Canada’s top media and internet regulator, Vicky Itrides, told the Banff World Media Festival on Monday that Ottawa standing in the way of Canada taxing US broadcast companies will not distract it from its long-term political ambitions to support local content.
“The work of the CRTC continues. We are focused on supporting Canada’s modern and sustainable broadcasting system,” said Itrides during a keynote address. “Adaptation has always been part of our regulatory landscape,” she added.
“Together, these initiatives represent an important chapter in the continuing evolution of the Canadian broadcasting system. They are not the last chapter,” she added.
Regulators around the world are also grappling with how to transform local TV ecosystems to embrace rapidly evolving change in a streaming era dominated by giant U.S. media companies, Itrides said. “How can we adapt frameworks to a broadcast environment that is being reshaped by new technologies, new business models and changing audience habits?” Eetrides asked.
Although they did not directly address the Canadian government’s interference in the CRTC’s ruling on American streaming, Eatrides’ comments in Banff came as a battle of wills between the country’s television watchdog and the dominant American broadcast companies came to light this week in the Canadian Rockies.
Itrides, president and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, is charged with helping ensure shelf space for local content in a market dominated by big players in Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
To do this, in 2023 the Canadian government passed the Online Broadcasting Act to force US digital players including streamers, for the first time, to invest in producing Canadian content. But after the CRTC in early June imposed another 10 per cent tax on foreign streaming platforms as well as a temporary mandatory 5 per cent spending on local Canadian content production, Mark Miller, Canada’s identity and culture minister, asked the regulator to scrap those plans to avoid angering US President Donald Trump as the country negotiates a potential new North American free trade deal before a July 1 deadline.
That has left the Canadian government to provide up to another $600 million in annual taxpayer support for Canadian film and television production rather than continue with plans to persuade American media companies to foot the bill, at least for now.
Ottawa’s reversal puts a question mark over Eatrides’ ability to enforce the CRTC’s rulings and its authority as a broadcast regulator in the face of interference by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as he squabbles with Trump over a new trade deal.
Broadcasting policy in Canada has long sought to “protect, enrich and enhance the cultural, social, political and economic fabric of Canada. This goal has remained at the heart of every version of the (Broadcasting) Act,” Itrides said.
The current controversy surrounding the CRTC ruling is reminiscent of a previous clash in 2014 between the TV regulator and Netflix, in which the video streaming giant refused to hand over confidential subscriber information to protect the company’s private data.
This was followed by then-Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Heritage Minister Shelley Glover asking the CRTC to stop its battle with Netflix, as Ottawa had no plans to tax or regulate the US streaming company as it operates north of the border.
Now that Ottawa, through its Internet Broadcasting Act — which has yet to be enacted amid an appeals court challenge by U.S. companies — is taxing and regulating American media giants, the government has faced questions in Banff from aggrieved local creators and producers who question why the Canadian government and the TV regulator promised to force foreign broadcast companies to pay into Canada’s production ecosystem to protect the country’s cultural sovereignty, only to abandon those plans to continue private access to the U.S. market for domestically made cars, steel and aluminium.
On Sunday, Federal Minister Miller was in Banff and told delegates that his government had not “sold out Canadian culture” by scrapping the CRTC’s recent plans for an online streaming law in the face of “ominous threats coming from our best friend.” He added that Trump had talked about annexing Canada as the 51st U.S. state and imposing tariffs on non-U.S. films produced abroad, including within Canada.
“It’s not about ensuring no one pays a fair share. It’s more about where the money goes and who pays for it,” Miller said of the ongoing conversations about the CRTC and implementation of the Internet Broadcasting Act.
But frustration among Banff delegates only grew with Miller’s admission that funding US broadcast companies are paying into the Canadian system as part of their OTT obligations has not yet been spent because the legislation has not yet been enacted due to an appeals court challenge brought by US media giants.
