When Canadian Culture Becomes a Trade Barrier
Audience Reality Check #9
The collapse of Canada-United States trade talks brought Canada’s right to shape the pathways to its own audiences into a wider fight over trade and sovereignty.
To be fair, Canada did not walk away from the negotiating table on August 21 because of culture alone. The disagreement involved the treatment of medium and heavy trucks, Canada's autonomy in negotiating trade deals with other countries, demands touching French-language protections and much more. Prime Minister Mark Carney described the cumulative offer in blunt terms: the United States had “asked too much and offered too little.”
The exact negotiating text has not been released, but Carney confirmed that U.S. demands reached online discoverability of media, subsidies and other forms of cultural support. A senior government source also told the Globe and Mail that American negotiators sought an exemption for U.S. streaming platforms from future Canadian-content requirements. They characterized the objective as creating more room for U.S. content and less for Canadian content on those services. (As if American content needed more room in the Canadian cultural landscape.)
This reported demand treated discoverability rules as a commercial threat worth challenging and revealed how valuable control over access to an audience has become.
A Fight Over Access
Canadian cultural policy has long concentrated on getting work made. Living next to the cultural juggernaut of the United States means struggling to rise above the noise from the south. Public funds and tax credits have financed our stories, while broadcast and exhibition rules created space for them on screen.
In the platform era, however, the cultural landscape has shifted. The Canadian gatekeepers no longer limit audience choice and control. The audience has access to stories from around the world, filtered through algorithmic systems. Search results, recommendations, home-page placement, and audience data shape what becomes familiar enough to choose. A film can be financed, certified as Canadian, and licensed to a streamer, but then disappear into a catalogue most viewers will never explore. Getting work made and even making it available is no longer enough.
Washington raised questions about laws intended to shape how American platforms operate in Canada. They understood the value of controlling audience access as part of the trade relationship. While the default marketplace has never been neutral, today the stacking of the deck has become more complicated and harder to see. Decisions are made constantly about which titles receive prominent placement, which releases benefit from global campaigns, how “personalized” recommendations are generated, and what audience information is shared.
Canada Was Defending Its Cultural Authority
The Online Streaming Act gives the CRTC authority to impose discoverability conditions, but the regulator has not created a universal CanCon quota for streaming home pages or ordered platforms to rewrite algorithms. That nuance changes the meaning of the trade demand.
Canada was defending its right to decide what effective, measurable discoverability could look like as the system develops. The United States was reportedly seeking a carveout for its companies before those Canadian obligations had even been determined. Since the talks collapsed, the CRTC has confirmed that it will continue developing discoverability requirements. It is heartening to hear Canada doubling down on its authority in this space. The question now is how well we will use it.
Discoverability Is Still Not an Audience Strategy
Earlier this year, I argued that discoverability is not enough. I still believe that. Prominent streamer placement cannot make someone care about a film. Visibility does not automatically become desire, and desire does not always become a decision to watch.
Yet “not enough” should never be mistaken for “unimportant.” Discoverability is one of the first rungs on the Audience Ladder. If a story is absent from where people search, the journey never begins. The opportunity to be encountered has cultural value, even if it cannot complete the journey alone.
The stronger parts of the CRTC framework recognize this. They move beyond counting catalogue titles and ask services to measure prominence, impressions, clicks, viewing, and the pathways that lead audiences toward content. They also contemplate sharing useful information with producers and programming services. That learning matters. Without it, every placement remains an isolated promotional gesture, and the sector cannot distinguish visibility from meaningful audience movement and engagement.
The Audience Journey Does Not Stay on the Platform
It would also be a mistake to imagine the audience journey continuing neatly up the ladder within the same streaming platform. A platform may help make a film available, discoverable, and help it get noticed, but the movement that follows depends on trusted people and shared experiences.
People rarely move along the Audience Ladder inside a single system. Someone may hear about a film through a community organization, watch it later on a streaming service and then recommend it online. Someone else may discover it through a social post and then choose a theatrical screening because the filmmaker will be there or a special event is planned. A cinema, festival or trusted community host can give the work context that a catalogue placement cannot. Audiences do not experience these as separate systems. Each encounter can move them further along the ladder or lead them towards the filmmaker’s next project.
This wider ecology is part of Canada's cultural infrastructure. Independent exhibitors, festivals, and community screening networks create pathways for work that will never receive the force of a global marketing campaign, appear on a major cinema screen or get prominent placement in a digital marketplace. They build local knowledge and trust over time. Yet policy too often treats this work as downstream promotion rather than ongoing audience development that strengthens the pathway for future projects.
What Cultural Sovereignty Should Deliver
Canada was right to protect its ability to make cultural policy inside its own borders. A blanket exemption for American-owned platforms would weaken that ability at a crucial point of audience access. French-language, Indigenous, and other Canadian work should not depend on whether it fits the commercial priorities of companies headquartered elsewhere.
Having defended that authority, Canada now has to use it across the whole audience pathway. Discoverability commitments should reflect pathway differences while producing evidence we can learn from. Producers need data showing how viewers found their work, where interest stalled, and whether one title created momentum for another. Public funders need to know which investments build meaningful audience connections rather than brief visibility and reach.
The same attention must extend beyond platforms. Cinemas, festivals, and community partners need the capacity to introduce Canadian work in context and keep relationships alive after release. Creators need infrastructure that allows some of the audience relationship to remain with them instead of disappearing after the launch.
The United States called Canadian cultural measures trade barriers. Canada called them matters of language, culture, and sovereignty. Beneath that language is an audience reality: control over attention carries power, but attention is shaped in many places.
Making Canadian work is only the beginning. Our stories need many routes into people's lives and sustained effort to become meaningful. Cultural policy should connect production, distribution, exhibition, and audience learning so that each project leaves stronger pathways behind for the next. That is how we will build true sovereignty and sustainability for our films, filmmakers and audiences across the country.
Sources and further reading
Prime Minister's remarks on Canada-U.S. trade negotiations. Official remarks delivered August 22, 2026.
Ottawa rejected last-minute U.S. demand to drop CanCon rules for streamers. Marie Woolf, The Globe and Mail.
What we know about why Canada's trade deal with America fell apart. Chris Knight, National Post.
CRTC 2026-95: Discoverability framework. The CRTC's framework for Canadian and Indigenous content and services.
CUSMA Article 32.6: Cultural Industries. The cultural exemption and equivalent-commercial-effect provision.