From Berlin to Ottawa: Regulating for Leverage, Not Just Participation

By Cartt.ca

At this year’s European Film Market in Berlin, a high-level panel titled “Balancing Cultural Diversity, Artistic Freedom and Competitiveness in the Platform Era” felt like a genuine policy turning point. European Parliament First Vice-President Sabine Verheyen summed up the moment: “If a handful of players decide which stories are visible, whose voices are amplified, and which languages are profitable, cultural diversity is no longer guaranteed, and creative sovereignty is weakened.”

The same warning describes Canada’s situation precisely. Canada faces the same structural challenge and adds one of its own: regulatory delays that hold back domestic players right when they need to move fast.

The parallels between Europe’s platform debate and Canada’s roll-out of Bill C-11 are striking. Both are wrestling with the same reality: global streaming and social platforms now decide what gets funded, made, promoted, and discovered. Cultural policy isn’t just about domestic broadcasters anymore – it’s about transnational distribution systems.

Canada is regulating for participation; Europe is starting to regulate for leverage. That difference matters.

Participation ensures contribution. Leverage ensures outcomes.

The Platform Question

Canada’s approach to platform policy has mostly focused on financial contributions: ensuring global streamers help fund Canadian content. That’s important work. But money is just one layer of the platform equation. If a handful of global players control visibility, data, and algorithms, does financial support alone guarantee creative sovereignty? The answer, more and more, is no.

Europe is moving past just financial participation and starting to regulate for real leverage – looking hard at data access gaps between global platforms and independents, the competitive impact of AI-driven recommendations, digital ad market concentration, and whether mid-sized services can go global without unfair disadvantages. Canada faces all these issues, too. The difference is that Europe is acting, while Canada is still mostly focused on production financing – and even that contemplates a much watered-down version of Canadian ownership.

Leverage is not an alternative to cultural policy – it is what allows cultural policy to succeed in a platform-driven system.

There has been comparatively little public discussion in Canada about whether Canadian media companies can actually compete in the distribution layer – or what policy steps would be required to make that possible. Some of these issues extend beyond the CRTC’s traditional mandate, but they are increasingly inseparable from the outcomes Canadian media policy is trying to achieve.

Part of the challenge is institutional lens. The CRTC was built to govern a domestic system, and for most of its history that was the right frame. Its mandate was Canadian audiences, Canadian licensees, and Canadian content on Canadian screens. International sales happened, and for some Canadian producers and distributors they became significant – but they sat downstream of domestic performance, treated as a by-product rather than a co-equal objective. The metrics, triggers, and conditions of licence tracked the domestic side. The international side took care of itself, or didn’t.

The marketplace those assumptions were built on has changed. International distribution used to operate vertically: a domestic broadcaster financed a Canadian licence, and the rest of the world was sold territory by territory to foreign broadcasters who slotted the finished program into their own schedules. Streaming moved that market horizontally – global platforms now commission, distribute, and monetize across all territories at once, and the territory-by-territory sales market has contracted underneath the producers and distributors who depended on it. The trade-show ecosystem that anchored that market – MIP-TV, NATPE, Realscreen and others – has consolidated, shrunk or disappeared in turn.

The transition is not complete; we are roughly halfway through it, and AI is accelerating the rest. Both worlds are visible at the same time, which is why the policy framework has to operate in both – supporting what still works in the vertical model while building the capacity Canadian companies need to compete in the horizontal one.

But the Broadcasting Act is now clear that the system should “encourage the development and export of Canadian programs globally.” Export capability now requires building distribution infrastructure, owning IP, and competing directly with global platforms – none of which fit neatly into a production spending-based regulatory framework. The urgency now is for the CRTC to broaden its lens: not to regulate global markets, but to understand that the health of Canadian services depends on their ability to compete in them. A regulator that only asks domestic questions will keep producing domestic answers, at a moment when the Act itself calls for something more.

Regulatory Speed as a Competitive Dis-Advantage

The CRTC was built to govern a system where change happened slowly. That world is gone. In fast-moving markets – SVOD innovation, FAST and AVOD channels, hybrid models, AI-driven personalization – multi-year regulatory cycles function as a drag on exactly the companies Canada most needs to succeed: the smaller, more agile players building new distribution models. Every month a broadcaster, distributor, or streamer waits for a CRTC decision – on renewals, amendments, exemptions, or conditions of service – the costs, legal fees, and lost revenue add up. Regulatory uncertainty drives up the cost of capital; investors treat unpredictability like any other risk. Some read that uncertainty as a reason to defer reform until the framework stabilizes. The opposite is true: stability comes from decisions, not from waiting.

