By Connie Thiessen
Golden West Broadcasting CEO Elmer Hildebrand is among the private broadcast executives who aren’t happy with the CBC’s recent bureau expansion.
The public broadcaster announced in January it was expanding its footprint, with plans to create 11 new local bureaus and hire 33 journalists, increasing its presence to 77 bureaus and stations, including three additional locations in Saskatchewan, and two each in the Yukon, Manitoba and Quebec.
Among the new communities it’s hired reporters in are Swift Current and Moose Jaw, SK, cities in which Golden West already operates a total of six radio stations between them, as well as SwiftCurrentOnline.com and DiscoverMooseJaw.com that already…
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Announces $600M in new money for broadcasting system
By Ahmad Hathout and Linda Stuart
Culture Minister Marc Miller announced Wednesday that he is directing the CRTC to review its recent decision to regulate online streamers and Canadian broadcasters, which sets out mandatory contributions toward the broadcasting system.
The CRTC’s new requirements, which raises to 15 per cent the financial obligation on foreign streamers, “would impose new costs on the companies providing these services, which could ultimately fall on Canadian consumers through higher prices,” said a Canadian Heritage press release Wednesday. The regulator…
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By Ahmad Hathout
The result of two lawsuits filed in Federal Court could increase pressure on the federal government to clarify in the Copyright Act whether non-profit charities that play copyrighted music should pay royalties, according to a Heritage briefing document obtained by Cartt.
Last summer, the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) filed the lawsuits against two major annual music festivals – Ottawa Bluesfest and Festival D’ete de Quebec (FEQ), the largest outdoor festival in the country operated by Festival d’été international de Québec Inc. – for allegedly permitting the playing of copyrighted music without paying…
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By Howard Law, author of MediaPolicy.ca and Canada vs. California: How Ottawa took on Netflix and the streaming giants (Lorimer, 2024)
The other shoe dropped last week when the CRTC delivered two rulings that nearly complete its new regulatory framework for Netflix and the rest of the Hollywood streamers, as well as Canadian television broadcasters.
The reaction to the rulings from the Hollywood streamers and their Canadian enablers offered more heat than light. Media reports played them as a trade story and some breathlessly speculated on Culture & Identity Minister Marc…
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Brad Danks | CEO, OUTtv Media Global
Part 7 – CARTT Series: Beyond the Walled Garden
Read – Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
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,…
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Filing adds to growing list of lawsuits against AI tools
By Ahmad Hathout
A trio of Canadian writers is proposing a class proceeding against Google in Federal Court for allegedly using unlicensed copyrighted works to train and develop its generative AI tools.
Instead of obtaining training data licensed by the plaintiffs and the class, Google knowingly crawls, scrapes and makes copies of the scanned works uploaded to pirate websites, which host versions without the technological prevention measures (TPMs) used to protect them, the May 1 statement of claim alleges. The models learn the narrative arcs and structured texts in…
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Rogers Sports and Media last week announced the greenlight of Deadliest Catch: Northern Edge, a new Canadian iteration of the long-running Deadliest Catch series owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.
Currently filming in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and the North Atlantic, this eight-episode, one-hour series is slated to premiere in winter 2027 on Discovery in Canada.
Produced by Canadian production company Attraction and Fremantle’s Original Productions in association with Discovery US, Deadliest Catch: Northern Edge introduces viewers to a new fleet of captains, offering fresh perspectives and…
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Bell Media announced Monday it is digitizing its national archive of more than 300,000 tapes to preserve decades of news, music and sports history and is making YouTube the primary home for the content.
Representing 255,000 hours of content dating back to the early 1960s, the Bell Media archive spans an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 physical tapes. Bell Media said in a press release it will convert more than 100,000 tapes by the end of 2026, preserving and reactivating legacy content for modern audiences.
“This ‘hidden history’ is being unlocked using Google’s Gemini models, to generate metadata which…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Culture Minister Marc Miller said Thursday that the $6 billion he said was the projected value of a prospective tax credit for broadcasting news was an “error.”
“On Tuesday, I conflated the projected Film & Video Tax Credits over the next 6 years with the Journalism Tax Credit for the audiovisual news sector, for which we announced consultations in the Spring Update and which has yet to be quantified,” Miller said on X this afternoon. “This error is entirely mine.”
The correction appears to address the confusion about how the minister came up with the figure,…
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Editor’s note: The minister took to X on May 7, 2026 to say the $6B was an “error.”
By Ahmad Hathout
Culture Minister Marc Miller told the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage Tuesday that the implementation of a federal tax credit for broadcasting news could be worth as much as $6 billion.
The federal government’s spring economic update, released last week, includes a promise to hold a public consultation on expanding the Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit – currently reserved for written news – to the broadcasting sector.
“For me, it’s not a question of if, but…
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