A Non-Renewal With a Reading List Attached
On July 1, 2026, the United States, Canada, and Mexico held the first mandatory joint review of the USMCA under Article 34.7 — and the U.S. walked away without agreeing to extend it. "The United States did not agree to renew the USMCA in its current form," Ambassador Jamieson Greer's office said in a statement. "As a result, the USMCA is not renewed." Canada and Mexico both confirmed they wanted the 16-year extension; the U.S. did not. The deal stays fully in force, but the parties are now locked into annual joint reviews until it lapses on July 1, 2036, unless all three governments agree to extend it sooner.
The same day, the Computer & Communications Industry Association — whose members include Google, Meta, and Amazon — filed its own statement making clear what it wants fixed before that happens. CCIA Vice President Jonathan McHale said negotiators "should address discriminatory measures undermining reciprocal market access, like Canada's Online Streaming Act, its content-funding mandates, and the Online News Act's link tax," alongside Mexican cloud rules CCIA says amount to de facto data localization. This is a trade lobby using a stalled renewal clock as leverage — but the underlying policy critique is worth taking on its own terms, because Canada's two flagship platform laws have produced results that undercut their own stated purpose.
What Ottawa Actually Built
The Online News Act (Bill C-18), which received royal assent on June 22, 2023, requires platforms that carry links to Canadian news to compensate the publishers — the "link tax" CCIA objects to. Meta's response was to stop carrying Canadian news links on Facebook and Instagram entirely rather than pay, a blackout that has now run for roughly three years. Google negotiated an exemption instead: the CRTC approved a deal on October 31, 2024, under which Google pays $100 million a year into the Canadian Journalism Collective, a nonprofit that distributes the money to eligible outlets, in exchange for a five-year carve-out from individual bargaining and arbitration.
The Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11), passed the same year, extended decades-old Canadian-content spending obligations from domestic broadcasters to foreign streaming services. The CRTC's Broadcasting Regulatory Policy 2026-96, issued May 21, 2026, tripled the mandatory contribution for large unaffiliated streamers like Netflix and Amazon from a 5% base rate to 15% of Canadian broadcasting revenue, applying to any service with $25 million or more in Canadian revenue. Streamers earning over $100 million must direct 30% of that spending to "enhanced partnerships" where Canadians hold majority copyright — a bar much of Netflix's existing Canadian spending doesn't clear. The CRTC projects the regime will now direct more than $2 billion annually toward Canadian and Indigenous content.
The Steelman
Canada's case isn't frivolous. Local news has been gutted across North America, and Ottawa's argument — echoing Australia's 2021 News Media Bargaining Code — is that platforms captured the advertising revenue that used to fund journalism and owe something back for distributing that content. The Online Streaming Act, similarly, simply asks foreign streamers to shoulder the same Canadian-content spending obligations domestic broadcasters have carried since the 1970s, on the theory that a media market with only foreign-owned production incentives is a cultural policy failure, not a free-market outcome.
Why the Objection Has Teeth Anyway
The problem is what actually happened when Ottawa tried to collect. Meta didn't pay the link tax — it deleted the links, and independent Canadian outlets that relied on Facebook referral traffic lost readers with nothing to show for it. A policy meant to fund journalism instead shrank its distribution. Google's $100 million exemption is a better outcome, but it's a negotiated settlement, not the statute working as designed — the CRTC effectively admitted a blanket bargaining mandate wasn't going to survive contact with a platform that could just walk away.
The streaming levy has the sharper trade problem: raising the rate to 15% and reserving credit for majority-Canadian-owned productions functions less like a neutral content quota and more like a spending mandate aimed specifically at foreign-owned services, since domestic broadcasters already meet the ownership test by default. The Motion Picture Association has called the ruling a violation of Canada's USMCA obligations, and copyright scholar Michael Geist predicts it produces exactly four outcomes: litigation (streamers already sued over the interim 5% levy), trade retaliation, accounting games to relabel existing spending as compliant, and higher subscription prices for Canadian consumers — none of which is new Canadian content getting made.
The Bigger Risk
Folding these disputes into the USMCA review raises the stakes past what either dispute earned on its own. Canada has real leverage — cultural-policy carve-outs have survived prior trade rounds — and a government facing domestic pressure to defend cultural sovereignty has every incentive to hold the line rather than negotiate mid-review. But an annual-review structure that runs until 2036 means this fight doesn't get resolved once; it gets relitigated every July. The proportionate path for Ottawa is the one it already found with Google: replace blanket extraction mandates with negotiated, transparent contributions, and treat journalism funding as a subsidy problem distinct from platform regulation — not fold it into an escalating structure that, so far, has mostly produced blocked links and a lawsuit queue.