When Heated Rivalry — a queer hockey romance adapted from Nova Scotia author Rachel Reid’s novels — became the most-watched original series in Crave’s history and a breakout hit on HBO Max, Canada’s culture minister called it a “Cancon triumph.” And by every regulatory measure, it is: Canadian writer, Canadian director, Canadian production company, $3.1 million from the Canada Media Fund, certified under the CAVCO points system. But here is the paradox at the heart of Canadian cultural policy: Heated Rivalry qualifies as Canadian content not because it is steeped in hockey culture, not because its characters play for a Montreal team, and not because its source material was written in Halifax. 

It qualifies because Canadians hold enough of the key creative positions to score six out of ten on a checklist. A show about hockey made by non-Canadians in Toronto would not count. A show about nothing recognizably Canadian, made entirely by Canadians, would. The system that decides what constitutes Canadian culture does not actually measure culture. It measures citizenship. That distinction — between an industrial definition of Canadian content and a cultural one — is the unresolved tension running beneath the Online Streaming Act. At its core is a persistent question: how can the state protect Canadian culture while sustaining the industries that produce it?

From Spectrum Scarcity to Platform Power

Canadian broadcasting regulation emerged amid early 20th-century anxieties about American cultural influence. At a time when airwaves were scarce and U.S. signals transmitted across the border, regulators saw public interest mandates as tools to cultivate a distinctive Canadian broadcasting system. In this scarcity paradigm, prioritizing Canadian programming followed a clear logic: controlling distribution meant shaping culture. Canadian broadcasting policy has long tried to balance cultural protection with industrial sustainability, from early radio regulation in the 1920s to the creation of the CBC in 1936 as a counterweight to American dominance.

Digital streaming fundamentally alters these conditions. Distribution is global by default; algorithms, not broadcast schedules, help determine what content audiences encounter. The largest platforms are transnational corporations whose scale and data-driven architectures challenge the regulatory reach of any single nation-state. Regulators must now grapple with the limits of state oversight over privately owned digital infrastructures, including persistent questions around transparency and data access. Cultural policy is no longer just about regulating production and distribution, but about governing the systems through which content is made visible in the first place.

This shift does not just complicate the core policy question. It destabilizes it. If Canadian cultural policy was built on the assumption that supporting domestic production would shape what audiences see, that link is now mediated by platforms that Canada does not control. Supporting Canadian production no longer guarantees cultural visibility or influence when discovery, distribution, and attention are governed elsewhere.

In this respect, the Online Streaming Act reflects a familiar regulatory dilemma. Policymakers are once again attempting to use industrial tools to achieve cultural ends, extending longstanding regulatory principles into a platform-dominated environment. The Act modernizes the 1991 Broadcasting Act by bringing online streaming services under the authority of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), requiring platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ to contribute to and promote Canadian content. In doing so, it extends a longstanding policy approach that links market participation to cultural support.

But this raises a more difficult question: can strengthening the economics of Canadian production still serve cultural ends when the systems that determine visibility remain outside national control?

Industrial Viability as Cultural Strategy?

At the national level, the Broadcasting Act ties cultural and economic objectives together: Canada’s broadcasting system should “safeguard, enrich, and strengthen the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of Canada.” In practice, industrial viability has often functioned as the precondition for cultural promotion. Canadian cultural production is not just identity work; it is an essential economic sector that creates jobs, attracts foreign investment, and contributes to GDP.

Beginning in the 2024–25 broadcasting year, the CRTC established a 5 percent base contribution requirement on the Canadian revenues of large online streaming services, directing funds to support Canadian and Indigenous content. The decision is meant to correct a structural imbalance: while foreign platforms capture revenue from Canadian audiences, they have not historically been required to support domestic cultural production. 

The requirement therefore extends a core principle of Canadian cultural policy—that those who benefit from the Canadian market should also invest in it—to the platform era. Meanwhile, streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ launched court challenges against that requirement, arguing that it would hurt collaboration with Canadian creators and negatively affect Canadian consumers.

In the current regulatory framework, the industrial objective—securing stable economic flows and production capacity—becomes the mechanism by which cultural goals can be achieved. This brings the core tension into focus. If Canadian culture must first succeed economically in order to survive, is policy protecting culture from market logics, or simply helping it adapt to them? And a deeper question: what conception of Canadian culture are we working with? 

Platforms, Power, and Sovereign Limits

In this context, the central policy question becomes harder to resolve. Supporting Canadian production does not necessarily translate into sustaining Canadian culture when platforms control visibility, distribution, and attention.

Regulating financial contributions and content discoverability will not automatically secure meaningful visibility for Canadian creators or, by extension, Canadian culture. Nor will it neatly resolve the structural imbalance between Canada and the corporations whose revenues and infrastructures rival those of many nations.

There is also an internal contradiction: to secure the cooperation of global streamers, Canada must remain an attractive production environment. Service productions from foreign platforms generate jobs and investment. But a policy orientation that prioritizes production volume for revenue’s sake risks diluting the distinctiveness and diversity of Canadian storytelling, privileging economic forces over cultural specificity.

The Online Streaming Act does not reject market logic. Instead, it reshapes it in the name of cultural protection. Whether this recalibration succeeds largely depends on interpretation and implementation. If success is measured primarily by total productions or aggregate investment, the economic objective may overshadow the cultural one. However, if the CRTC’s regulatory tools can amplify diverse voices, support independent creators, and address longstanding inequities in cultural labour, the policy may begin to reconcile economic and cultural aims in a more substantive way.

Yet questions persist about the enforceability of the Online Streaming Act’s standards. Strengthening the CRTC’s regulatory authority—whether through fines or enhanced oversight of algorithmic promotion—could reinforce accountability and ensure compliance, but the broader debates over media and Internet regulation that have animated Canadian cultural policy for decades will persist: over public versus private interest, national sovereignty versus consumer sovereignty, culture versus commerce. Whether Canadian culture is defended against market forces or made competitive within them will determine whether the Online Streaming Act becomes a symbolic gesture or a structural reconfiguration of cultural power in the digital age.

Ultimately, cultural sovereignty cannot be secured solely through funding formulas. The Online Streaming Act does not resolve this tension. It sharpens it. The question is no longer whether Canada can support its cultural industries, but whether doing so is enough to sustain Canadian culture at all.

A show like Heated Rivalry can meet every requirement to qualify as Canadian. Whether it is seen, shared, and recognized as Canadian is a different question entirely — one that Canadian policy no longer fully controls.

© OpenCanada