperwork to match.

In this system, “Canadian” is rarely a single judgment, made once, by one body, that everything else simply confirms. It’s a set of separate, parallel administrative answers, each running its own test - and this series is going to keep asking, instalment by instalment, what each one is actually counting.

That’s worth keeping in the back of your mind as we move along the continuum. Instalment Two goes where the real money is, and the test gets considerably more intricate than anything covered here. Whether more intricate also means more accurate is a different question - and not one this series is going to answer for you in advance.

As a public service, I offer below six plain-language translations. You’re welcome.

For each statement, you will find: (1) what was said; (2) what it means; and (3) why they’re saying it.

Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture - Marc Miller

What was said: “The CRTC’s new requirements would impose new costs on the companies providing these services, which could ultimately fall on Canadian consumers through higher prices. At a time when Canadians face cost-of-living pressure, now is not the time to make culture and entertainment more expensive.”

Translation: We are responding to American trade pressure and would prefer you not notice.

Context: This is the most polished statement of the bunch, because it works on two levels simultaneously. On the surface, it is a consumer protection argument: streaming bills are too high, and the minister is standing up for ordinary Canadians. Underneath, it is a diplomatic retreat: the USMCA comes up for mandatory review on July 1^st, the Motion Picture Association had called on Cabinet to reverse the CRTC’s decision, the U.S. ambassador complained loudly,1 and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer had personally flagged the Online Streaming Act as a trade irritant.

Miller, to his credit, was relatively candid in front of reporters: “It’s no secret to anyone that’s been paying any attention to this that the USTR has identified these issues as a trade issue.” The official press release on Canada.ca was rather less forthcoming. It mentions “cost-of-living pressure.” The words “USMCA” and “trade” do not appear.

It is also worth noting the constitutional mechanics: under the Broadcasting Act, Cabinet cannot directly overturn a CRTC decision. It can only issue a new policy direction on how the Act should be implemented - a distinction that is legally meaningful but practically irrelevant. The CRTC will certainly get the message and “reconsider” its framework accordingly.

“We blinked because of tariffs” is a difficult sentence to put in a ministerial press release. “We’re protecting your Netflix bill” is considerably easier.

Canadian Media Producers Association - Chair Kyle Irving

What was said: “We are concerned that the federal government has sold out Canadian culture in favour of big US tech interests. If the [Digital Services Tax] file taught us anything, it is that concessions with nothing in return only result in demands for more concessions.”

Translation: "Canadian culture" is what the CMPA calls its revenue model when talking to journalists.

Context: The CMPA represents hundreds of independent production companies - the businesses that develop and produce Canadian film and television. Its members’ operating model depends substantially on regulated contribution flows: other people's money that, under the framework just abandoned, would have been directed through the finance pipeline that feeds and sustains its members. So when Irving says the government "sold out Canadian culture," he means the government lifted a revenue obligation from the streamers before it could flow to the production companies he represents.

The DST reference is shrewd: it invokes Canada's capitulation on the Digital Services Tax - a relevant precedent - to frame this as a pattern of appeasement rather than a one-off policy adjustment. That argument has some merit as a trade observation. It also happens to align perfectly with the financial interest of independent producers in maintaining regulatory contribution requirements. Irving is not wrong that the streamers have made billions from Canadian audiences. He is less interested in asking whether those billions, once they return in part to flow through the regulatory system to Canadian producers, reliably produce anything distinctly Canadian - a question I have been asking in these pages for some time.

ACTRA - National President Eleanor Noble

What was said: “Rather than requiring wealthy media companies to modestly invest in Canada’s cultural ecosystem, Ottawa has chosen to transfer that responsibility to Canadian taxpayers under the guise of “consumer protection.” Our industry was assured that culture would not be a bargaining chip in North American free trade negotiations, but this decision proves differently.”

Translation: ACTRA’s members get hired when productions get funded. Productions get funded when someone is required to pay for them. The only question Noble is asking is who gets stuck with the bill.

Context: Noble’s phrase “under the guise of consumer protection” is accurate as far as it goes - the affordability argument is real but very convenient. But the more revealing thing about Noble’s statement is what it takes for granted: that the Canadian production industry requires a permanent, mandatory, externally imposed subsidy to exist, and that the only legitimate policy question is which external party should provide it.

Nobody is asking why an industry that cannot survive without permanent subsidy should be supported by policy or public money in the first place. That question does not appear in any of these press releases. It does not appear because answering it honestly would require the entire ecosystem of producers, performers, distributors, guilds, and advocacy organizations to confront something uncomfortable: that the regulatory system was designed to sustain an industry, not to support a culture, and that those two things are not the same. The taxpayers who fund the difference are not in the room. They are never in the room.

Motion Picture Association — Canada - President and Managing Director Michele Austin

What was said: “Today’s announcement acknowledges that the CRTC’s proposed framework for investment obligations needs to change. We are encouraged by the government’s commitment to new policy directions. While certain concerns about the Online Streaming Act’s framework for global streamers remain unresolved, we look forward to engaging with leaders in Ottawa to develop a new approach to supporting Canadian stories.”

Translation: Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Spotify froze their shares of $600 million in Canadian cultural funding through litigation,2 got the government to reverse a regulatory decision in under two weeks, and now announce they look forward to “supporting Canadian stories.”

Context: MPA-Canada represents Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Paramount, Sony, NBCUniversal, and Warner Bros. Discovery - the companies whose combined legal challenges have, as Minister Miller acknowledged, frozen the contribution flows that were supposed to fund the Canadian cultural sector in the first place.

The statement is a masterwork of the genre: it thanks the government without appearing to gloat, flags “unresolved concerns” without specifying them, and commits to “engaging” - which in the vocabulary of Washington-backed trade lobbying means: we won this round and we’ll be back for the next one.

Two weeks ago, MPA-Canada was in the Federal Court of Appeal challenging the CRTC's contribution framework as unlawful. Having helped litigate it into reconsideration, they are now more than happy to announce their commitment to "supporting Canadian stories." Turns out that it’s much easier to support Canadian stories when nobody can make you pay for them.

Rogers Communications - Spokesperson Zac Carreiro

What was said: Rogers was “pleased” with the minister’s announcement, because the CRTC’s framework had introduced “complicated and onerous new expenditure quotas” on Canadian broadcasters, while “placing a much lighter set of obligations on American streamers.”

Translation: We want the same deal the Americans just got.

Context: Rogers is a traditional Canadian broadcaster and one of the largest corporations in the country. It has long complained - with some justification - that legacy broadcast regulation requires far more of domestic incumbents than it does of foreign streaming entrants. That asymmetry is real.

What Rogers’ statement omits is that Rogers spent years resisting the Online Streaming Act itself, preferring a lighter regulatory environment for everyone. The sudden enthusiasm for “fairness” is a bit rich. Rogers wants the playing field levelled - but levelled in a downward kind of way, toward what the streamers pay. “Complicated and onerous” is what corporations call regulations they would prefer not to follow. Rogers wants to pay less. That is its right. Describing that preference as a concern for regulatory equity is the time-honoured tradition of large companies attending public policy hearings.

Directors Guild of Canada - National Executive Director Alistair Hepburn

What was said: “A Canadian cultural policy does not happen by accident. It requires deliberate choices. While temporary public support measures are helpful, Canada’s production sector can’t grow, innovate and compete internationally if its long-term financing framework remains unstable. This is about building a sustainable Canadian creative ecosystem that fosters original Canadian storytelling.”

Translation: Hepburn says the sector can’t grow, innovate, and compete internationally because the financing framework is unstable. He does not say how many financing frameworks the sector has cycled through, or why the next one should be expected to produce the stability that none of the others did.

Context: The Canadian film and television industry has been working toward a “sustainable Canadian creative ecosystem” for the better part of sixty years, across multiple regulatory regimes, billions in public subsidy, tax credits, direct government investment, and a succession of policy overhauls and contribution frameworks each announced as the one that would finally get the job done. The ecosystem is, according to the DGC, still not sustainable.

The $600 million announced this week is the latest injection into a patient who has been on life support since birth and has never once been stable enough to walk out of the ICU. As for the claim that the sector's inability to grow, innovate, and compete internationally is the fault of an unstable financing framework - the streamers have been operating in Canada for roughly a decade. Whatever failure to grow, innovate, and compete internationally the DGC is describing was already well underway when Netflix showed up. Attributing it to framework instability rather than to the sector's own performance is the kind of argument that works best when nobody checks the dates.

The CRTC

Between 2023 and 2026, the CRTC held four public consultations on the Online Streaming Act, received more than 360 detailed submissions on contributions alone, conducted a three-week public hearing at which it heard from over 120 groups, and produced a contribution framework it described as a major step forward in modernizing Canada’s broadcasting system.

That framework lasted twelve days.

The CRTC’s response to having three years of regulatory work reversed by a single ministerial announcement was an unsigned email to a journalist: it would review whatever policy directions the government sends.

It was the most honest statement of the week.

What None of Them Said

The government has committed $600 million to replace the contribution obligations it just walked back. Taxpayers will fund what the streamers were supposed to. The streamers keep their margins. Everyone, in other words, is fine.

What no one said - what no one ever says - is whether any of this is working. Whether Canadians are watching. Whether they feel reflected. Whether the word "culture" in any of these press releases refers to something meaningful that exists outside the funding system designed to produce it.

Again, the system was designed to sustain an industry. It was never seriously designed to sustain a culture. This week proved it.

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.

The Mechanics of a Retreat

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 Bill Comes Due

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.

Culture as Costume

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.

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.

What Comes Next

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.

The Series

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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Why This Matters

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.

What’s Coming

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?

A Note on My Perspective

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...

There is something deeply, almost comically Canadian about the “elbows up” moment. A country that apologizes reflexively - that has embedded “sorry” so thoroughly into its conversational expression that the word functions less as an admission than as punctuation - has adopted as its rallying cry against American economic aggression a hockey metaphor about strategic violence. And yet here we are, somehow surprised that it doesn’t come naturally.

