Brad Danks | CEO, OUTtv Media Global
Part 8 – CARTT Series: Beyond the Walled Garden
Read – Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
The previous article in this series showed what should change in how Canada funds media. This article names the authority that can actually make that change — and where the conversation must happen.
The previous article in this series set out five commitments a redesigned Canada Media Fund would require: shifting allocation from inputs to outcomes, funding distribution infrastructure as core cultural policy, extending IP policy beyond the point of production, backing companies rather than only projects, and naming the transition explicitly rather than describing it in the passive voice. Each of those is a design question. This article is about a different question, and it is the one that determines whether the design questions ever get resolved: who has the authority to make these changes, and where does that authority actually sit?
The answer is not the CMF. That matters more than it sounds like it should.
The Institutional Reality
The CMF cannot make this redesign alone. The framework it operates within is set through its contribution agreement with Canadian Heritage. The envelope architecture, the trigger eligibility rules, and the production-ownership requirements that do not extend downstream are the rules of a framework written elsewhere and administered at the fund. The CMF can advocate, consult, and reshape what it controls. It cannot rewrite the framework on its own authority.
That constraint has a second implication, one that the CMF’s four-year plan does not name but cannot avoid. An institution that cannot articulate a strategic position on its own framework, whose published plan does not mention AI, and whose own diagnosis of the structural shift — financial and architectural — does not translate into a stated reallocation, is not currently positioned to take on a materially larger share of public capital. The question raised by any new federal funding stream is not only where it should sit. It is whether an institution that has not yet specified how it would redesign its existing architecture should be asked to absorb new capital into that architecture by default.
The plan’s Modernize pillar names the venue: a commitment to “review and adapt our Contribution Agreement with Canadian Heritage to ensure it reflects the realities of a market-driven industry.” That sentence identifies the right venue. It does not specify what the CMF will push for, against what timeline, or to what end. A commitment to review and adapt without a substantive position is process, not strategy.
The Venue That Is Actually Open
The “single screen agency” modernisation process underway under Minister Miller is the institutional venue where the rules of the system are actually open for revision. That is where the questions this series has named will have to be resolved: what public capital should be purchasing, how outcomes should be measured, where decision authority should sit, what conditions should attach to foreign-platform participation, and whether the CMF should be permitted to articulate a strategic position at all.
As a federally directed not-for-profit, the fund operates within direction it receives through its contribution agreement and cannot, on its own authority, advance a position that would be read as advocating for policy change. That is a real constraint, and part of what the contribution-agreement review needs to address. Strategy at this scale cannot be the responsibility of an institution structurally prohibited from articulating one in public.
This means the demand named across this series does not sit with the CMF. It sits with Canadian Heritage and with Minister Miller. The four-year plan is what the fund can publish within its current direction. The framework redesign is the Minister’s to drive through the contribution-agreement review and the single screen agency modernisation — and the structural choices this series has named are choices the Department now owns, regardless of what the fund’s next four years look like.
What the Legislative Test Already Requires
The 2023 Broadcasting Act amendments made the export mandate clearer than it has ever been: the system should encourage the development and export of Canadian programs globally. That is the legislative test against which public expenditure is meant to be measured, yet the architecture currently allocating that expenditure was not designed to meet it. As production costs compress and value shifts further toward IP, audience data, and distribution intelligence, public capital flowing through a production-volume-weighted formula produces less of what the Act now requires. AI is the accelerant on a structural misalignment, and the misalignment compounds whether the four-year plan engages with it or not.
One question belongs on the table before any other: how new federal funding enters the system. The choice is not binary. Absorbing new capital into the existing envelope architecture by default does not pause the reform question — it answers it, in the direction of the status quo. Holding all new money outside the system until the redesign is complete is no better; it delays investment in the layer that most needs it. The third path is the one the implementing directive should take: new capital enters only through deliberately designed streams — with their own eligibility, their own outcome measures, and their own accountability — which the CMF can administer without the envelope architecture governing them. Whether new money reforms the system or entrenches it is decided by the design of its entry point.
That choice is not abstract. The $600-million annual commitment is being allocated now, and the implementing directive currently being finalized is the actual point of decision. A distribution-capacity component is far easier to design into that directive at the outset than to retrofit once the funding is already flowing through the CMF’s existing envelope architecture. Once committed, default patterns are difficult to reverse — not because the policy case weakens, but because budgets, recipient organizations, and institutional expectations adjust to the architecture as built. The window for this decision is the directive being written today, not a future planning cycle.
The Walled Garden Is Already Gone
The BDU revenue decline is not the structural fact. It is the visible symptom of one. The structural fact is the collapse of the system the CMF was built inside — a domestic walled garden in which Canadian BDUs controlled access to Canadian audiences, BDU contributions financed the public-private bargain, and policy could be made within national borders because distribution stayed within them. That system is gone. Audiences now reach content directly through global platforms. Rights, revenue, and audience relationships travel through infrastructure no Canadian institution controls. The funding mix changed because the world changed.
The architectural redesign is not one the CMF can drive in isolation, and it is not a problem the CMF created. But the public is owed a strategy aligned with the system in which Canada actually operates — one that treats Canadian content as participating in a global market, not as a domestic output to be subsidised against legacy benchmarks. The modernisation conversation is the venue. The four-year plan is the opening position. It falls to the Minister and Heritage to determine whether the next decade of Canadian public capital builds a Canadian system inside the global one — or finances its absorption into someone else’s.
The CMF was built for a different system. In the Walled Garden, production scarcity was the binding constraint, broadcaster triggers were the administrative mechanism through which producers demonstrated market interest and unlocked the money, and a small domestic market made cross-subsidy the only path to sustained Canadian content. The architecture answered the question of its era. AI is changing the question. As production capacity expands and costs compress, value is consolidating in IP ownership, distribution capacity, and audience relationships — layers the current architecture was never designed to reach. A funding system designed for the first era cannot govern the second.
What This Series Has Argued
Nine articles is enough to lose the thread, so it is worth restating plainly. Canadian broadcasting policy has spent a generation treating production funding as the whole of cultural policy. It is not. It is the first of two layers, and Canada has built the first one well. The second layer — Canadian-owned audience relationships, audience data, and the distribution infrastructure that converts content into durable enterprise value — has gone largely unbuilt, and largely unmeasured, by the system that allocates public capital. A simple test makes the gap concrete: five years after public support, does a Canadian company still control the sequel, remake, licensing, or direct-to-consumer rights — and does any Canadian entity still hold the audience relationship the investment created?
That is not a case against production support. It is a case for completing the architecture production support was always meant to serve. A system that finances the creation of Canadian stories but not the means of reaching, knowing, and keeping the audiences who watch them has only finished half the job. The federal government is now the system’s majority funder. That fact alone does not fix the architecture. It just means the choice about whether to fix it can no longer be deferred to industry, or to BDUs, or to a funding mix that no longer exists. The constructive case — what the second layer costs to build, who finances it once public capital has proven the model, and what it returns to the system — is the subject of work to follow.
Canadians deserve a strategy for the future, not a defence of the past.
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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