CRTC’s New Canadian Content Rules Spark Outrage: Critics Say It’s a Joke

The CRTC says it’s modernizing what counts as Canadian content for TV and streaming, but the reaction from digital-rights groups suggests the regulator has once again managed to make a complicated system even more confusing — and even less connected to real Canadian life.

The update is part of the CRTC’s job under the new Broadcasting Act, which requires online streaming platforms to support Canadian and Indigenous stories. To get there, the CRTC reviewed how it decides whether a show or movie qualifies as “Canadian,” a classification tied to funding and promotion rules.

As usual, the regulator pointed to its long consultation process (480 submissions and 3 weeks of hearings) before announcing that it’s tweaking the points system used to judge whether a production is Canadian. The system already hands out points for jobs like director and screenwriter, and the CRTC says the new version “recognizes a wider range of creators.”

CRTC chair Vicky Eatrides defended the change, saying, “By recognizing the contributions of a wider range of creators, we are supporting Canadians who help bring our stories to the screen. Our decision promotes Canadian talent, encourages new partnerships, and helps keep our creative industries strong for the future.”

But digital-rights group OpenMedia says the CRTC’s new rules do the opposite—and lock in an outdated, almost cartoonish idea of what a “Canadian story” should look like.

For the first time, the CRTC is giving a bonus point for featuring Canadian settings or Canadian characters. The catch? A production only gets that point if all settings and all lead characters are Canadian or Indigenous. If a story includes a single non-Canadian lead character, or takes place anywhere outside Canada for any reason, it loses that point.

OpenMedia says this shows how out of touch the regulator is.

“Today the CRTC failed to recognize Canada,” said Matt Hatfield, OpenMedia’s executive director. “Any story that features these ties cannot receive a point for being a Canadian story. Canadians told the CRTC… that we want stories that represent our lives as they actually are. Today’s decision does just the opposite; by restricting story-based recognition on such narrow terms, it encourages the telling of narrow, nostalgic, and fundamentally unrealistic stories about what Canada is and the lives we live within it.”

Right now, a show needs at least 60% of available points to qualify as Canadian content. Before today, no points were tied to recognizably Canadian characters or settings at all — a long-standing complaint from creators. But critics say the CRTC managed to add this missing piece in the most rigid way possible.

More than 2,300 Canadians submitted feedback earlier this year asking for a definition of Canadian content that reflects modern life—including mixed cultural identities, immigration stories, and international connections. The CRTC’s own polling also showed strong support for recognizing Canadian locations and characters. Instead, critics say the new rule forces creators to write stories where every major character is Canadian, even if that makes no sense for the plot.

This decision is the first of two. The next ruling is the one that will lay out spending requirements for Canadian programming (including news) is still coming.

What’s your take on the CRTC’s Canadian content rules? Do we still need strict CanCon requirements in 2025 now that the internet and streaming platforms dominate how people watch TV? If a show is great, people will find it—nobody sits down and says, “I feel like watching something specifically made in Canada with Canadian actors and filmed here”… or do they?