That surprise is interesting to examine. Because what’s really being revealed isn’t just a political debate about tariffs and trade deals. It’s something older and more interesting: a national identity that was constructed, in no small part, around a particular kind of self-presentation - and that is now being stress-tested by a world that has stopped rewarding it.

The Identity We Built

In earlier work, I’ve written about what Michael Billig calls “banal nationalism” - the small, unremarkable, everyday cues that keep a national identity quietly in circulation without anyone having to declare it. Weather maps. Bilingual cereal boxes. The Hockey Night in Canada theme. Remembrance Day poppies. None of these moments announces “this is who we are,” but their repetition serves an important purpose. “Canada” is learned as a habit.

"Niceness" has long been part of that habit. It isn't hard to see where it came from. A country that spent its formative centuries as someone else's colony - deferring first to France, then to Britain, then to the gravitational pull of an immensely more powerful neighbour to the south - learns deference as a survival skill before it learns it as a virtue. Add to that the persistent Canadian habit of defining ourselves in contrast to Americans - we are the ones who aren't that - and you get a national identity partly constructed around restraint, civility, and the careful avoidance of confrontation. Not because Canadians are actually nicer than anyone else, but because "nice" became a useful brand. It was low-cost, exportable, and - crucially - nobody wanted to fight you over it.

That brand served us well - for a long time and under very specific conditions. As I’ve argued in writing about the “sense” of being Canadian, our national identity isn’t a fixed thing. It’s a default we inhabit - a set of liberal commitments and everyday practices that feel normal precisely because they are so rarely challenged. Chief among those defaults, for most of the postwar era, was this: that our most powerful neighbour broadly shared our commitments to rules, institutions, and the liberal international order that made Canadian “niceness” not just a personality trait but a viable foreign policy. You don’t need elbows when everyone is skating in the same direction.

Those conditions no longer apply.

The World That Broke

What we are living through is not merely a trade dispute. It is the acceleration of something scholars of nationalism and international order have been tracking for years: the fracturing of the post-1945 liberal consensus that gave countries like Canada the luxury of punching above their weight through multilateralism, rules-based dispute settlement, and the soft power of being broadly liked. That consensus - imperfect, often hypocritical, but capable of supporting a lot of weight - is gone. Or at least, it is no longer something Canada can rely on as a default.

In my research on Canadian identity and cultural policy, the question I keep returning to is whether the institutions and frameworks Canadians built to express and protect who we are still function in the environment they were designed for. The answer, increasingly, is: not obviously. And that’s as true of our cultural regulation as it is of our trade relationships and our foreign policy posture. The world changed. But the frameworks didn’t.

“Elbows up” is, in its awkward way, a recognition of exactly this. The sound of a country discovering - not for the first time, but perhaps more urgently than usual - that the identity it constructed around agreeableness and rules-following doesn’t travel well in a cynical world where the rule-makers have stopped following the rules.

Which brings us to the current debate, and two exchanges from the past two weeks that strike me as illustrating how disoriented some of our political commentary has become.

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The Anti-American Fever Dream

The Hub published a piece this week arguing that Carney’s “anti-American rhetoric” is costing Canada, particularly as sensitive trade negotiations approach. The article’s central exhibit? A YouTube video. To get a sense of the tone the critics are calling “anti-American,” it’s worth quoting it directly. In the April 19th address, Carney said: “I promise you, I will never sugarcoat our challenges. Instead, I’ll talk with you directly and regularly about our plan - why we’re doing what we’re doing, what’s working, what isn’t, and what we’re going to do next.” Carney was equally direct about the structural problem: Canada's ties to the United States had become, in his word, "weaknesses" that the country must correct. “Anti-American rhetoric?” To me, it sounds more like someone trying to sound like a competent adult in a difficult situation.

But the label is doing a lot of work. The “anti-American” frame is a well-worn piece of Trumpian rhetorical architecture: find offence in the most neutral assertion of a counterparty’s interests, then position yourself as the aggrieved party and demand sacrifice and apology. That we are importing it into our domestic political commentary - that Canadian voices are doing Trump’s framing for him - is its own kind of problem. It reflects something I’d describe as a kind of identity lag: the instinct to reach for the old toolkit of deference and reassurance even when the situation has fundamentally changed. We are so accustomed to managing our international relationships through niceness that we’ve started policing each other’s tone rather than examining the substance of what’s actually being demanded of us.

And the substance is worth examining. The Carney government has resisted making upfront concessions, noting that Canada received nothing in return for previous ones - including our forbearance around retaliatory tariffs, the lifting of the digital sales tax in 2025, and the imposition of tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in 2024 at American request. That looks less like anti-Americanism and more like a government that finally learned something from being repeatedly taken to the cleaners. In the old liberal order, being the reasonable party in a dispute eventually paid off - because there were institutions, norms, and reputational costs that enforced some baseline of reciprocity. In the current environment, being the reasonable party just means you go home empty-handed and get to feel good about your tone.

The Poker Player Showing His Hand

Then there’s Pierre Poilievre, who offered, two weeks later at a May 3rd press conference in Toronto, his own contribution to the debate: “If energy and minerals are not going to be leveraged for Canada in these negotiations, what leverage does Mr. Carney claim to have? He can’t tell us what leverage we have, what demands he’s making, what tariffs he wants to get removed, and when and if he will even get a deal at all.”

Poilievre’s demand for specifics has something very Canadian about it. In its own strange way, its an extension of the niceness reflex - the idea that a democratic government owes its citizens (and by extension, apparently, the other side of the table) full transparency about its negotiating hand in real time. Accountability dressed up as strategy. The assumption embedded in the demand is that the old rules still apply: that good-faith disclosure will be met with good-faith reciprocity. That Canada can afford to be the open book in a negotiation with a U.S. administration that has shown, repeatedly, that it reads open books and then demands far more.

Poilievre’s own stated alternative - to “build up a massive strategic reserve of energy and minerals and use that as leverage to get tariff-free access to the United States economy” - is, actually, a coherent idea. It is also an idea that would be instantly neutralized by the transparency he’s simultaneously demanding. You cannot hold leverage and announce it at the same time. That’s just an expensive press release, not a negotiating strategy.

What “Elbows Up” Actually Means

Here’s what I think is actually happening, and why it matters beyond the immediate trade file.

Canada is in the middle of an identity negotiation as much as an economic one. The “elbows up” moment is uncomfortable not because Canadians are being asked to be aggressive - the phrase, after all, describes a legal and routine hockey move - but because it asks us to inhabit a version of ourselves that doesn’t match the self-image we’ve carefully cultivated. We are the peacekeepers. The honest brokers. The ones who built their reputation on being the reasonable country in a world of unreasonable ones.

That reputation was real, and it was earned, and it was genuinely useful. But it was always, as I’ve argued in writing about the constructed nature of Canadian identity, a product of specific historical conditions - not an inflexible national character. The idea of Canadian niceness has a rather more complicated history than the brand suggests, sitting uneasily alongside Canada’s loaded record of colonization, residential school systems, Japanese internment, and sustained injustice toward Indigenous peoples. We were perhaps never as uniformly nice as we thought. We were very good at projecting the image - particularly in contrast to a louder, more combustible neighbour. And for a long time, the projection worked.

And yet the neighbour has gotten louder. And even more combustible. And the whole projection isn’t working anymore.

What the moment requires is not a repudiation of Canadian values - the liberal commitments to due process, pluralism, accountable government, and rules-based order that I’ve described elsewhere as the “operating system” of Canadian society. Those are worth defending precisely because they are under pressure, here and elsewhere. What it requires though is a clear-eyed understanding that those values cannot be performed into existence in a world that no longer rewards their performance. They have to be backed by something. Leverage. Options. Patience. Strategic ambiguity.

In other words: elbows up. Not as a rejection of who we are - but as a recognition that who we are has always been more complicated, and more capable, than the niceness myth suggested.

Canada has become very good at avoiding its most essential questions. We smother them in euphemism, pass them off as administrative disputes, and reassure ourselves that somebody in a robe will eventually figure it out. The Supreme Court of Canada’s hearing this week of the appeal against the constitutionality of Quebec’s Bill 21 should make that dodge harder to execute.

The case concerns a provincial law restricting religious symbols in the public service, Quebec’s invocation of the notwithstanding clause to shield it from a court’s Charter review, and the appellants’ argument that two Charter rights – sex equality and minority-language education – lie beyond the reach of the notwithstanding clause regardless. But strip away the procedural language and what remains is a national argument Canadians have been trying not to have: what kind of country is this, what holds it together, and what are we prepared to defend as part of our common life?

Those questions run well beyond Quebec’s debate over religious symbols. They connect directly to the other anxieties now pressing on the country: Alberta’s separatist agitation, widening arguments over immigration, integration, and social cohesion, and the suddenly urgent question – sharpened considerably by Donald Trump’s annexation fantasies – of whether Canada is still willing to describe itself as anything more substantial than a set of borders and a flag. If the answer to that last question is no, then Trump is essentially right: there is nothing here worth defending as a distinct political community. Most Canadians sense that is wrong. This case is one place where we get to prove it.

The evidence assembled by the appellants makes the stakes concrete. Every documented case of an employee denied work or forced from their position under Bill 21 involves a Muslim woman wearing a hijab. Not a cross. Not a kippah. Christian symbols occupy a normalized, banal position in Quebec public culture in a way that the hijab plainly does not – the cross on Mount Royal has been illuminated for nearly a century and nobody has called it a threat to state neutrality. The law is nominally neutral. Its effects are not. What is dressed up as state secularism is in practice a demand that some people make themselves less visibly themselves before they may fully participate in public life. That is far from neutrality, it’s the majority deciding which identities are tidy enough for public life.

That is what makes this hearing larger than Bill 21 itself – and why Canadians should be watching.