Uncertainty produces predictable behaviour: companies defer new models and innovations that require regulatory approval and stick to safer, lower-return approaches. That’s not irrational, it’s a survival strategy in a system that punishes risk-taking. But for Canada as a whole, it’s a loss: fewer new products, slower adaptation, less investment, and a diminished ability to compete globally.

What Doesn’t Come Back

There is a category of regulatory outcome the current framework is not designed to detect: the decision-by-delay that ends an institution permanently. A wrong decision can be appealed. A slow decision can be accelerated. A decision delayed past an institution’s financial runway is neither – it is a ruling made by the absence of one. Inaction is not neutral. It is a decision made by other means.

This kind of decision is invisible to the framework that produced it. A regulator never has to write a ruling that says “we have decided this service should not survive.” The same outcome arrives by inaction. In a system that audits its own decisions but not its own delays, the most consequential outcomes are the ones that never appear in the audit.

This is what differentiated timelines are for: a mechanism by which a regulatory system distinguishes between decisions where delay is a cost and decisions where delay is the decision. The CRTC has the authority to make this distinction. What it does not yet have is the explicit commitment that some categories of decision must move on a timeline measured in weeks or months, not years – because the institutions affected cannot survive a multi-year clock, and once lost, they cannot be rebuilt.

Sovereignty in the 21st Century

When the Berlin panel talked about “cultural sovereignty,” it was a serious point. The term means something very different now than it did when Canadian cultural policy first took shape.

Cultural sovereignty once meant owning channels, spectrum, and content quotas. Now, it’s about something much more complex: who controls distribution, prominence, metadata, audience data, and the algorithms that decide what gets seen. When just a few global companies run those systems, discoverability becomes a policy problem and Canadian services face real limits, no matter how much content they produce. As AI systems concentrate visibility among a handful of authoritative sources, cultural sovereignty becomes inseparable from whether Canadian content – and Canadian services – are even recognized by those systems. That’s a policy challenge the current framework hasn’t named yet, let alone begun to address.

Policy Recommendations

Stepping back, these seven articles make one big argument: we need to stop seeing Canadian media as just a production problem and start treating it as a system design challenge. The creative talent and the market opportunity are here. The real question is whether our policies will evolve – so we reward real advantage, not just activity.

Getting there requires more than five moves; the deeper redesign work deserves its own dedicated treatment, and that is the subject of ongoing work beyond this series. But five concrete first steps would shift the system’s direction and signal that Canada is serious about capturing the value its creative sector generates. These recommendations span institutions – some are primarily for the CRTC, some for the CMF, some for Canadian Heritage and the broader policy framework – and no single regulator carries all of them. That distribution is deliberate: the misalignment is systemic, and the response needs to be too.

Reform the CMF broadcaster-trigger model. The CMF’s broadcaster-trigger system was designed for an era when the largest commercial, vertically integrated broadcasters were the primary engine of private Canadian content investment. As those broadcasters shift their core business toward connectivity, the trigger model increasingly routes public money through institutions with diminishing strategic interest in building globally competitive Canadian media. A reformed model should weight funding toward two streams: (1) public interest services — including those carrying mandatory distribution, must-offer status, or distinct mandates serving Indigenous, official-language minority, accessibility, parliamentary, or diversity audiences (beyond CBC/SRC); and (2) commercial services investing in audience growth, IP retention, export performance, and direct distribution capability by Canadian-controlled media. It should create pathways for independent Canadian media services, including those with export strength, to access CMF support without depending on legacy broadcaster triggers. This approach is different than the CMF’s new focus on supporting international rights management by Canadian distribution companies (which is not likely to support a strong Canadian media ecosystem, domestically or abroad).

This reweighting operates within the system’s existing cultural obligations – regional production, French-language programming, Indigenous content, educational programming, third-language programming and diversity objectives are not casualties of redesign but core objectives to meet. Commercially, a sustainable Canadian system needs Canadian media services to grow and become players in international markets (directly or through rights licensing and co-productions that media choose and lead).

