Over the past three years, Parliament has seen Bills introduced that would strip supposedly “hateful” and “harmful” content (as defined by politicians and bureaucrats in Ottawa) from the internet. Freedom-loving Canadians have justifiably focused their attention on laws that explicitly censor speech, like the Combatting Hate Act (Bill C-9) and the Online Harms Act (Bill C-63, which died with the April 2025 election).
In contrast, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) engages in a more subtle – but equally deadly – assault on freedom of expression.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms wisely protects not only the individual’s right to think, believe and speak freely, but also the very conditions that sustain democracy in Canada: “freedom of the press and other media of communication.” So even if the federal government succeeded in stifling press freedom through discriminatory policies like its Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization designation, the Charter still protects “other media of communication.”
The Online Harms Act and the Combatting Hate Act seek to punish expression after it occurs. In contrast, laws like the Online News Act (Bill C-11) and the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-18), which came into force in 2023, undermine free expression by restricting Canadians’ access to content which the CRTC deems undesirable.
The Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11) gave the CRTC authority over the internet, empowering it to manipulate the algorithms of domestic and foreign streaming services, and to compel streaming services to “make discoverable” what Ottawa regards as “Canadian” content. The Online Streaming Act does not enable the CRTC to remove content from the streaming services it regulates, so there is no direct censorship. However, the CRTC does have the power to direct Canadians’ attention to its preferred French-language, Indigenous, LGBTQ+ and other “diversity” content. The CRTC has in fact become a censorship tool of the federal government, and therefore it no longer serves the public interest.
Thanks to the Online Streaming Act and the Online News Act, the CRTC’s regulatory grip over Canada’s communications sector undermines the free marketplace of ideas. The CRTC picks winners and losers, rather than respecting net neutrality. As a consequence, the federal government now has longer levers to shape the national conversation in real time. It has turned the CRTC into a gatekeeper that decides which ideas, creators, and stories get amplified, and which ones get quietly suppressed by making them harder to find. The CRTC, along with many politicians and bureaucrats in Ottawa, simply do not trust Canadians to choose for ourselves what we watch and listen to.
Created in 1968, the CRTC claims to “regulate” the Canadian communications sector “in the public interest.” Its 700-person bureaucracy supervises “over 2,000 broadcasters, including TV services, AM and FM radio stations, and companies that bring these services to Canadians” as well as “telecommunications service providers, including internet, cellphone and telephone service providers.”
Within a few years of its creation, the CRTC began forcing radio and then television stations to broadcast Ottawa’s version of “Canadian” content.
In 1997, the CRTC approved Playboy TV, The Golf Channel, and Game Show Network for television. That same year, the CRTC rejected the applications of three small religious networks and the much larger Eternal Word Television Network. The CRTC imposed stringent conditions on religious content: single-faith channels were permitted only on cable, and applicants had to demonstrate “balanced programming” that included multi-faith perspectives on matters of public concern. Needless to say, Playboy TV was not required to provide “balanced” programming by including messages from pornography opponents, or from addiction counselors. For the CRTC, golf and pornography are somehow more “Canadian” than religion (especially Christianity).
The CRTC promoting pornography while banning a religious broadcaster shows that Canadians do not need a government body to serve as their “cultural guardian” and decide what content they should discover, consume, or create. This blatant CRTC bias exposes the absurdity of empowering a government body to grant or deny licenses, or manipulate internet algorithms, based on what political appointees think is “Canadian.”
The CRTC’s political bias is not a thing of the past. As explained by Jamie Sarkonak, the CRTC has ordered Netflix, Amazon and other online streamers to collect diversity data about whether key creative personnel are “racialized people, people with disabilities, individuals who identify as 2SLGBTQI+ and women,” and to support programming created by and for non-white communities. When government requires the gathering of data about what it calls “equity-deserving groups,” quotas are sure to follow. In 2022, the CRTC ordered the CBC to spend a minimum proportion of its production budgets on “diverse” shows and production teams.
According to the CRTC in 1997, “Canadian” meant golf and pornography, to the exclusion of religion. For today’s CRTC, “Canadian” means woke neo-Marxist ideology with quotas for “equity-deserving” groups.
The Online News Act (Bill C-18) became law in 2023 and gave the CRTC legal authority to regulate Google as well as Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, and force these companies to pay news outlets for links. Former CRTC commissioner Peter Menzies wryly observed that demanding that internet platforms pay for content is like charging paperboys for the privilege of distributing the newspaper.
In response to the Online News Act, Google begrudgingly agreed to pay the CRTC $100 million per year, with the government picking the lucky recipients based on the “Canadian-ness” and “true journalism” of content.
Instead of complying with the law by coughing up a hefty fee, like Google did, Meta chose to ban the sharing of news links on Facebook and Instagram, which vastly reduced the number of viewers and listeners to Canadian news outlets.
The CRTC thus inflicted substantial readership and revenue losses on the Canadian news industry, with small independent publishers hit especially hard. In 2023, 24% of Canadians were getting their news from social media, and 85% of Canadians aged 15-34 got their news from social media. The Online News Act prevented Canadians from sharing links to news articles, ending a golden era of access to information that had provided Canadians with news everywhere, all the time. The consequences of the Online News Act have been catastrophic for Canadian news outlets who now have far fewer viewers. Fewer Canadians receiving and viewing Canadian news is the sad reality that embarrasses the CRTC because it has seriously undermined, rather than promoted, “Canadian” content.
A government that controls the internet and disrespects net neutrality will invariably push the ideology favoured by the politicians and bureaucrats of the day. On a daily basis, the CRTC undermines “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication” as protected by the Charter.
One of the most insidious and effective ways to restrict freedom is to dress up censorship as benign, ordinary and routine administration. However, promoting some content while limiting access to other content is still censorial, even when conducted through licensing schemes and discoverability mandates. The best way to protect freedom is not by depending on the goodwill of the government, but by placing firm limits on state power.
Freedom of expression aside, there are also economic reasons to abolish the CRTC. The CRTC protects existing broadcasters (e.g., Bell, Rogers, Telus) over consumers, as its policies reduce competition, investment, and innovation in the market, thereby limiting consumer choice and increasing costs. The CRTC is also inefficient, secretive, and slow, with fewer public hearings, more private lobbyist meetings, and declining productivity despite almost doubling staff by 2025–26 since its early days. Still, this unwieldy, lumbering “cultural guardian” continues to grow. Staffing at the CRTC was 56% larger in 2025 compared to the 2005-2024 average – making it one of the fastest growing federal agencies in Canada.
It’s time to abolish the CRTC.
John Carpay, B.A., LL.B., is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca).
