A Well-Worn Legal Path, With a New Shortcut
On July 3, 2026, Federal Court Justice Richard Southcott signed a two-year site-blocking order, docket T-1127-26, requiring eight of Canada's largest ISPs — Bell, Rogers, Telus, TekSavvy, Videotron, Cogeco, Eastlink and SaskTel — to block 13 named piracy operators, including 123Movies, FMovies, Putlocker, WatchSeries and several IPTV subscription services (official case notice, t112726.ca). The applicants — Rogers, Groupe TVA, Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros. — are the same class of rightsholder that won Canada's first blocking order in Bell Media Inc. v. GoldTV.Biz, 2019 FC 1432, a ruling the Federal Court of Appeal upheld in 2021 and the Supreme Court declined to revisit (Quebecor press release).
What's new is the mechanism, not the outcome. T-1127-26 introduces an "Expanded Scope" procedure: rightsholders can add a fresh domain to the blocklist by filing an affidavit showing the site's sole or predominant purpose is unauthorized distribution of the applicants' works, that it operates similarly to an already-named service, that it's reachable from Canada, and that the operator was given seven days' notice. ISPs then get five business days to object. If none do, the domain is added — no hearing, no judge (TorrentFreak). Justice Southcott reportedly drew on a UK High Court "omnibus order" model that lets rightsholders block any "structurally infringing" audiovisual service without naming it in advance — the same TorrentFreak report frames this as the leading edge of a UK-to-Canada convergence in blocking practice.
The Case for Speed
The rightsholders' argument deserves to be taken on its own terms. Piracy operators today rotate domains in hours, not months — a mirror of a blocked IPTV service can be live under a new name before a motion is even filed. Canada's original GoldTV framework required a fresh application, with notice and an opportunity to be heard, every time an operator resurfaced, which effectively rewarded evasion: the more successfully a pirate site dodged a court order, the longer it bought before the next one caught up. Quebecor's public position — that "legal tools must keep pace with the increasingly sophisticated tactics of those who profit from stolen content" — is not wrong about the underlying problem. Courts have also already blessed the core remedy: the Federal Court of Appeal in 2021 rejected the argument that ISP blocking implicates the ISPs' own expressive rights, treating them as common carriers rather than speakers, and the Supreme Court let that stand.
Where the Safeguard Actually Broke
The defect isn't the blocking power itself — it's who reviews its expansion. The original GoldTV order and its 2019 progeny required each new domain to clear a judge, even routinely; that step was slow, but it was also the only check on rightsholders' own affidavits. T-1127-26 replaces judicial review with ISP silence as consent. An ISP that doesn't object within five business days isn't affirming the affidavit is accurate — it's simply not resourced to litigate a copyright dispute it isn't a party to and has no commercial stake in contesting. TekSavvy, the one ISP on record with reservations, called blocking orders generally "a grave violation of network neutrality" and warned the model is "a slippery slope," while still not formally opposing this specific order (TorrentFreak; iPhone in Canada). That's the tell: the parties best positioned to catch an overbroad affidavit have the weakest incentive to spend money doing so.
Justice Southcott did build in limits — the order is scoped to "the Applicants' Works" specifically, preventing studios from stretching the injunction to catalogues acquired later, and subscribers who believe they were wrongly blocked can apply to the Federal Court within 30 days of first being affected. But an after-the-fact appeal by an individual internet subscriber is a poor substitute for a judge screening the initial addition. Overblocking in site-blocking regimes is not hypothetical: shared infrastructure, CDN IP ranges and misidentified "similar" platforms have produced collateral blocks in the UK and EU blocking programs T-1127-26 explicitly borrows from.
What Should Change
Canada doesn't need to choose between an unworkable case-by-case model and an unreviewed one. A defensible middle path exists: keep the five-day expedited window, but require the applicant to serve a copy of every expansion affidavit on a standing public-interest respondent — CIPPIC or a similar clinic already active before the Federal Court — with standing to object on overbreadth grounds even when the named ISPs stay silent. That preserves the speed rightsholders need against a genuinely fast-moving threat, without making commercial disinterest by eight ISPs the only thing standing between a affidavit and a two-year block on a Canadian's access to a domain a judge never looked at.