The Ethnic Fantasy and the Post-National Fog

The debate over national identity sits on a spectrum, and it is worth being honest about the poles.

At one end is the old, poisonous view associated with figures like Richard Walther Darré: the idea that nationhood is rooted in blood, ancestry, inherited stock, and an organic attachment to land. Darré’s whole vision is distillable from the title of one of his works: A New Nobility of Blood and Soil. That is nationhood reduced to race, lineage, and exclusion – the politics of inherited essence. It is ugly, discredited, and wholly incompatible with anything that should count as Canadian constitutional life.

No serious person should want that.

But the opposite extreme is not wisdom. It has its own kind of madness.

At the other end is a now-familiar elite reflex – fashionable in certain academic, media, and activist circles – that treats almost any effort to describe a national character, a shared culture, or a common civic inheritance as racist until proven otherwise. On this view, to speak of national identity at all is to flirt with chauvinism. To suggest that a country might have a substantive public culture is a coded act of exclusion. To ask what binds the place together is to have already revealed yourself as the problem - and that is not anything close to legitimate analysis. It is a thought-terminating reflex that has made large portions of the Canadian conversation about identity functionally impossible – and that has left the serious work of civic nation-building to atrophy while the ideological gatekeepers congratulate themselves on their persistent vigilance.

That tendency is not without intellectual foundation. The warning that animates it is serious enough: nationalism has a long and well-documented history of curdling into exclusion, and the distance between “we share a culture” and “you don’t belong here” has historically been shorter than nationalists like to admit. A glance at the chaos now enveloping the United States drives this reality home with daily force.

But a warning can itself become a dogma. And once it does, it starts doing damage of its own.

If every attempt to articulate a common national character is treated as suspect, then the only safe nation is an empty one – drained of any meaningful content, reduced to a legal shell, a marketplace, a service provider, a border with tax administration. It may still function, in a way. But it no longer knows how to explain itself: not to newcomers, not to minorities, not even to itself. And that vacuum is dangerous. Political communities do not hold together indefinitely on procedural abstraction, theoretical musings, economic growth, and a few heritage minutes. If liberal democracies refuse to articulate a credible civic identity, they should not be surprised when more primitive and uglier forms of identity come stomping back through the door.

Anthony D. Smith and the Middle Ground That Actually Matters

This is why Anthony D. Smith remains so useful. Smith occupies the space between racial essentialism and post-national mush. His definition is still one of the clearest on offer: a nation is “a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members.” That is not “blood-and-soil” mysticism. But neither is it the fantasy that a country can survive without memory, symbols, institutions, and some durable sense of shared belonging.

Smith’s middle ground matters because it helps clarify what is actually at stake in Bill 21. Canada does not need an ethnic conception of nationhood. It never should have one. But it also cannot afford the opposite error – the idea that any effort to define a Canadian public identity is somehow illegitimate by definition.

A country has to stand for something.

And Canada has, historically, tried to answer that question in a very particular way: through a political nationality rather than an ethnic one. That was already present, however imperfectly, in the Confederation debates of 1867. Janet Ajzenstat’s Canada’s Founding Debates is a useful reminder that these questions were not invented by social media or the latest round of immigration anxiety. They were there at our very beginning. The founders were already wrestling with nationality, religion, difference, minority protection, and the problem of building a common political community out of deep plurality. Their answers were limited, often blinkered, and framed through the narrow lens of the “two founding nations.” But the question was unmistakably there. And it has never gone away.

The Post-National Fantasy and Its Costs

This is where multiculturalism has to be defended seriously rather than sentimentally. Canada is a multicultural country. That is not a fashionable accessory; it is one of its defining features. But multiculturalism does not mean that anything goes, or that the country has no centre of gravity, or that public life can survive indefinite fragmentation without some shared commitments. Multiculturalism worthy of the name has to be anchored in liberal-democratic norms – equality, freedom, constitutional restraint, mutual obligation, and a common political framework.

That is precisely why Justin Trudeau’s “post-national” declaration was so reckless. The problem with announcing that Canada has “no core identity” and “no mainstream” is not merely that it sounds shallow. It is that it surrenders the field. It signals to everyone – newcomers trying to understand what they are joining, minorities depending on constitutional protection, and citizens anxious about rapid cultural change – that the state has nothing coherent to say about what we share or why it matters. That abdication does not produce cosmopolitan enlightenment … it produces the conditions for a politics of ethnic grievance to fill the space left behind.

Those who are uneasy about high immigration from cultures with different social norms, different understandings of gender equality, different orientations toward liberal institutions – their anxiety is not automatically xenophobia. Some of it reflects a legitimate concern about whether the institutions and norms of liberal democracy are being adequately transmitted and defended in a context of rapid pluralism. That is a serious question which deserves a serious answer.

The serious answer, though, is not Bill 21. Bill 21 does not defend liberal values. It demonstrates how a liberal state can dress majority cultural preference in the language of neutrality and deploy it against minorities. The Muslim women who wear hijabs in Quebec classrooms are not the threat to liberal values. They are educated women seeking to participate fully in public life on their own terms. The last time anyone checked, that was the definition of liberal participation.

Why You Should Be Watching

The better Canadian tradition is older and harder than the post-national fantasy. It says this country is neither a tribe nor a hotel. It says we are bound together not by blood, but not by “nothing” either. It says that minority rights are not cosmetic extras tacked on for good optics, but part of the constitutional and political identity of the country itself. It says a common life can be real without being ethnically pure, and plural without being morally hollow.

If a liberal democracy protects minority rights only when they are socially convenient, then those rights are not foundational at all. They are conditional.

That is what the Supreme Court is being asked to decide. And whether Canadians are ready to admit it or not, that is the question before the country too.

CBC wants us to believe we’re entering a “golden age of Canadian television.” In an article by Nickie Shobeiry, published February 18, 2026,1 the claim arrives less as argument than as celebration: industry confidence, a couple success anecdotes, and a conference soundbite treated as proof. Exhibit A is Bell Media’s Carlyn Klebuc, who used the Canadian Media Producers Association’s annual conference in Ottawa this February to proclaim, “We’re in the Canadian golden age of television.” Shobeiry’s piece largely takes the line at face value, when a public broadcaster’s job is to pressure-test it.

Start with the obvious: when a “golden age” needs to be announced at an industry conference, it’s probably more branding than history. Yes, conferences exist to manufacture momentum. The problem is CBC repeating that momentum as public narrative without so much as a smell test.

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To Shobeiry’s credit, one inconvenient fact makes it in: Canadian film and TV production “sank by 18.5 per cent” between 2023 and 2024. But the piece quickly converts that decline into inspirational framing - the slowdown in foreign acquisitions becomes an “opportunity,” Canadian originals “fill gaps,” Bell backed “roughly 300 hours of Canadian programming,” and Heated Rivalry is held up as proof of renaissance. We’re told “the demand for content - specifically Canadian content - has never been higher.”

Higher demand from whom? For what? Measured how? Demand is not a vibe. It’s audiences choosing Canadian shows when they could choose anything. The article never makes that distinction because it would force the harder question: are we building cultural value, or keeping an industrial apparatus fed?

The core problem: we confuse certification with culture

Canada has trained itself to treat “Canadian” as an administrative outcome, not a cultural one. We certify. We check passports. We count points. We track spend. We manage ownership thresholds. Then we speak as if those inputs automatically produce identity, cohesion, and shared reference points.

They don’t.

A show can be Canadian on paper while culturally anonymous in substance - and our system is designed to tolerate, even reward, that separation. That’s why “golden age” claims are so easy to make and so hard to verify: the regime measures production activity far better than it measures cultural outcomes.

So when CBC says “golden age,” the basic question is: gold for whom? For Canadians - seeing themselves and one another on screen in ways that actually land? Or for the production ecosystem - where success means simply that the financing closed and the paperwork cleared? If it’s the second, then call it what it is: a heavily subsidized industrial support system that sometimes produces popular art.

“Canadian content” is industrial policy in cultural hair and makeup

Shobeiry quotes familiar lines about risk-taking and building “our own industry.” Fine. But what does “risk” mean in a sector where risk is routinely borne by society through tax credits, government funds, mandated broadcaster contributions, and certification gatekeeping?

This is a problem of civic honesty. Canadian content debates are sold as cultural necessity, but the operating logic is industrial: who qualifies, who gets financing, who keeps studios busy, who holds rights, who captures downstream value, who hires enough Canadians. That might be defensible - industrial policy can be a legitimate choice - but it should be named honestly, not smuggled past readers as a cultural triumph.

Even the success story in the piece - Heated Rivalry - is treated as proof of renaissance without any serious asking of what, exactly, it proves. A global breakout hit is great. But a hit does not validate the policy regime. It validates the show. The policy question is more uncomfortable: does the regime reliably generate hits, cultural moments, and shared references - or does it reliably generate certified production volume? Those are not the same thing. Not even close.

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What CBC didn’t ask (and should have)

The article profiles a new production company making “feel-good TV movies,” and a young cinematographer who feels valued in Canada, in part due to supportive conditions for women behind the camera. Those are real and worthwhile things. But CBC’s job is not just to celebrate good vibes; it’s to ask whether the story it is selling to the public matches the underlying reality.

Here are some questions a public-interest version of this piece would have asked:

1. If we’re in a “golden age,” why did production drop 18.5% in a single year? Is this a cyclical dip or a structural correction? What’s changing in broadcaster spending and platform strategy?

2. “Demand for Canadian content has never been higher” - demand from whom? Platforms needing volume is not the same as audiences choosing Canadian stories.

3. What does “Canadian” mean here - culturally or administratively? Are we talking about stories that reflect our nation, our histories, our lives, our challenges, our values and our aspirations, or productions that qualify under a certification framework increasingly tied to financing and rights allocations?

4. How much of this “golden age” is underwritten by public and regulation-created money? And what is the public getting in return - culturally - beyond the jobs and economic activity?

