The CRTC confirmed in comments to media in late August 2026 that it will proceed with developing discoverability rules for streaming services — requiring Netflix, Disney+, and other platforms operating in Canada to make Canadian and French-language programming visible to users, even when they aren't actively searching for it. The regulator said it is still finalizing dates for the regulatory proceeding, but the direction is clear: this mandate survives even as the CRTC's separate, and far more contested, revenue-contribution framework for the same platforms gets dismantled around it.
Two Mandates, One Law, Diverging Fates
Both obligations trace back to the same statute: the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11), which received royal assent on April 27, 2023, and amended the Broadcasting Act to require that online undertakings "ensure the discoverability of Canadian programming services and original Canadian programs, including original French language programs, in an equitable proportion."
The CRTC translated that mandate into two separate regulatory tracks in May 2026. Broadcasting Regulatory Policy 2026-96 set a concrete number: unaffiliated streaming services earning more than C$25 million a year in Canadian revenue would owe 15% of that revenue to Canadian content funds. Companion policy 2026-95 set discoverability "outcomes" — that Canadian and Indigenous content be easy to find, prominently presented, and transparently reported on — without yet fixing specific obligations.
The contribution rule collapsed first. On June 3, 2026, the federal government directed the CRTC to reverse the CPE requirement, and a July 17, 2026 Department of Justice filing to the Federal Court of Appeal confirmed Ottawa's intent to "eliminate the base contribution requirement on streaming services and to provide government funding to replace those contributions" — reportedly around $600 million annually, per Michael Geist's analysis of the court filing. A regime built since 2024 was dead within months, taxpayers set to backfill what the CRTC could no longer legally extract.
The discoverability track, by contrast, is moving forward — and Prime Minister Mark Carney has said the U.S. specifically pressed Canada to soften it during trade talks, arguing the requirements would restrict access to online content. Ottawa held firm on this piece even while conceding the money.
The Case for Discoverability, Stated Fairly
The strongest argument for the CRTC's approach is real. Linear broadcasters have always been required to schedule and promote Canadian content precisely because market forces alone under-supply it — niche, regional, and French-language programming struggles to compete for attention against internationally produced hits. Recommendation algorithms optimized purely for engagement can bury that content even more thoroughly than a broadcast schedule ever did, since a global platform has no inherent reason to surface Quebecois drama over a bigger-budget import. A discoverability rule, unlike a straight revenue levy, doesn't ask platforms to fund anything — it asks them to expose content that already exists in their catalogs. That is, in principle, a lighter and more narrowly tailored intervention than a tax.
Why the Algorithm Mandate Is the Harder One to Defend
But a revenue contribution and an algorithm mandate are not equivalent in intrusiveness, and Ottawa's choice to keep the second while dropping the first gets the risk calculus backwards. A 15% contribution rate is fungible and auditable: a company writes a check, and a regulator can verify the number. "Prominence" and "discoverability" are not numbers — they require the CRTC to define, monitor, and eventually enforce how a private platform ranks, recommends, and surfaces content inside its own product, on a per-service, negotiated basis (the CRTC's own May decision explicitly deferred a universal rule in favor of "tailored" commitments with each streamer). That is regulatory involvement in UI and recommendation-engine design, not fiscal policy, and it invites exactly the kind of open-ended compliance disputes that just killed the contribution framework in the Federal Court of Appeal.
The CRTC defines discoverability as ensuring content is "made available and visible to audiences, including when an audience member is not actively seeking such content," and that it not be "limited to Canada-specific silos."
That standard is a defensible cultural-policy goal. It is also inherently subjective, which is precisely why the contribution fight — a comparatively simple percentage dispute — still took two years, a Federal Court challenge, and a trade confrontation to unwind. A discoverability regime with per-platform, negotiated conditions of service is a slower-moving, harder-to-audit version of the same fight, now aimed at something platforms will resist even more: control over their own product surface.
What Comes Next
The CRTC has not yet set proceeding dates or draft rules, which means the design choices that will determine how invasive this gets — whether obligations are narrow reporting requirements or binding conditions on ranking algorithms — are still open. Given that the government has already shown, in the contribution reversal, that it will bend under trade pressure and legal risk, the discoverability track's ultimate shape likely depends more on how the U.S. relationship evolves than on cultural-policy merits alone. Policymakers should take the CPE collapse as a warning rather than a detour: rules that require regulators to arbitrate product design, not just collect revenue, are the ones most likely to end up back in court.