Speed Is Policy. The CRTC is currently undertaking some of the most consequential proceedings in a generation: redefining Canadian content, overhauling distribution models, and reshaping who participates in the system. Those outcomes matter enormously. But while the big proceedings advance, the routine decisions that independent and edge players depend on – renewals, amendments, exemptions, and dispute resolutions – are not keeping pace. The ask here is not simply to move faster across the board. It is to adopt differentiated timelines: lighter, faster processes for edge innovation, routine amendments, and non-systemic approvals, while preserving rigorous policy review for landmark proceedings that affect incumbent rights and competitive neutrality. Those are different kinds of decisions, and they should not share the same multi-year clock. The cost of conflating them falls disproportionately on the smaller players that Canada most needs to succeed.

The Commission’s decision to revisit deferral of rate applications by CPAC and other 9.1(1)(h) services is a good example of acting now – when necessary – and adjusting later if needed, is an example of this type of decision-making.

The edge players most likely to become the next generation of Canadian media companies are operating under real financial pressure right now, squeezed between a traditional system that wasn’t designed for them and a transition that hasn’t yet arrived. Decisions that are not made, delayed, or deferred now, are just as consequential as developing a new framework. The goal is to ensure that those companies don’t disappear before the new framework is ready for them and that when it arrives, it creates genuine on-ramps for new entrants and emerging edge players, not just a reconfiguration of existing incumbents.

Reform program metrics. IP retention, export revenue, and distribution capability should be tracked and rewarded alongside production volume and cultural objectives – including within the CMF’s own strategic framework, where outcomes tied to ownership and long-term value creation are currently absent. The data that would most directly answer this question – what percentage of CMF-funded productions result in Canadian media companies retaining and directly exploiting global IP rights – has never been systematically collected. That absence is itself a policy signal: the system does not measure what it does not prioritize. What the CMPA’s own annual data does show is that foreign presales and distribution advances – each representing rights flowing outward as a condition of financing – account for roughly a quarter of Canadian television production financing. The value those rights generate downstream is not tracked, not conditioned, and not returned.
Fund distribution capability. Create structural support for distribution capability in Canadian-controlled companies, not just for content creation.

The goal is not to add another fund to the existing system. It is the architecture Article 5 describes: shared, industry-governed infrastructure that strengthens Canadian services’ collective position against global incumbents. The federated model – shared infrastructure, distributed ownership, independent operation – already has a working proof of concept in Numeris. The policy question is whether we build on it deliberately or leave it to chance.

Align with European platform governance. Engage seriously with the European framework developing around platform leverage, data access, and AI governance. Canada faces the same structural challenges and would benefit from aligned responses. The specific asks are not abstract: recommender-system transparency obligations on dominant platforms, a data-access regime that lets independent Canadian services and the regulator see how Canadian content is surfaced and to whom, and a clear policy position on whether AI training on Canadian creative works requires licensing or compensation. Canada will not write these rules alone, and does not need to. What it needs is the institutional readiness to adopt aligned rules quickly when the European framework matures – and to participate in shaping that framework while it is still being written, rather than receiving it as a settled standard later.

The economic case for IP ownership is not theoretical. A January 2026 joint study by the European Union Intellectual Property Office and the European Patent Office found that IP-intensive industries pay a wage premium of more than 40% compared to other sectors and account for nearly half of EU GDP. The creative industries – film, television, and digital media – are explicitly included as copyright-intensive sectors in that analysis. A media sector built on production-for-hire generates wages and stops there. A sector built on IP ownership generates wages, reinvestment capital, and compounding enterprise value. Canada currently funds the former. Redesigning toward the latter will have real costs: some production volume will fall in the short term, some incumbents will receive less, and the transition will require absorbing that disruption deliberately rather than deferring it. That is not a reason to delay. It is a reason to sequence the redesign carefully. To begin.

Of these five moves, two can begin in the current government’s term without new legislation: reforming the CMF trigger model, and adopting differentiated regulatory timelines at the CRTC. Both sit within existing mandates. Both are within the authority of bodies already constituted to make the relevant decisions. Both can be initiated by a policy direction or a Commission-led process now, with implementation phased over a defined period. Starting there is not the whole answer. It is the part that does not require waiting for anything else to align first – and the part whose deferral most directly produces the institutional losses described above.

None of these moves require building new institutions. The federal government already has export-financing scaffolding – the Creative Export Strategy, renewed in April 2026 for a further five years and $95 million; Export Development Canada; the Business Development Bank of Canada; the Trade Commissioner Service. These instruments sit outside the CMF/CRTC architecture, are administered by Canadian Heritage and Global Affairs Canada, and are systematically under-deployed for the audiovisual sector relative to other creative industries. The redesign described here is not a parallel system. It is a coordination problem: aligning what the broadcasting framework rewards with what the export framework already funds, so that an independent Canadian service competing internationally can move through both without each one assuming the other’s job is being done. Markets evolve. Systems that don’t move with them don’t stay put, they fall behind, even as they keep doing exactly what they were built to do.