5. Who captures downstream value when a “Canadian” show succeeds globally? In the streaming era, IP ownership and exploitation rights are the difference between a sustainable sector and a permanent service economy.

These questions are not anti-industry. They’re what it looks like to take the public seriously.

If the industry wants a “golden age,” it needs a standard of proof

Here’s a more accurate headline: “Canada is very good at producing Canadian-certified production”. We have built a world-class compliance-and-financing machine. What we have not built is a credible way to test whether this machine delivers the cultural outcomes constantly invoked to justify it.

If we’re going to keep underwriting billions annually, “trust us, it’s working” is not good enough - not in 2026, not under fiscal pressure, and not in a global attention economy where Canadians can ignore Canadian content with a finger’s click. A real renaissance would include at least three things:

• Audience pull: Canadians choose these shows at scale – and consistently; the shows travel because they’re wanted.

• Value capture: meaningful Canadian ownership and exploitation rights, not symbolic slices shared with the real power players.

• Cultural substance: not a single, rigid national myth, but shared references that actually help Canadians recognize one another across difference.

Until CBC - and the wider Canadian production and broadcasting industry - can point to evidence instead of conference cheer, the “golden age” claim is just a paper crown: shiny and comforting, but entirely unearned.

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Image credit: Crave

I really wish this debate was about almost anything other than pornography.

Not because the underlying issue is any less serious here, but because porn is the perfect political shield: the moment you mention it, the discussion gets dragged into a values fight (“good/bad,” “moral/immoral”) instead of staying where it belongs … on the technology and the power it puts in government hands.

So, imagine a different target. Imagine the UK deciding that graphic war reporting - frontline footage, mass-casualty scenes, and raw documentation from conflicts - should be “age-gated” online. Most people respect that journalistic material; much of it is socially valuable; and yet it can obviously be distressing (arguably even “harmful”) for children. The case for child protection would be easy to make. The headlines would be sympathetic. The moral panic would be a whole lot lower.

But the mechanism would be the same: a system designed to control access to legal content by requiring “proof” of age before viewing. And once that mechanism exists - once the infrastructure, norms, and enforcement logic are in place - the key question isn’t whether we like the content in today’s debate. It’s whether we’re comfortable building a scalable gate that can be pointed at any legal content tomorrow.

Are we comfortable with governments building censorship-capable infrastructure that predictably blocks legal content - no matter what the content is - because the first test case is politically convenient?

That’s why the UK’s age-assurance fight matters. Not because pornography is uniquely precious or has a unique right to protection, but because it’s the easiest test case for normalizing a tool whose practical effect is often the same regardless of the target: legal content becomes harder to access, or simply unavailable, by a government’s policy design.

What just happened in the UK

The BBC reports that Pornhub will restrict access to UK users starting February 2nd: after which only people who already have a Pornhub account will be able to access content. Everyone else will find the site’s content inaccessible.

Aylo (Pornhub’s parent) frames this as the predictable outcome of the UK’s Online Safety Act age-check obligations, arguing the approach hasn’t protected minors and has instead pushed traffic toward “darker, unregulated corners of the internet.” Aylo also claims the legal change produced a 77% drop in Pornhub traffic.

The response by the UK regulator (Ofcom) is blunt: porn sites have a choice - they can either do age checks or block access.

This is the policy reality that gets buried under the rhetoric of press releases. Age assurance regimes often “work” not by smoothly verifying adulthood, but by making access sufficiently unpleasant, risky, or expensive that either (a) platforms choose a safer path: deny access; or (b) adults decide not to exercise their right to freely express themselves through their access to legal online content.

The part that matters: adults get blocked from accessing legal content

Pornhub’s spokesperson says that after February 2nd, users trying to access the site will meet “a wall” instead of content. Ofcom is explicit that blocking is one of the two paths.

The UK government line, via its Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, insists the Online Safety Act “does not stop adults viewing legal content” and that services “do not need to leave the UK.”

That statement only works in a world where “robust age assurance” is frictionless, universally trusted, cheap to implement, and doesn’t alter behaviour. This world doesn’t exist - and never will.

In the real world, age assurance tends to produce a predictable sequence:

• Users don’t want to hand over personal information.

• Platforms don’t want the compliance, liability, and reputational exposure.

• Many choose the lowest-risk option: block, restrict, geofence, or withdraw features.

And people route around gates. The article notes that VPN downloads surged in the UK after age-verification requirements began in July, and policymakers are now debating whether VPN providers should be restricted for children.

So the spiral becomes familiar:

1. Build the gate.

2. People route around the gate.

3. Try to restrict the routing-around tools.

4. Repeat.

The UK is the preview, not the exception

As I’ve previously written about, the UK is a preview of what we can expect in Canada if current age-assurance proposals are enacted based on a “think of the children” argument.

Once “age assurance” becomes the baseline, the market reshuffles:

• Big, visible platforms comply or restrict access because enforcement and reputational risks are real.

• Smaller / offshore / sketchier sites keep doing what they’ve always done because regulator reach is limited and enforcement is uneven - precisely the complaint Aylo makes.

• Adults lose convenient access to lawful content, while officials insist that isn’t what’s happening … right up until it happens!

That’s why the UK’s age-assurance fight matters. Not because pornography is uniquely precious or has a unique right to protection, but because it’s the easiest test case for normalizing a tool whose practical effect is often the same regardless of the target: legal content becomes harder to access, or simply unavailable, by a government’s policy design.

Key takeaway

Age assurance is sold as verification. In practice, it often functions as denial - denial through friction, privacy risk, compliance cost, or outright blocking. And once a jurisdiction normalizes that model, it becomes importable: “If the UK can do it, why can’t we?”

The content at issue today is pornography. That’s the easy case for the politicians supporting age assurance to make - one that lets everyone feel virtuous while building a system that can be scaled up.

The harder question is worth asking:

Are we comfortable with governments building censorship-capable infrastructure that predictably blocks legal content - no matter what the content is - because the first test case is politically convenient?

Canada’s production sector is at risk of mistaking cultural regulation as a substitute for market leverage – and the sudden pivot by the Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA) from praising the CRTC’s new “Canadian program” definition - to seeking leave to appeal it to the Federal Court - is simply the latest, clearest snapshot of the pattern.

The “dependency mindset”

In professional settings, a “dependency mindset” takes hold when someone treats the institution as a substitute for leverage. Rather than building credibility through results, they default to process: rules, escalation, and managerial intervention. When outmatched, they push to standardize the interaction or rewrite the policy so the system delivers what their performance or bargaining position can’t. Over time, they get better at working the bureaucracy than competing in the work, and start asking the organization to supply the leverage.

Used carefully that concept maps onto a recurring feature of Canadian cultural-policy debates. For decades, many film and television producers have treated federal cultural policy not only as a framework for the support of production, but as a mechanism to stabilize commercial outcomes: subsidies, tax credits, mandated financial contributions, broadcast quotas, certification rules – and now, increasingly, regulatory interventions designed to improve producers’ negotiating outcomes with global buyers.

None of this is an attack on individual producers. Canada has some serious creative talent, and the structural realities of a small market beside the U.S. are real. My concern is structural: our default policy reflex has too often been to treat regulation as a replacement for leverage – especially when the market offers terms we don’t like.

The CMPA’s decision to appeal

The CMPA’s decision to seek leave to appeal the CRTC’s new “Canadian program” definition is revealing precisely because it happened in real time.

On November 18, 2025, the CMPA publicly applauded the Commission’s “modernized” definition – encouraged by its emphasis on Canadian ownership and pleased to see references to “guiding principles to ensure fair negotiations among production partners.” Only a few weeks later, the association changed course and filed in the Federal Court of Appeal seeking leave to appeal the very decision it had just welcomed.

That pivot isn’t merely a communications wobble. It’s instructive because it captures the dependency mindset in one move: access the benefits of flexibility, then ask the state to protect you when a stronger counterparty uses that flexibility efficiently. It evidences a structural problem: the production industry wants access to global markets and global money, but lacks confidence in its ability to negotiate and thrive there without regulator-supplied leverage.

What the CRTC actually did

Whatever one thinks of the policy, the Commission tried to respond to a streaming-era fact that policy debates often dance around: modern financing involves shared ownership, layered rights, and complex arrangements among multiple stakeholders.

The new framework ties certification more directly to Canadian copyright ownership and uses a sliding scale: as Canadian copyright ownership rises, the requirements for Canadian participation in key creative roles become less demanding; as Canadian ownership falls, those creative-role requirements become more demanding. The decision also states a floor: at least 20% of the program’s copyright must be retained by a Canadian.

In other words, the CRTC aimed to modernize certification while resisting the temptation to become a deal-maker. It signaled a preference for flexibility over prescriptive micromanagement and left commercial terms where they belong: with the parties at the negotiating table.

The premise is simple: the regulator can define what counts as “Canadian,” but it should not write the term sheet.

Be careful what you wish for

The irony is that this move toward flexibility did not materialize from nowhere. It reflects what many Canadian producers – CMPA included – have been pressing for in the streaming era: a certification framework that can accommodate modern financing and rights-sharing without killing projects at the deal stage. That argument was often framed as a “give-and-take” model: foreign services could obtain more rights in exchange for more Canadian participation in key creative roles. – and the Commission’s new approach largely embeds that logic.

Yes, producer advocates also warned about the predictable downside: powerful buyers would push for maximum ownership wherever possible, and a highly flexible model might not ensure Canadians “control and benefit in a significant and equitable manner” from exploitation. The problem isn’t that the risk was unforeseeable. It’s that the response is once again to treat negotiating weakness as a policy defect – and to reach for regulatory or judicial correction instead of rebuilding leverage at the table.

This is the recurring pattern: ask for flexibility to access global markets and global money – then complain when global markets behave like global markets.

This isn’t culture - this is leverage

To facilitate litigation, the appeal had to be framed in the language of cultural policy and statutory purpose. But the engine underneath it is commercial. The concern is not simply whether Canadian ownership exists somewhere on paper; it’s whether producers can benefit from ownership in practice through meaningful control over exploitation and the ability to capture downstream value.

