The simplest justification for the new act is economic: Foreign streaming services, which take millions in subscription revenue out of the country, should be required to invest in local production.

So kudos to Minister of Canadian Heritage Pablo Rodriguez for standing his ground, working Parliament and finally succeeding where two Liberal predecessors (Mélanie Joly and Steven Guilbeault) had valiantly tried but ultimately failed. Many opponents of the new legislation seem far more concerned about hypothetical government-mandated algorithms that might be used to boost Canadian shows or songs than the actual ones currently used by Big Tech. It’s easy to demonize content regulation for political gain – according to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre the government is now engaged in censorship – but much harder to explain the intricacies and injustices of international entertainment markets. The Online Streaming Act, the first update of the Broadcasting Act since 1991, became law Thursday.įor those who have followed this file since Netflix first entered the Canadian market in 2010 and rapidly signed up a million subscribers, it is hard to know what’s more amazing: that it took this long or that it even happened at all. And so, more than a decade after it became apparent that internet-based streaming would bypass Canadian-content rules, the federal government has finally fought off the skeptics and naysayers to regulate foreign services. They say politics is the art of the possible.

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