This article first appeared as the cover story to our September 2023 issue of Inside Policy. You can download the full issue here.
By Peter Menzies, October 4, 2023
The federal government has made a regulatory mess with wrongheaded legislation targeting digital media content.
Few things are more fundamental to a nation’s economic prosperity and social cohesion than a robust communications framework.
Canada has its challenges in terms of rural and northern internet and mobile connectivity, but the nation’s overall communications mainframe is, by most international measures, in good shape. The rest of the story involving what gets carried on the mainframe (i.e., the actual content) isn’t as pretty. In fact, two recent communications policy initiatives proposed by the federal government have put tens of thousands of jobs at risk in the creative and news industries.
Money goes where it is likely to generate profit, and if some key arteries aren’t unclogged quickly, the flow of communications investment dollars in Canada could seize up. Worse, the future of what has been a thriving creative economy, driven by independent content creators, is now uncertain.
Meanwhile, the news industry is on the cusp of becoming permanently reliant on government subsidies – a dependency that’s certain to undermine the public’s already wavering trust in its independence.
But first, the good news. While measures vary by source and date, Canada consistently ranks among the world’s top 20 nations when it comes to fixed broadband connectivity, and as high as No. 1 in the world when it comes to mobile internet capacity. Given that most of nations in the top ten for broadband connectivity are smaller in landmass than Prince Edward Island, this is a considerable achievement for a country the size of Canada. This connectivity, however, has come at a premium – consumer in this country are historically among those paying the highest rates anywhere in the world, particularly when it comes to mobile plans. Costs to consumers remain high but have been trending downward in recent years as carriers shift strategic priorities from acquiring new consumers to retaining existing ones.
Far more challenging is a regulatory environment that is less than friendly when it comes to attracting private investment. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has been risk-averse in its dealings with Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) and smaller Internet Service Providers (ISPs) looking for competitive access rates to incumbent networks. Still, competition is one area that appears to be a priority for the CRTC. The regulator’s new chair, Vicky Eatrides, has a background in competition policy; a new vice chair, Adam Scott, is thoroughly familiar with the Telecom industrial framework; and the new Ontario Regional Commissioner, Bram Abramson, has experience as a regulatory officer for a smaller telco. (Abramson’s former employer, TekSavvy Solutions, recently waved the white flag in its efforts to compete in the Canadian market and put itself up for sale.)
Now the bad news – and, fair warning, there’s a lot of it.
Canada is aggressively regulating the internet – not in priority areas such as privacy, algorithms and data collection, but in terms of its content and its users’ freedom of navigation. The Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11) came into force in the spring, amending the Broadcasting Act to define the internet’s audio and video content as “broadcasting” and, as such, placing all this content under the authority of the CRTC. The goals remain the same as they did during the broadcast radio and cable television world of the early 1990s: the funding of certified TV and film properties, ensuring Canadian content (CanCon) gets priority over foreign programming and ensuring designated groups – BIPOC and LGBTQ2S, among other acronyms – and official language minorities are represented. How exactly the CRTC intends to achieve this without disrupting what has been a booming decade for film and television production in a freewheeling global market remains to be seen. As does how it will give its supply-managed content priority without imposing economic harm on the 100,000 Canadians who earn a living in the unlicensed, uncertified world of YouTube and other major streaming platforms.
While the CRTC has promised to provide at least preliminary answers to these questions by the end of next year, years of regulatory haggling and court challenges await and the regulator’s reputation for the timely resolution of matters is spotty at best. As of September 22, for instance, it still hadn’t dealt with a cabinet order to review its CBC licensing decision; a decision which, itself, which took 18 months for the regulator to reach (following a January 2021 hearing that was held three years after the term of the CBC’s previous license had expired). Regulatory sloth of this nature on a routine matter does not inspire much optimism for the expedient handling of the far more complex issue of online streaming.
Indeed, the burden of the Online Streaming Act has already overwhelmed the CRTC’s administrative capacities. In August, it autorenewed the licenses of 343 television channels, discretionary services, and cable and satellite services for two to three years each. It subsequently announced it wouldn’t be dealing with any radio matters at all for “at least” two years. It even nervously punted a demand for the cancellation of Fox News’ Canadian carriage into the future by declaring it necessary to re-do the entire framework involving cable carriage of foreign television channels. It has clearly signaled that it plans to manage nothing other than telecom and Online Streaming Act issues for years to come. Everything else is on hold until such time comes to initiate a catch-up process that, in turn, will itself take years to clear the logjam. All this at a time of significant disruption that demands corporate and regulatory nimbleness.
But even what appears to be catastrophic regulatory arrest pales in comparison to the impact of the federal government’s second significant piece of new internet legislation: the Online News Act. Rarely has legislation designed to assist a sector – news production – been so poorly constructed that it has managed to make everything worse for everyone involved.