I negotiated financing arrangements with powerful international parties for 30 years. The concern is legitimate – but the proposed solution is the problem.

Global streamers are not cultural patrons; they’re businesses. They will do business on terms that make economic sense for them – especially when they can identify a regulatory baseline that produces certification and keeps the financing machine moving. A clarified baseline becomes a tool. And the party with the most leverage tends to use tools efficiently.

So the anxiety is rational. But the move from anxiety to litigation is where the dependency mindset shows itself: when outcomes look unfavourable, the instinct is not to build a stronger position, but to ask the regulator – or the courts – to redesign the bargaining environment.

Not competitive? Regulate!

This is not only about one legal appeal. The broader push, increasingly visible in the streaming era, is toward policy-supplied bargaining leverage.

CMPA advocacy has not stopped at defining Canadian content in a way that reflects modern financing. There have also been calls for baseline terms and conditions – sometimes framed as “codes of practice” – meant to govern how negotiations with streamers unfold, including what producers can retain by way of exploitation and commercialization benefits. That goes beyond the building of cultural scaffolding. It is a move toward the state shifting from defining what Canadian content is to shaping the commercial terms on which it is financed, owned, and exploited.

The logic is consistent: If negotiations don’t produce acceptable outcomes, don’t improve what you bring to the table – move the table.

What decades of dependency mindset have produced

Over time, this approach does more than shift deal terms. It shapes industry identity and competence. It rewards mastery of administrative process, compliance architecture, and leverage-seeking over innovation, risk-taking, and audience demand. It produces a creative sector that becomes highly fluent in government and increasingly uncertain in markets – more practiced at securing conditions for success than at creating success that generates leverage.

And the cost is not abstract. An industry trained to depend on policy for leverage will underinvest in the harder work of building leverage:

• developing properties with genuine audience pull;

• creating Canadian IP that travels because it’s wanted (not because it qualifies for certification); and

• building enough commercial confidence – and alternatives – to walk away from bad terms.

What a non-dependent strategy would look like

A healthy production sector does not need the regulator to negotiate its deals. What it needs – especially in a market dominated by global buyers – is leverage that can’t be granted by policy and can’t be fabricated in court. That starts with audience pull: work so compelling, distinctive, and repeatably bankable that it travels on its own merits and forces buyers to compete for it. It also requires commercial confidence – enough clarity about value, enough alternative pathways to finance and distribute, and enough willingness to walk away – with “no” being a credible option rather than an empty threat. And it demands innovation, not a buzzword, but a disciplined practice: new approaches to development, financing, packaging, rights strategies, distribution, and partnership structures that reflect how the business actually works now, rather than how we wish it worked.

Regulation can support those conditions. But it cannot replace them. When policy is asked to replace them - by hardwiring bargaining leverage into certification criteria or importing deal terms into regulatory codes - the industry becomes less capable of developing leverage on its own. Dependence becomes normalized; weakness becomes managed instead of cured.

Same strategy, same results

If the goal is a more innovative, resilient, commercially confident Canadian production sector, retrofitting negotiating outcomes through regulatory escalation – whether at the Commission, in cabinet corridors, or in the Federal Court of Appeal – is not modernization. It is the same reflex, updated for the streaming era: ask government for flexibility, then ask government to supply the bargaining power.

That is the dependency mindset in motion. It has never been a path to strength. It is a path to continued weakness – managed, normalized, and periodically litigated.

On November 18th, the CRTC released Broadcasting Regulatory Policy CRTC 2025-299, a decision that quietly rewrites what counts as a “Canadian program” in the age of Netflix, Disney+, Amazon and YouTube. At first glance, it’s the kind of dry regulatory tweak that most people would quickly scroll past. But this policy is the gatekeeper for billions of dollars a year in support for Canadian film and television production – money that largely comes from Canadian taxpayers.

When the CRTC redraws the line around what “counts” as Canadian, it is deciding which projects and which companies gain access to that public money. Canadians are entitled to ask whether those billions are being used in the public interest or mainly in the interests of the industry that lobbies for them.

In rough terms, that system now regulates more than $4 billion in certified “Canadian content” production each year. Well over half of the financing comes either directly from governments or from spending that exists only because of regulation: refundable federal and provincial tax credits, contributions from the Canada Media Fund and Telefilm Canada, and the Canadian-programming obligations the CRTC imposes on private broadcasters and, increasingly, streamers. When we argue about what a “Canadian program” is, we are really arguing about how that river of public and regulated money flows, and who gets to build a business model around it. This is not a small, niche policy space; it is a multi-billion-dollar support system that Canadians are underwriting.

Formally, the policy is about “modernizing” an old system so the law can catch up with streaming. In practice, it tells us something more uncomfortable: when the CRTC and major industry players talk about “Canadian content,” they use the language of culture – Canadian stories, Canadian voices, Canadians seeing themselves on screen – but the decisions they actually make are overwhelmingly about industrial policy.

That might be fine … industrial policy is a legitimate goal. The Broadcasting Act has always married cultural ambitions to hard-headed economic objectives: jobs, investment, infrastructure, domestic ownership of intellectual property. But if most of what we’re doing is industrial policy, we should have the courage to say so, rather than pretending that every change to our content rules is a victory for national identity.

Right now, we are letting cultural rhetoric do a lot of work for decisions that are, in substance, about commercial interests.

What the policy really does – in broad strokes

The decision makes four main moves.

First, it updates the “points system” that has defined Canadian content for decades. A show still must hit a minimum number of points based on who directs it, who writes it, who the lead actors are, and so on, and most of the production spend still has to occur in Canada. The CRTC has expanded the list of recognized “key creative” roles and introduced percentage thresholds instead of the old “six-out-of-ten” scoring. It’s tidier, more flexible and better aligned with how modern productions are structured.

Second, it formally brings copyright ownership into the definition. For the first time, CRTC policy requires that a minimum share (20%) of the rights must be held by a Canadian company – either a producer or a broadcaster – for a program to qualify as Canadian at all. Above that minimum, there is a sliding scale: productions with more Canadian ownership can qualify with fewer Canadian creatives; productions with less Canadian ownership have to rely more heavily on Canadians in so-called “above the line” positions.

Third, the CRTC takes a cautious line on artificial intelligence. Key creative roles – the jobs that carry points – are supposed to be held by human beings, and AI-generated material on its own is not meant to qualify a program as Canadian. AI can assist, but it is not supposed to replace writers, directors or actors when it comes to certification.

Finally, the Commission demands better data from streaming services: more detailed reporting on revenues and programming expenditures, with some of that information to be published in aggregate form. That will help fuel the next round of arguments over who pays what into the system and, as always, who benefits.

All of that matters. These changes will affect how financing, production, and distribution deals are structured, who gets hired, and which projects receive favourable regulatory treatment. But if you listen to the hearings that led up to this decision, and then read the decision itself, a striking gap opens between the way the policy is sold and what it actually does.

The hearings spoke the language of culture. The decision speaks the language of industry.

Over three weeks of hearings, the CRTC heard from producers’ associations, broadcasters, unions, streamers, Indigenous and other equity-seeking organizations, public-interest advocates and more. Over and over, their written submissions and oral presentations leaned on the same set of cultural phrases: Canadians must “see themselves reflected” in what they watch; Canadian voices and perspectives must not be drowned out by American content; the system must protect Canadian values and a distinct Canadian identity.

If you only listened to that rhetoric, you would think the central question before the CRTC was: What kind of programming helps sustain a sense of Canadian identity?

But that is not what industry stakeholders meant … and that is not the question the CRTC’s decision answers.

When you strip away the preambles, the policy is overwhelmingly about which corporations are deemed “Canadian,” how points are allocated across production jobs and credits, how much of each budget must be spent here, how much intellectual property ownership global players must give up in order to have their shows recognized as Canadian, and how money is tracked and redistributed inside the system.

These issues are all industrial in nature. Again, there is nothing untoward or illogical about that. But if we are going to spend months talking about culture and identity in public, then resolve everything in terms of ownership structures and payroll, we should admit what we’re doing.

Industrial policy by any other name

If you read the decision as a piece of industrial policy, it is coherent.

It modernizes an aging machine. The old ten-point scheme was built for an era of three or four dominant broadcasters and largely domestic production. Today’s environment is one of global franchises, cross-border writers’ rooms and complex co-financing structures. Expanding the list of key creative roles, allowing shared credits and using percentage thresholds is a practical response.

It keeps global money flowing. Foreign streamers and studios told the CRTC, more or less politely, that if Canadian status became too rigid – especially around ownership and creative control – their appetite to invest here would shrink. The new copyright rules set a low floor for Canadian participation and then offer a workable path for big global players to operate their usual business models while still getting Canadian certification.

It manages competing lobby groups. Domestic broadcasters want “equity” with streamers. Independent producers want stronger IP protections. Guilds want clear limits on AI and foreign creative control. Indigenous organizations want narrative sovereignty. Public-interest groups want diversity and access. The Commission gives each of them a hearing, acknowledges their concerns, and then lands somewhere in the middle that does not seriously disrupt the status quo.

As a piece of economic management in a politically sensitive sector, it’s a very familiar Ottawa result: incremental, technocratic, and carefully balanced.

Where the trouble starts is when we pretend this is also a meaningful answer to the cultural issues everyone was careful to invoke along the way.

Culture as costume

The Broadcasting Act is clear that Canada’s broadcasting system is supposed to serve both cultural and industrial objectives. It talks about safeguarding, enriching and strengthening the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of Canada. It talks about Canadian programming reflecting Canadian attitudes, opinions, ideas, values and artistic creativity. It also talks about Canadian ownership, employment, and industrial capacity.

We are entitled to pursue both objectives; they both matter.