Countries that succeed in the next phase of media will not be those that produce the most content, but those that build the most globally competitive media companies. Canada’s advantage lies not in scale but in specialization – in multilingual, culturally specific content drawn from communities the algorithmic mainstream was never built to reach, and that travels precisely because of that specificity.

You can already see Canada’s future in global media at the edges. The question is whether we’ll treat that as a sign to redesign the system and scale those successes to the centre.

Why This Moment Is Different

Canada has deferred these reforms through several waves of tech change. The usual excuse: the system is under stress, incumbents need stability, now isn’t the time. That excuse has run out. The impact of AI on content, discovery, costs, and competition is no longer speculative – it’s visible. Policies move slowly. Markets don’t.

The critical moment isn’t when AI is fully mature. It’s now, during the workflow redesign phase already underway. The first wave of AI in media was tools and experiments at the margins. The second wave, where companies rebuild their entire pipeline around AI – is when costs crash. That wave is moving faster than most policy timelines expect.

The organizations acting now will be hard to unseat. Not because they’ve mastered AI, but because they’re already learning. If Canada waits for certainty, the window will close before the first decision gets made.

And this isn’t just theory. A January 2026 McKinsey report says that up to $60 billion in annual revenue could shift within five years of AI reaching mass adoption in film and TV – just as we saw money move from linear to streaming, only faster. That money doesn’t disappear. It moves. From old-school distribution (which now supports Canadian funding) to the players who control data, audience, and IP. Right now, Canada’s system is set up to catch the value that’s disappearing, not the value that’s growing.

There’s also a political reason to act now that we didn’t have five years ago. The AI conversation has finally created real urgency in Ottawa and at the CRTC – urgency we never saw during the streaming shake-up. Policymakers know AI is a game-changer. That’s an opening. Whether it leads to real structural reform, or just another round of slow, incumbent-friendly tweaks, is the big question for the next year and a half.

The future of Canadian media won’t be decided by how much content we make, but by whether Canadian companies are visible and control the systems that move those stories around the world. Production built the first wave of success. Distribution, IP, and audience smarts will build the next. The challenge now isn’t just to support Canadian storytelling, it’s to ensure that Canadian companies retain the leverage to carry those stories into the global marketplace.

A Personal Statement

After more than 30 years in this industry, I have watched the promise of the Broadcasting Act drain away through choices that each looked reasonable in isolation. I have also seen what is possible when the constraints are lifted: OUTtv Media Global expanded into 16 countries across five continents by pursuing many of the principles this series argues Canada should encourage more broadly – not through the policy advantages the largest Canadian broadcasters receive, but by building Canadian-owned distribution capacity and retaining the IP that made it portable. The opportunity is real. The talent is real. The audience is real. What has been missing is a system willing to act on what it already says it wants.

Canada’s media policy isn’t just about culture or economics anymore. In a world where information systems can deepen division or dependency, the media is a national infrastructure. The goal isn’t protection, it’s resilience: making sure Canada can produce, distribute, and monetize its own stories, reach its own people, and compete globally without relying on any one platform or market. That takes investment in content, yes – but also in IP, distribution, and discovery systems that put Canadian priorities first. The micro-multinationals at the edges of the system aren’t anomalies. They are the signal. And the window to act on that signal – this time – is real and urgent. This is likely the last policy window before global platforms and AI systems fully consolidate around their current advantages.

In Brief

Europe is moving past financial contributions and starting to regulate for real leverage – asking whether money alone guarantees creative sovereignty when a handful of global platforms control visibility, data, and algorithms. Canada faces the same structural challenge plus one of its own: regulatory delays that fall hardest on the smaller, more agile companies the system most needs to succeed. The final article in this series sets out five concrete first steps. Participation ensures contribution. Leverage ensures outcomes.

Brad Danks is CEO of OUTtv Media Global and an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Victoria. He is a frequent writer and speaker on the evolving media landscape. He represents OUTtv’s interests as a member of industry groups, including Beyond Mainstream – a global alliance of independent streaming companies advancing innovation and competition in digital media, and Streaming for Australia. Brad also sits on Numeris’ Board and is a faculty advisor at the Center for Digital Media in Vancouver.

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