Based on the unproven premise that Big Tech companies were profiting from “stealing” content from news organizations, the Act was designed to force Meta (Facebook’s parent company) and Google to redistribute their considerable advertising revenue to those who used to receive the lion’s share of this revenue – newspapers and broadcasters. From the beginning, Meta indicated that the premise and the cost of the legislation, unless amended, would force it to cease the carriage of links to news stories and suspend its existing support programs for Canadian journalism.
The government and the news industry lobbyists who backed the bill grossly overestimated their economic value to Meta and insisted the tech giant was bluffing. Last week, however, Brian Myles, Director of Le Devoir, told an online panel hosted by the Canadian Journalism Foundation that it was clear Meta wasn’t bluffing and, going forward, news organizations would have to adapt to its exit from the market and the considerable financial impact it will have on their industry. He nevertheless held out hope that a rapprochement of some kind might still be possible with Google.
Like Meta, Google has indicated that it, too, will suspend both news linkage and its current partnerships with Canadian news organizations, unless the federal government can provide more economically acceptable options than what it has heretofore offered. As much financial harm as Meta’s departure will cause, there is consensus that Google’s departure – if it occurs – would be a disaster on a nuclear scale.
Even if a deal is reached, the best the news industry can hope for is that Google’s financial concessions will offset a portion of the losses suffered from losing access to Facebook, Instagram and Threads (among other Meta properties). Any money that can be squeezed out of an agreement with Google would be meaningful but a far cry from the hundreds of millions the industry was dreaming of a year ago. The largest recipients of any such windfall, of course, will be those who least need it – namely CBC and Bellmedia.
The bottom line is that, following passage the Online News Act, there will be less revenue for Canadian news organizations than there was just a few months ago. As a result, publishers are pleading for “temporary” measures such as the Journalism Labour Tax Credit and Local Journalism Initiative to be not just extended but enhanced. Up to 35 percent of legacy newsrooms costs would be covered by the federal government while, without Facebook, it will be near impossible for local news innovators outside of the legacy bubble to build audiences.
Next up is an anticipated Online Harms Act, designed to control “lawful but awful” speech through a government-appointed Digital Safety Commissioner. Expect more policy mayhem in the months to come.
Peter Menzies is a senior fellow at MLI and a former vice-chair of the CRTC.
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“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
President Donald Trump said Thursday that changes are coming to his aggressive immigration policies after complaints from farmers and business owners.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote in a social media post Thursday morning. “In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”
Later Thursday, Trump made it clear that businesses need workers.
“Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers – they’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great. And we’re going to have to do something about that,” the president said.
He added: “We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don’t have, maybe, what they’re supposed to have.”
Just how Trump may change his approach to immigration enforcement remains unclear, but he said he wants to help farmers and business owners.
“You go into a farm and you look and people, they’ve been there for 20 or 25 years and they work great and the owner of the farm loves them and you’re supposed to throw them out. You know what happens? They end up hiring the criminals that have come in, the murderers from prisons and everything else,” Trump said.
Trump said changes would be coming soon, but gave little detail on how policies could change.
“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
In a later post on Truth Social, Trump said illegal immigration had destroyed American institutions.
“Biden let 21 Million Unvetted, Illegal Aliens flood into the Country from some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional Nations on Earth — Many of them Rapists, Murderers, and Terrorists. This tsunami of Illegals has destroyed Americans’ Public Schools, Hospitals, Parks, Community Resources, and Living Conditions,” the president wrote. “They have stolen American Jobs, consumed BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in Free Welfare, and turned once idyllic Communities, like Springfield, Ohio, into Third World Nightmares.”
He added that deportations would continue: “I campaigned on, and received a Historic Mandate for, the largest Mass Deportation Program in American History. Polling shows overwhelming Public Support for getting the Illegals out, and that is exactly what we will do. As Commander-in-Chief, I will always protect and defend the Heroes of ICE and Border Patrol, whose work has already resulted in the Most Secure Border in American History. Anyone who assaults or attacks an ICE or Border Agent will do hard time in jail. Those who are here illegally should either self deport using the CBP Home App or, ICE will find you and remove you. Saving America is not negotiable!”
For years, Canada’s political class sold us on the idea that carbon taxes were clever policy. Not just a tool to cut emissions, but a fair one – tax the polluters, then cycle the money back to regular folks, especially those with thinner wallets.
It wasn’t a perfect system. The focus-group-tested line embraced for years by the Trudeau Liberals made no sense at all: we’re taxing you so we can put more money back in your pocketbooks. What the hell? If you care so much about my taxes being low, just cut them already. Somehow, it took years and years of this line being repeated for its internal contradiction to become evident to all.
Yet, even many strategic conservative minds could see the thinking had internal logic. You could sell it at a town hall. As an editorial team member at an influential news organization when B.C. got its carbon tax in 2008, I bought into the concept too.
And now? That whole model has been thrown overboard, by the very parties had long defended it with a straight face and an arch tone. In both Ottawa and Victoria in 2025, progressive governments facing political survival abandoned the idea of climate policy as a matter of fairness, opting instead for tactical concessions meant to blunt the momentum of their foes.