What we are not entitled to do, at least not if we take citizens seriously, is to speak constantly in the language of culture while quietly acting almost entirely in the realm of industry – and then declare victory on the cultural front because some percentages moved on a CRTC form or a spreadsheet.

When we say:

• “This framework is about ensuring Canadians see themselves on screen,”

but what we actually do is:

• ensure a global streaming platform needs only a small Canadian partner to call its show “Canadian,” and access Canadian taxpayer funding,

• treat a program as Canadian regardless of whether its story has anything to do with Canada or Canadian life, and

• judge success based on points, budgets and domestic spend,

then we are using cultural language to sell an industrial compromise. That may be good politics, but it is not honest - and regulators, producers, broadcasters, and other industry stakeholders should owe Canadians honesty - if nothing else.

What gets left out when we pretend this is cultural policy

Notice what the policy does not do.

It does not ask whether the programs produced under this regime help an increasingly diverse Canadian population understand each other across regions, languages and communities. There is no concern with whether people in Winnipeg and Rimouski and Surrey are actually seeing one another’s lives in what we certify as “Canadian.”

It does not ask whether Indigenous, racialized or otherwise marginalized communities are gaining durable space to tell their own stories, on their own terms, in front of large audiences – or whether they are still largely confined to the fringes while the bulk of certified content looks and feels much the same as it always has.

It does not ask whether Canadians feel more, or less, like there is such a thing as “Canadian culture” after watching what we classify as Canadian in schedules and recommendation feeds. The system never pauses to test whether the stories it funds are doing anything to build a shared sense of belonging or merely filling quotas.

Those questions are genuinely hard. They require a different kind of research, a different kind of evidence and, frankly, a different kind of politics. They might produce uncomfortable answers.

By ignoring them, the system protects itself from having to admit that decades of regulation may not have produced the cultural outcomes we claim. It also lets industry players dress nakedly self-interested demands – who gets the subsidies, the jobs, the IP and the next round of deals – in patriotic language, as if locking in revenue for themselves were the same thing as serving Canadian culture.

It’s time to call the thing what it is

My argument is not that we should abandon the Broadcasting Act’s industrial objectives. A viable domestic production industry matters. Jobs matter. Technical skills and infrastructure matter. It is entirely reasonable to want Canada to be something more than a branch plant for American platforms.

My argument is that we should stop pretending industrial decisions are automatically cultural achievements. If a policy is primarily about preserving the solvency of Canadian producers, keeping soundstages busy, or ensuring foreign streamers can continue investing here without too much friction, then we should say that plainly. We can debate whether those goals are worth pursuing, and how much public or regulatory support they deserve, on their own terms.

If we also care about cultural outcomes – about Canadian identity, about social cohesion, and the stories we tell ourselves as a country – then we should be equally candid in admitting that the current machine is not designed to measure, let alone foster or promote, those things.

We may need different tools for that work: targeted funding, different kinds of mandates, institutions that are not tied so closely to the health of specific corporations. We may need to accept that cultural policy cannot be reduced to a checklist of points and passports and thresholds without losing sight of the culture itself.

What we cannot keep doing, in good faith, is to let every industrial tweak to regulation pass itself off as a cultural victory.

Where I’m going next

I am spending the next several years working on a PhD that tries to take these cultural questions seriously. Rather than starting from a preferred blueprint, I am trying to ask better questions of both the regulatory regime and the people who live inside it.

How do Canadians describe the moments when a film or TV series has actually helped them feel part of a national community? How do producers, writers and performers experience the link between their financing structures and the stories they can tell? How do Indigenous and other marginalized creators navigate the rules in practice? How are Canadian stories found – or lost – inside global recommendation systems built for scale, not citizenship?

Those are not questions the CRTC can answer with a new points table. But they are the questions we will have to face if we genuinely care about the cultural side of the Broadcasting Act, rather than just invoking it as cover for industrial trade-offs.

For now, the policy should at least push us to be more honest.

If this is mainly an industrial policy for Canadian screen industries in a global market, then let’s call it that. Then we can have the more serious, and overdue, debate about what we’re prepared to do – or not do – for the cultural life of our country.

After “When the Cure for Pornography Becomes the Disease” and “Oh My God – The Thing’s Still Alive,” family and friends began asking why I’m “always writing about porn”. That’s not the sort of question you want to be asked by your 16-year old daughters. So I told them I was done with my strange fixation on laws about porn..

But then Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, published data around the impact of the age-verification regime implemented under its Online Safety Act - a regime which contains precisely the sort of verification measures Miville-Dechêne keeps pushing here. And the data has me worried - again - about where the Senator and her allies want to take us.

This piece is really an update: a chance to look at the new evidence from the UK and ask what it means for Canada as Bill S-209 is shepherded through Parliament. The short version is that the most credible, official numbers we have now confirm what the early data – and my earlier writing – already suggested: age-verification regimes chill lawful adult use and drive people toward workarounds, not away from pornography itself.

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Early signals now confirmed

When the UK’s Online Safety Act age checks kicked in on July 25, 2025, the first numbers we saw came from Similarweb, a private web-analytics firm. The Guardian’s 13 August piece, based on data first reported by the Financial Times, showed British visits to the biggest porn sites falling off a cliff during the first two weeks after implementation. Daily visits to Pornhub dropped from 3.6 million on 24 July – the day before age-gating – to 1.9 million by 8 August, a 47% decline. Other pornography platforms - XVideos and xHamster - showed similar reductions in traffic, at 47% and 39% respectively.

Even then, defenders of the age-checks could say: this is just one commercial data source, taken very soon after implementation. Maybe it’s just noise. … maybe it’s an overreaction … maybe things will “normalize.”

Fast-forward to today (10 December). The Guardian just published a new piece, this time built on Ofcom’s annual Online Nation report – the regulator’s flagship snapshot of online behaviour in the UK.

Ofcom reports that:

• age-vetting on 25 July led to “an immediate fall” in visits to the major porn publishers, including Pornhub;

• Pornhub’s UK visitor numbers in August 2025 were 9.8 million, down 1.5 million from August 2024; and

• overall, visitor numbers to the ten most-visited porn services have now “settled at a lower level than before 25 July” (see page 43 of Online Nation).

In other words, the regulator’s flagship report confirms that the early Similarweb picture was not a momentary blip - but a new baseline.

The Guardian then goes a step further, drawing on additional Similarweb data provided directly to them. They report that Pornhub had 7.2 million unique UK visitors “last month” (November 2025), a 36% decline since August 2024, with XVideos and Chaturbate down 27% and 18% over the same period.

So we now have two layers of evidence that line up:

1. Early, private-sector analytics (Similarweb via FT/Guardian) showing a sharp immediate drop.

2. Later, regulator-endorsed data, using the same underlying measurement but confirming a sustained lower level of traffic months after implementation of the age-verification measures.

The Ofcom report is what makes this moment different. You don’t have to take a data vendor’s word for it - you can now point to the UK’s own regulatory watchdog and say: this is how the system is changing behaviour.

That confirmation - from an official source that governments, courts, and policymakers treat as neutral and authoritative - is why I’m back at it on this file, even at the risk of further undermining my kids’ already-fragile confidence in my professional judgment.

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What Ofcom’s numbers actually say

Once you move past the headline that “traffic to porn sites is down,” the implications of Ofcom’s data are very uncomfortable for anyone who cares about rights.

First, nothing in these numbers distinguishes minors from adults. Ofcom is talking about total traffic to the top ten porn services. Given what we know about usage patterns, adults comprise the vast majority of that. When those overall numbers drop and stay down after you introduce ID verification technology, one obvious explanation is that a significant number of adults are changing their behaviour rather than pass through an age-checking gate.

They are turning away from lawful content because doing so now comes bundled with new privacy and reputational risks.

Second, Ofcom is explicit (see page 45 of Online Nation) that the regime is fuelling circumvention. The same report notes that VPN usage more than doubled after age checks were introduced – rising from around 650,000 users to over 1.4 million in mid-August – before easing back to around 900,000, still a considerable increase of more than 38% from usage rates prior to implementation.

So we are not simply seeing “less porn.” We are seeing less porn on regulated, age-gated platforms, and more use of tools designed to step beyond the UK’s regulatory purview altogether.

That is exactly what porn platforms predicted, and what they now claim has happened in the UK and in other jurisdictions with similar age checks: compliant sites lose users, non-compliant sites gain them.

Put bluntly: Ofcom’s own numbers show a regime that chills lawful adult use on the mainstream sites while encouraging determined users to move to more opaque, less accountable corners of the internet.

A strategic response as old as the printing press

This is not simply a porn-plus-VPN story. I’ve tracked previously how church and state reacted to earlier “information shocks” – from Gutenberg’s printing press onward – by trying to license who could publish, ban what could be printed, and centralize control over distribution of artistic content.

The reality then was the same as it is now: when authorities clamp down on access to material that people strongly want, they don’t eliminate the desire; they don’t eliminate the material; they push distribution into more resistant forms.

In the 16th century, the response to papal edicts and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum was unlicensed printing presses and an unprecedented boom in the business of smuggled books. In the 21st, the response to age-gated porn sites is a spike in VPN use.

My earlier work on Bill S-210 argued that Canada was on the brink of repeating exactly this “restriction-of-access” strategy, dressed up in contemporary technology and child-protection language. The UK data now gives us a real-world case study of how Miville-Dechêne’s strategy plays out in practice – and validates the worry that it systematically fails on its own terms.

Why this matters for S-209

So what does all of this mean for Canada, right now, as S-209 moves through Parliament?

First, it means we can no longer treat concerns about chilling effects and circumvention as speculative. The combination of Similarweb and Ofcom data gives us a clear picture: age-verification regimes suppress some adult use and redirect other use, rather than cleanly “protecting kids” while leaving adults untouched.

Second, because Ofcom is a public regulator with a statutory mandate – not a private analytics firm marketing itself – its findings carry different weight in legal and policy debates. When Ofcom says that visits to the ten most-used porn sites “have now settled at a lower level than before 25 July,” it is the watchdog for the Online Safety Act itself acknowledging a lasting shift in behaviour.

