When Canada passed the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11) in April 2023, policy-makers presented it as a historic revision of the nation’s broadcasting legislation: to bring streaming platforms into the same cultural policy apparatus as radio and television. With online streaming services now defined as broadcasters, the Act requires platforms to showcase Canadian stories and music (CanCon) and contribute to the production of Canadian stories and music in English, French, and Indigenous languages. The Canadian Radio-television and Communications Commission (CRTC) is currently developing its regulatory plan for implementing the modernized policy in the digital age.
When the Online Streaming Act was first introduced, supporters described the bill as a defence of Canadian culture against American-based streaming giants such as Netflix. This defence rests on a longstanding logic: that cultural sovereignty can be legislated from above, that culture can be safeguarded through federal policy.
Yet, the very terrain of sovereignty has shifted. What was once imagined through domestic airwaves and program schedules is now mediated by platform economies and transnationalism. The notion of cultural sovereignty, central to Canadian cultural policy since the licensing of commercial radio in 1922, has not disappeared. It has instead been rearticulated as digital cultural sovereignty: a twenty-first century expression of the longstanding desire to define and defend the nation’s cultural identity.
C-11, amending the 1991 Broadcasting Act, signifies both continuity and disruption: continuity in its belief that state intervention can preserve and promote a national identity, and disruption in its attempt to extend an analogue-era regulatory philosophy onto the internet, a borderless entity.
Broadcast policy as cultural policy
The debate over online streaming regulation echoes nationalist anxieties that shaped early broadcasting policy. As radio broadcasts entered Canadian living rooms, politicians and lobbyists feared American dominance of the airwaves. The idea of public broadcasting was soon introduced as a means of asserting cultural sovereignty and fostering national consciousness across a vast, young country with a dispersed population. A rhetoric of cultural nationalism—protecting “Canadian” culture from external threats while resisting internal tensions—sought to justify economic and cultural objectives.
That legacy persists. But platforms are transnational, data-driven, and governed by black box algorithms that elude public service mandates. Bill C-11 transposes a twentieth-century system onto digital infrastructures, where normative regulatory philosophies are troubled and symbolic boundaries set by signals and borders are transcended.
Throughout Canadian history, broadcasting policy has been articulated as more than an economic imperative. It is a form of cultural discourse, where competing narratives and myths of nationhood, belonging, and representation are continuously negotiated. When we interrogate broadcasting policy in this way, we can historicize how sovereignty has been constructed and contested across time—from the Aird Commission’s recommendations for a fully public system in 1929 to the Online Streaming Act nearly a century later.
The idea of sovereignty for the nation-state, more broadly, necessarily privileges certain voices while excluding others. Broadcasting debates have often excluded Indigenous, racialized, and marginalized communities, and contemporary processes continue to privilege industrial and institutional interests.
Signals from above and below
When introducing Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, in parliament in 2022, then-Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez declared that platforms must “contribute to the strength and vitality of Canada’s cultural sector,” because “Canada’s strong culture is no accident.”
From above, policy-makers and industry leaders see cultural sovereignty as something to secure through top-down rules and regulations: funding requirements, regulatory oversight, and content mandates like those in the Online Streaming Act. This approach is hopeful, but assumes that federal policy can meaningfully impact cultural outcomes in the digital age in the same way it has for radio and television.
From below, sovereignty is about people’s everyday media experiences, including those online. It involves how Canadian creators and audiences gain visibility and participate culturally on the global stage. When Canadians talk about promoting “Canadian culture” online, they often focus on how Canadian content must be discovered globally, the precarity of cultural work in the domestic industries, and whether diverse voices are genuinely represented in federal policymaking. These themes go beyond questions of an elusive national identity or technocratic industrial objectives.
These two perspectives, political and participatory, are connected but work in different ways. Policies like the Online Streaming Act set out some important conditions for cultural visibility in Canada, but sovereignty also emerges in daily media practices—through active creation, sharing, and engagement. Today, looking at culture from below shows how Canadians define belonging, representation, and participation in digital spaces.
All that is not to say that the gap between perspectives is the result of bad policy (indeed, I hope Bill C-11 will prove itself a much-needed step forward). Rather, it reflects enduring questions about how cultural power and participation are structured and enacted in contemporary Canada.
Whose sovereignty?
This contrast between rhetoric in Ottawa and public engagement reveals competing conceptions of cultural sovereignty in the digital age. The first, sovereignty from above, frames it as protection: the state’s capacity to support cultural industries and promote a sense of Canadian-ness. The second, sovereignty from below, frames it as agency: the ability for individuals and communities to participate meaningfully in cultural expression and to define their own identities on the national and global level.
Of course, neither vision alone is sufficient. Top-down regulation necessarily risks reproducing colonial and exclusionary logics and leaving governance entirely to transnational corporations will inevitably deepen inequities and issues of access, visibility, and funding. The challenge lies in reframing cultural sovereignty in the digital age not only as protectionism, but also as participation.
Reimagining sovereignty as participation, in this context, means recognizing audiences and creators as active cultural agents, not merely as markets to be protected. While the CRTC’s public hearings and consultations represent a form of participatory governance, a pluralist system inevitably privileges those with resources, technical literacy, or institutional support. In practice, a more participatory understanding of sovereignty might mean recognizing the informal negotiations that already take place across digital platforms—where creators advocate for visibility, audiences mobilize around shared cultural concerns, and communities experiment with new forms of storytelling and self-representation.
These processes challenge the idea that regulation is something done to culture, instead positioning it as an ongoing dialogue between policy, platforms, and publics. Participation, in this sense, is less about formal inclusion in hearings than about enabling the conditions for diverse voices to meaningfully shape Canada’s digital sovereignty. We need transparency, accessibility, and adaptability in policy-making, regulatory and funding decisions, and platform governance.
The Online Streaming Act modernizes a century of broadcasting policy, but it also reminds that cultural sovereignty, whether analogue or digital, is never settled. It is continuously negotiated between institutions and publics, between Parliament Hill and Canadian living rooms, between the signals sent from above and the voices heard from below.