The result: lower-income Canadians who had grown accustomed to carbon tax rebates as a dependable backstop are waking up to find the support gone. And higher earners? They just got a tidy little gift from the state.
The betrayal is worse in B.C.
This new chart from economist Ken Peacock tells the story. He shared it last week at the B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
What is shows is that scrapping the carbon tax means the poor are poorer. The treasury is emptier.
What about the rich?
Yup, you guessed it: richer.
Scrubbing the B.C. consumer carbon tax leaves the lowest earning 20 percent of households $830 per year poorer, while the top one-fifth gain $959.
“Climate leader” British Columbia’s approach was supposed to be the gold standard: a revenue-neutral carbon tax, accepted by industry, supported by voters, and engineered to send the right price signal without growing the size of government.
That pact broke somewhere along the way.
Instead of returning the money, the provincial government slowly transformed the tax into a $2 billion annual cash cow. And when Mark Carney won the federal election, B.C. Premier David Eby, boxed in by his own pledge, scrapped the tax like a man dropping ballast from a sinking balloon. Gone. No replacement. No protections for those who need them most.
Filling the gas tank, on the other hand, is noticeably cheaper. Of course, if you can’t afford a car that might not be apparent.
Spare a thought for the climate activists who spent 15 years flogging this policy, only to watch it get tossed aside like a stack of briefing notes on a Friday afternoon.
Who could not conclude that the environmental left has been played. For a political movement that prides itself on idealism, it’s a brutal lesson in realpolitik: when power’s on the line, principles are negotiable.
But here’s the thing: maybe the carbon tax model deserved a rethink. Maybe it’s time for a grown-up look at what actually works
With B.C. now reviewing its CleanBC policies, here’s a basic question: what’s working, and what’s not?
A lot of emission reductions in this province didn’t come from government fiat. They were the result of business-led innovation: more efficient technology, cleaner fuels, and capital discipline.
That, plus a hefty dose of offshoring. We’ve pushed our industrial emissions onto other jurisdictions, then shipped the finished goods back without attaching any climate cost. This contradiction particularly helped to fuel the push to dump carbon pricing as a failed solution.
The progressives’ choice was made once the anti-tax arguments could no longer be refuted: to limit losses it would be necessary to deep six an unpopular strand of the overall carbon strategy. This, to save the rest. That’s why policies like the federal emissions cap haven’t also been abandoned.
To give another example, it’s also why British Columbia’s aviation sector is in a flap over the issue of sustainable aviation fuel. Despite years of aspirational policy, low emissions jet fuel blends remain more scarce than a long-haul cabin upgrade. The policy’s designers correctly anticipated that refiners would never be able to meet the imposed demand, and so as an alternative they provided a complex carbon credit trading scheme that will make the cost of flying more expensive. For those with a choice, nearby airport hubs in the United States where these policies do not apply will become an attractive alternative, while remote communities that have no choice in the matter will simply have to eat the cost. (Needless to say, if emissions reduction is your goal this policy isn’t needed anyways, since the decisions that matter in reducing global aviation emissions aren’t made in B.C. and never will be.)
I’m not showing up to bash those who have been genuinely trying to figure things out, and found themselves in a world of policy that is more complicated and unpredictable than they realized. Simply put, the chapter is closing on an era of energy policy naïveté.
The brutally honest action by Eby and Carney to eject carbon taxes for their own political survival could be read as a signal that it’s now okay to have an honest public conversation. Let’s insist on that. For years now, debate has been constrained in part by a particular form of linguistic tyranny, awash in terminology designed to cow the questioner into silence. “So you have an issue with clean policies, do you? What kind of dirty reprobate are you?” “Only a monster doesn’t want their aviation fuel to be sustainable.” Etc. Now is the moment to move on from that, and widen the field of discourse.
Ditching bad policy is also a signal that just maybe a better approach is to start by embracing a robust sense of the possibilities for energy to improve lives and empower all of the solutions needed for tomorrow’s problems. Because that’s the only way the conversation will ever get real.
Slogans, wildly aspirational goal setting and the habit of refusing to acknowledge how the world really works have been getting us nowhere. Petroleum products will continue to obey Yergin’s Law: oil always gets to market. China and India will grow their economies using reliable energy they can afford, having recently approved the construction of the most new coal power plants in a decade amid energy security concerns. Japan, which has practically worn itself out pleading for natural gas from Canada, isn’t waiting for the help of last-finishing nice guys to guarantee energy security: today, they are buying 8% of their LNG imports from the evil Putin regime.
Meanwhile, we’re in the worst of both worlds: our courageous carbon tax policy that was positioned as trailblazing not just for B.C. residents but for the world as a whole – climate leadership! – is gone, the poorest are puzzling over why things feel even more expensive, and nobody knows what comes next.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