If we import an S-209-style model into Canada, we will do so in full knowledge of the likely results.

Finally, the confirmation effect matters. The initial Similarweb numbers were an early warning; the Ofcom report is regulatory confirmation, and the recent Similarweb data the Guardian obtained for November shows the trend continuing.

That’s why this update is worth writing. It’s one thing to argue, in theory, that age-verification laws risk chilling adult rights and fuelling workarounds. It’s another to watch the UK’s own regulator essentially corroborate that picture.

If our goal is genuinely to reduce children’s exposure to harmful content, there are other, harder tools available: digital literacy, platform design changes, robust enforcement against illegal material, support and education for families. If, instead, we lock ourselves into a blunt ID-gate model that we already know suppresses lawful adult behaviour and pushes demand to dark places, we need to be honest about what we are really doing.

At that point, the question becomes unavoidable: are we regulating for child protection, or are we returning to a much older project – the conviction, long shared by church and state, that pornography is a sin to be fought in every possible way, even at the cost of Canadian's’ Charter rights, privacy, and freedom to read, watch, and think for themselves?

The UK has provided us with hard data, not hypotheticals. The only real question now is whether the bill’s proponents are willing to let that evidence shape the design and course of S-209, or whether they’re still too attached to the moral script to hear what Ofcom’s numbers are actually telling us.

Ask a friend what “being Canadian” means to them - then sit back and watch. The head tilts, the eyes glaze, a tidy answer seems available … and then the signal breaks: a little feedback, a little static, a small shake of the head, a puff of smoke from an ear, and … silence. Sometimes the clichés arrive – hockey, healthcare, maple syrup, politeness – but they don’t really seem to meet the moment, and your friend is left uneasy: what does it say that I can’t put this feeling into words?

Before we unpack that feeling, here’s a quick caveat: “nation” and “nationalism” have been argued over for centuries. Some accounts treat nations as ancient and organic – rooted in land, ancestry, language, and “soil and blood.” Others say nations are modern projects – stitched together by schools, media, armies, and economies that standardize culture so millions of strangers can imagine themselves as one community. Another angle highlights the power of shared myths and symbols carried across generations. Post-colonial perspectives ask whose story gets centred and how migration and minority rights unsettle any possible single narrative. And an institutional view looks at passports, citizenship rules, census data, and the daily routines of the state that quietly manufacture a sense of belonging. No single lens is “the” truth; together they explain why the idea feels natural yet is so hard to put into words.

The Quiet Rules We Live By

To make sense of that feeling, it helps to recognize the what’s going on in the background – the quiet set of rules and assumptions that structures our daily lives: a broadly liberal common sense. Not “Liberal” as in the party label, but as in the political philosophy behind our liberal democracy – the idea that government exists to secure and balance individual freedoms, and that governmental power must be limited, accountable, and justified in public.

The concept of liberalism has a few core commitments which serve as default settings for the development and maintenance of our “sense” of who we are as Canadians:

• First, persons come before state power: individuals possess rights and are equal before the law. That’s why we can speak, worship, assemble, and publish without asking permission; why criticism of the government isn’t a personal risk but a routine.

• Second, power must explain itself: the state is constrained by constitutions and courts, required to give reasons, and be open to review. We are entitled to due process when a licence is denied, a benefit is cut, or a by-law is enforced; the police need a warrant; a minister’s decision can be appealed; tribunals must hear you out and render reasonable decisions.

• Third, a wide private sphere is presumed: families, associations, businesses, faith communities, and unions can organize their lives without constant supervision, so long as they respect others’ equal claims.

• Fourth, collective (state) action is legitimate when it protects shared goods—public healthcare, clean water, safe streets—so long as it is proportionate and accountable.

• And fifth, pluralism is a feature, not a flaw: different languages, beliefs, and ways of living are expected to coexist under the same legal roof.

If these commitments of liberalism seem abstract, notice how often they show up in your day-to-day life. The Charter is printed on classroom posters; journalists file access-to-information requests and get documents back; courts publish judgments in plain view; you can register a charity, start a debating club, or incorporate a company by filling out forms rather than courting favour from politicians or bureaucrats. School boards meet in public. Elections change governments peacefully. Human-rights codes tell landlords and employers what they may not do to their tenants and employees. Even bilingual labelling and language-of-service rules are rights-based, not just government branding. While none of this explains everything about Canada, it supplies the underlying operating system of our society. As one writer put it, it becomes “the air we breathe”: rarely noticed, constantly running, and responsible for a lot of what feels “normal.”1

The Everyday Curriculum of “Canada”

On top of this societal “operating system” sits the quiet choreography of what Michael Billig calls “banal nationalism”: the small, routine cues that keep “Canada” – the idea – consistently in view without fanfare.2 A weather map that forecasts for the “Prairies” or “Atlantic Canada; bilingual cereal packaging on breakfast tables and bilingual safety announcements on planes and trains; “coast to coast to coast” in a news intro; O Canada at a rink; Remembrance Day poppies in November; the Hockey Night in Canada theme song on a Saturday; an aboriginal land acknowledgment before a meeting. None of these moments declares “This is identity,” but their repetition does the teaching. The everyday becomes a kind of curriculum and “Canada” is learned as a habit.

When the Defaults Don’t Translate

But habits aren’t shared equally. The cultural touchpoints that feel obvious to long-time Canadians may carry little or different meaning for a recent immigrant whose calendar, heroes, and childhood playlists (or those of their parents) were formed elsewhere. For newcomers, the paperwork may register simply as bureaucracy – without the warm resonance of belonging. The pop culture references may feel more like someone else’s inside jokes than shared cultural meaning. That is not a failure of those Canadians; it’s a fact about how meaning travels - and evolves, and it complicates any assumptions around common touchstones. If the hints that bind some of us leave others feeling excluded, the “shared sense” we’re trying to describe will feel partial – because it is.

Updating the Banal

This is where Billig’s insight needs an update. The small symbols and routines don’t work by magic; they have to be bound to people, again and again, across languages, faiths, regions, and histories. Sometimes that binding happens organically through time, friendship, school, a first Canadian winter, a first vote. Sometimes public institutions help: citizenship ceremonies that feel like beginnings rather than endpoints; school curricula that describe Canada as a treaty project as well as a country; public media that makes room for many voices to sound ordinary, not exceptional. It’s not easy – it’s a fine line to walk. Too heavy a hand looks like propaganda; too light a touch and people live in parallel playlists with no songs they can sing together.

Multiculturalism by Design

Multiculturalism is Canada’s wager3 that this binding can happen without flattening difference – that the Canadian “we” can be hospitable to many different starting points. The challenge is practical as much as philosophical. Today’s algorithmic feeds segment audiences and leverage difference for profit; cities and regions move to different tempos; diasporic ties pull our attention outward; symbols that read as inclusive for some read as exclusionary for others. The work, then, is to keep the banal renewable: to refresh the everyday cues so they are legible and livable to newcomers and old-timers alike, and to anchor them more in civic commitments (fair dealing, bilingualism, treaty relationships, liberal process and power’s restraint) than in a narrow cultural filmstrip. Our goal should not be one story that everyone needs to parrot; but a shared set of low-friction practices that make many different stories feel welcomed, valued, and at home.

From Clichés to Commitments

Seen this way, a “sense” of Canadian identity is not a slogan you memorize or a list of cultural clichés you recite – but a default you inhabit based on commitments around our shared social reality. Liberal expectations supply much of the background hum; small, recurring cues work to turn that hum into something we can feel. Yet because the music doesn’t sound the same in every ear, the project of common belonging must remain ongoing work: to notice which routines include and which exclude, to retire signals which are tired or irrelevant, and be open to the invention of new ones that more of us can recognize as our own.

It marks Québec’s strongest attempt yet to legislate cultural sovereignty - a bold assertion that may ultimately collide with Ottawa’s framework under the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11). But for all its ambition, Bill 109 does not explain how quotas, prominence rules, or obligations will actually work. Like so much cultural regulation before it, the bill asserts grand principles but leaves the details to be worked out later by the Quebec Ministry of Culture and Communications.

That combination of boldness and vagueness tells us something important: both Québec and Ottawa continue to avoid the hardest questions about cultural policy. Québec hides behind language; Ottawa hides behind checklists. Both approaches are nothing other than an exercise in avoidance.

The Québec Shortcut: Language as Culture

Québec’s cultural policymaking has long rested on language as a proxy for identity. From Bill 101 in 1977 to Bill 96 in 2022, legislation has sought to ensure French dominates in business, education, and commerce. Bill 109 simply extends that formula to the digital sphere: if francophone content is visible, then Québec culture is safe. At least that’s the idea.

But language is not the same as culture. To treat French as the entirety of Québec cultural identity risks flattening the diversity of its artistic life into a single linguistic category. It spares the government from asking questions about narrative, history, theme, and representation. In that sense, Québec has found an easy way out: legislate for language and call it culture. It may be politically efficient, but the approach is extremely weak from an intellectual perspective..

The Ottawa Shortcut: Inputs as Culture

English Canada faces a different problem. English is not unique to Canada; it is shared with the United States, which dominates the cultural landscape. Regulators in Ottawa cannot treat language as a cultural boundary. Instead, they have leaned on industrial measures of “Canadianness” - who financed the project, who held the producer credits, who directed the episode, who designed the costumes.

As I have previously argued, this approach has hollowed out our cultural regulation. A drama set in Los Angeles, London, or Budapest, featuring no Canadian historic relevance, characters or themes, can qualify as “Canadian” if the right paperwork is filed. The logic is laughably bureaucratic with any cultural relevance being optional.

This shortcut, too, avoids the questions that matter: What stories should reflect us? Which Canadians are being represented? How do we draw the line between content that strengthens cultural or national identity and content that is merely Canadian by checklist?

