Canada’s TV Czar on Climbdown Over U.S. Streaming Tax: “Not the Final Chapter”

Vicky Eatrides, Canada’s top media and Internet regulator, told the Banff World Media Festival on Monday that Ottawa standing in the way of Canada taxing U.S. streamers will not divert her from longstanding policy ambitions to support homegrown content.

“The CRTC’s work continues. We are focused on supporting a modern and sustainable broadcasting system for Canada,” Eatrides said during a keynote speech. She added, “adaptation has always been a part of our regulatory landscape.”

“These intiatives taken together represent an important chapter in the ongoing evolution of Canada’s broadcasting system. It’s not the final chapter,” she added.

Eatrides said regulators worldwide are also grappling with how to transform local TV ecosystems to embrace fast-evolving change in the streaming era dominated by U.S. media giants. “How do we adapt frameworks to a broadcasting environment that is being reshaped by new technologies, new business models and changing audience habits?” Eatrides questioned.

While not addressing directly the Canadian government’s interference into her CRTC ruling on U.S. streamers, Eatrides’ comments in Banff came as a battle of wills between the country’s TV watchdog and dominant U.S. streamers burst out into the open this week at the Canadian Rockies.

Eatrides, chair and CEO of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, is charged with helping ensure shelf space for local content in a market dominated by major Hollywood and Silicon Valley players. 

To do that, Canada’s government in 2023 passed into law the Online Streaming Act to compel U.S. digital players including streamers to, for the first time, invest in Canadian-content production. But after the CRTC in an early June ruling slapped another 10 percent levy on foreign streaming platforms on top of an interim 5 percent obligatory expenditure on homegrown Canadian content production, Marc Miller, Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, told the regulator to scrap those plans to avoid angering U.S. President Donald Trump as the country negotiates a possible new North American free trade deal ahead of a July 1 deadline.

That has left the Canadian government to offer up another $600 million in annual tax payer support for Canadian film and TV production rather than carry through on plans to get American media players to foot the bill, at least for now.

The climbdown by Ottawa puts a question mark over Eatrides’ ability to enforce CRTC rulings and her authority as the broadcast regulator in the face of interference from Canadian prime minister Mark Carney as he shadowboxes with Trump over a new trade deal.

Eatrides argued Canada’s broadcast policy has long sought to “safeguard, enrich and strengthen Canada’s cultural, social, political and economic fabric. That objective has remained at the heart of every version of the (Broadcasting) Act.”

The current controversy surrounding the CRTC ruling recalls an earlier 2014 clash between the TV regulator and Netflix as the video streaming giant refused to turn over confidential subscriber information to safeguard its private corporate data.

That was followed by then Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper and heritage minister Shelly Glover telling the CRTC to stand down in its fight with Netflix as Ottawa had no plans to tax or regulate the U.S. streamer as it operated north of the border.

Now that Ottawa with its Online Streaming Act – which has yet to be enacted amid an appeals court challenge by U.S. companies – is taxing and regulating U.S. media giants, the government has faced questions in Banff from aggrieved local creatives and producers questioning why the Canadian government and TV regulator promised to get foreign streamers to pay into Canada’s production ecosystem to protect the country’s cultural sovereignty, only to abandon those plans for continued special access to the U.S. market for locally-made cars, steel and aluminum.

On Sunday, federal minister Miller was in Banff and told delegates his government had not “sold out Canadian culture” by scrapping recent CRTC plans for the Online Streaming Act in the face of “ominous threats coming from what was our best friend,” he added of Trump having talked of annexing Canada as the 51st U.S. state and imposing a tariff on non-U.S. movies made overseas, including in Canada.

“This isn’t about ensuring no one pays a fair share. The question is more about where the money goes and who pays for it,” Miller said of continued talks around the CRTC and the implementation of the Online Streaming Act, likely as part of a staggered process.

But frustration among Banff delegates only grew with the admission by Miller that funding paid by U.S. streamers into the Canadian system as part of Online Streaming Act obligations had yet to be spent because the legislation has yet to be enacted owing to an appeals court challenge brought by U.S. media giants.