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The parallels between Québec and Ottawa are quite striking. Both have found ways to avoid the politically charged work of defining culture. Québec uses language as a proxy. Ottawa uses production inputs. Each shields politicians and policymakers from accusations of censorship or cultural engineering. Each preserves the outward appearance of cultural protection while leaving the deeper questions around cultural meaning unasked and unanswered. Fortunately, both strategies are running out of time.

Why Avoidance Can’t Last

Avoidance may have worked in the past - when governments could afford to subsidize symbolic policies and call it cultural protection - but a policy of avoidance today is unsustainable. Here’s why …

• Demographics have changed. Immigration has reshaped Canada’s identity. Today’s audiences are more urban, more diverse, and more globally connected than the populations that cultural policy was originally designed to serve. A system that equates culture with the French language in Québec, or with production paperwork in English Canada, no longer accurately reflects who Québecois or Canadians are.

• Consumption has changed. Canadians consume global media on streaming platforms, TikTok, YouTube, and Netflix. Content flows across borders instantly. In this environment, a policy regime that rewards technical compliance but ignores meaning is now irrelevant. Audiences have choices, and they will not choose hollow and meaningless content simply because regulators choose to subsidize it.

• Credibility is at risk. Taxpayers increasingly see the gap between rhetoric and reality. Governments claim to reflect Canadians to themselves yet continue to fund productions that few Canadians watch or that feel indistinguishable from American output. Cynicism grows with every dollar wasted.

Regulatory Negligence

At this stage, it’s arguable that a policy of avoidance is no longer just politically convenient, but that it has risen to an act of regulatory negligence.

On the economic side, both Québec and Ottawa spend billions every year on Canadian certified productions whose criteria for eligibility are irrelevant and misleading. Why are taxpayers funding content that either fails to reach significant audiences or has little to do with Canadian lives, experiences, and identities? In the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps this kind of symbolic investment could be justified as part of a larger nation-building project. But in today’s context of healthcare shortfalls, a housing crisis, untrustworthy trading partners, and fiscal strain, this diversion of resources looks increasingly indefensible.

On the cultural side, the negligence is just as stark. By rewarding compliance over meaning, Canada has created a system that hollows out the very idea of cultural policy, cultural identity, and cultural sovereignty. We subsidize content that “counts” on paper but does not resonate with the audiences it is supposed to reflect. It is nothing more than the performance of nationalism without the substance of cultural identity.

Where We’re Going

Canada’s reality has changed. Immigration has transformed who Canadians are. Viewership habits are global. Fiscal pressures are mounting. Cultural regulation that avoids meaning - whether through language proxies or production checklists - will not survive in this environment.

If Québec truly wants to affirm cultural sovereignty, it cannot stop at language. It must confront the harder question of what Québecois culture in Québec and Canada actually is, and how to promote it in ways that reflect its history, diversity and lived experience.

If Ottawa truly wants Canadian content to matter, it cannot keep rewarding productions that are void of any Canadian reflection while congratulating itself on supporting Canadian culture. It must accept the risk of grappling with cultural meaning - of asking what makes a Canadian story, and explaining why they’re worth telling and worth supporting in the first place.

Conclusion: Government Must Do the Hard Work

Québec treats language as culture. Ottawa treats checklists as culture. Both approaches are politically convenient but culturally shallow. The danger is not that Canadian cultural regulation will result in government overreach. The danger is that it will remain irrelevant.

Avoidance in today’s world with today’s challenges is not a policy of neutrality. It is negligence - economic, cultural, and political. If Canadian policymakers want cultural regulation to remain more than a hollow performance, they must do the hard work both Ottawa and Québec have long avoided. Only then will cultural policy reflect more than language, forms and formulas and help Canadians see and understand themselves.

Today I tripped over a story out of the UK that demonstrates just how messy this can get. According to Metro, Britain’s “most tattooed man” has been repeatedly blocked by biometric checks under the new Online Safety Act. With tattoos covering 90 percent of his body, the facial recognition software simply refuses to recognize him. With its digital mind blown, the system tells him over and over to “remove my mask” … an impossible demand that leaves him locked out of lawful websites which provide access to legal content.

You might not feel much sympathy for “The King of Ink” because his extreme look makes him a unique case. Or maybe you play the tiny violin because of the nature of the content he wants to access … the facial recognition tech makes it harder for him “to chat to webcam girls”.

But that’s exactly why this story matters. His frustration signals the larger problem. Plenty of ordinary people are also excluded when verification systems don’t fit their circumstances. Adults with physical deformities, or those without government ID, a fixed address, or even reliable internet service - they all will face the same lockouts. And many others refuse, for entirely valid privacy reasons, to upload their personal identification to commercial verification sites that promise security but can’t guarantee it.

In each case, the result is the same: lawful adults are denied access to legal content, not because they’re underage, but because they can’t clear the technological hurdles put in their way. Today the barrier is a tattooed face; tomorrow it could just as easily be physical challenges, poverty, homelessness, migration status, or basic privacy concerns.

Canada should take note. Bill S-209 would import these very same requirements, and once identity checks for online expression is normalized, the temptation may grow to increase the nature of exclusion.

Bill S-209 would require all sites carrying sexually explicit material to implement prescribed age-verification/age-estimation systems. Canadians seeking lawful adult content would need to provide identity documents, biometric data, or other approved credentials before access. Non-compliant sites would face monetary penalties and potential site-blocking orders. Though framed as a measure to protect children, the bill in fact reproduces a long-standing strategy: designate certain content as “harmful” and restrict access, regardless of its legality.

A 600-Year-Old Playbook

The impulse to censor has deep historical roots. In 1559, the Catholic Church issued the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, prohibiting works ranging from erotic literature to Galileo’s writings. In 19th-century England, the Obscene Publications Act and the “Hicklin test” defined obscenity according to its potential to “deprave and corrupt” vulnerable readers, a standard so broad it encompassed medical and literary texts. In the United States, Anthony Comstock used federal postal powers to confiscate everything from contraceptive pamphlets to anatomy books under the guise of protecting morality.

Each of these efforts promised public protection, but in practice they expanded surveillance, empowered authorities to police expression, and proved ineffective at suppressing access.

Canada has not been exempt. Early 20th-century obscenity prosecutions and Customs seizures of imported books deemed “immoral” reflect the same impulse: declare material socially dangerous, then criminalize or restrict its distribution. Bill S-209 falls squarely within this lineage - a contemporary repackaging of failed strategies employed by both church and state since the invention of the printing press.

And now, the UK’s recent experience provides a contemporary illustration of how this approach functions in the digital era.

What’s Happened in the UK

The UK Parliament enacted the Online Safety Act in 2023, after extensive debate on digital harms. Among its most controversial provisions were requirements that pornographic websites implement “highly effective age assurance” measures -including government ID checks, biometric scans, or third-party verification systems. These age assurance provisions only recently came into force … in July 2025.

The results were immediate. Within weeks:

• Pornography traffic declined sharply as adults abandoned sites rather than provide personal identification.1

• Searches for and use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) increased significantly.2

• More than 530,000 (and growing) people signed a petition calling for repeal of the Act.3

As Sky News reported, “Pornography views plummet.” The UK’s experiment demonstrates not the protection of children, but the chilling of lawful adult expression.

Unlike the United Kingdom, however, Canada has a constitutional framework that makes such restrictions uniquely vulnerable.

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The Canadian Charter Test

Section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right to freedom of expression, which includes not only the right to speak but also the right to receive and access expression. Pornography, unless obscene, falls within this protection.

The UK’s early experience highlights why Bill S-209 would be constitutionally precarious in Canada. A chilling effect on lawful adult access may constitute a breach of section 2(b). The Supreme Court has consistently held that freedom of expression protects “all expressive activity” unless it takes the form of violence, and that restrictions which deter or dissuade expression are unconstitutional. In Irwin Toy Ltd v Quebec (AG), the Court affirmed that state measures which limit the ability to convey or receive meaning fall squarely within the scope of section 2(b).4

The inequality of access created when only those with VPNs or other circumvention tools can continue to access content further undermines the Charter’s promise of meaningful and equal expressive opportunity. And the creation of a surveillance infrastructure enabling the state or third parties to monitor private consumption amplifies the chilling effect. In R v Spencer, the Court underscored the constitutional significance of informational privacy in the online environment, warning that state access to records of private internet use engages core Charter values.5

Finally, none of these outcomes could plausibly be considered minimally impairing or proportionate. They therefore cannot be justified under section 1 of the Charter, which permits limits on Canadians’ rights only where they are reasonable and demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

The Real Goal — And the Real Risk

For many advocates, reduced pornography traffic is not an unintended side effect but the central objective. One might argue that Senator Miville-Dechêne’s initiative is less about protecting minors than about restricting pornography itself, with the effect of curtailing adults’ access to lawful expressive content.

The greater danger lies in normalization. Once citizens are accustomed to proving their identity before they can read, watch, or listen to content, the reach of restriction will not remain confined to pornography. Today’s target is sexually explicit content; tomorrow it may be political dissent, satire, or art.

Conclusion: Learning from Failure

Since the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press, religious organizations, governments and institutions have repeatedly attempted to legislate morality through restrictions on access to information. The Catholic Church quarantined “dangerous” books. Victorian courts banned texts under the Hicklin test. Anthony Comstock burned novels and pamphlets under the banner of moral purity. Each promised protection but delivered only overreach and the chilling of lawful speech.

Bill S-209 is the Canadian iteration of this failed formula. The UK’s Online Safety Act has already demonstrated its effects: adults deterred from lawful content, users turning to VPNs, and the construction of a surveillance apparatus.

History’s lesson is unequivocal: efforts to suppress expression through access restriction do not succeed. What they achieve instead is the erosion of rights, trust, and freedom. Canada must choose whether to uphold constitutional freedoms, or embrace a 600-year strategy of censorship that has consistently failed to achieve its objectives.