From Static to Streaming: Canada’s 100-Year Fight for Cultural Sovereignty

By Christine Cooling

When Canadians tuned into their first radio broadcasts in the 1920s, much of what they listened to wasn’t Canadian. American stations with stronger signals and flashier programming initially dominated the airwaves. The radio audience developed over time as the medium entered the domestic space, but Canadian listeners were part of a transnational media environment from the very start.

Politicians and cultural advocates quickly worried that Canada’s nascent national identity would be drowned out by its louder neighbour. One solution was bold: create a publicly funded, nationally regulated broadcasting system to tell Canadian stories and protect Canadian culture.

A century later, the debate isn’t dead. It’s just moved online. Canada’s 2023 Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11) brought platforms such as Netflix under the same regulatory apparatus once built for radio. The controversy it sparked on social media shows how deeply broadcasting policy remains tethered to cultural identity—and how difficult it is to future-proof a system designed for a radically different era.

A Nation on the Airwaves

Canada’s broadcasting policy formally began with the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1905, but radio legislation brought it to life. In 1922, commercial radio stations were first licensed. Many Canadians—especially those living near the border—often tuned in to American stations, drawn by stronger signals, slicker production, and a wider range of programming. In 1929, the federal government launched the Royal Commission on Broadcasting (better known as the Aird Commission) to address fears that Canadian culture was under threat by American commercial broadcasters.

The Aird Commission recommended a publicly owned, national broadcasting system. Graham Spry of the Canadian Radio League famously argued that the choice was “between the State and the United States.”

Canada never fully nationalized its broadcasting system, but thanks to the Aird Report and the efforts of public figures like Spry, the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission was launched in 1932, and just a few years later, in 1936, it became the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

CBC logo (1940–1958). Image by Hortence Binette, via Wikimedia Commons

This early move imagined broadcasting as a tool for nation-building: programming in both English and French, a public service ethos, and federal control over a technology that could bind space and unite a vast, sparsely populated country.

Television, Diversity, and Tension

Television soon came along to transform the broadcasting system in the 1950s. New Royal Commissions debated the role of public broadcasting versus commercial networks, and by 1958 regulatory authority shifted from the CBC to the new Board of Broadcast Governors (BBG). The BBG was later replaced by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the regulatory body Canadians know today. Meanwhile, the CBC—a beloved cultural institution—continues to inform, entertain, and educate as our national broadcaster.

As the system expanded, so did tensions. Northern and Indigenous communities resisted southern-centric programming, while Québec demanded greater provincial sovereignty. Broadcasting policy promised diversity but systemically sidelined marginalized voices. Indigenous broadcasting rights weren’t formally recognized until the 1991 Broadcasting Act, which also emphasized Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework.

By the mid-to-late 20th century, Canadian content (CanCon) regulations were central to the broadcasting system: radio and TV stations had to air a certain percentage of Canadian programming to support domestic creators. Yet critics argued that broadcasting policy and regulation reflected a narrow, cultural nationalist vision of Canada, privileging dominant political and cultural voices even as it claimed to promote diverse representation.

Globalization and the Digital Shift

Cable television, neoliberal reforms, and trade agreements in the 1980s and 1990s reshaped Canadian broadcasting. The 1991 Act was the last major overhaul of the system before the Internet disrupted everything.

Streaming platforms like Netflix, operating within and beyond Canadian borders, challenged nearly a century of traditional regulation. They offer content abundance, personalized recommendations, but make no material contribution to Canadian culture. Scholars and policymakers warned that this new platform era had fractured the connection between national identity and media regulation.

Still, Canadian policymakers were reluctant to act. The Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review panel, appointed in 2018, finally recommended bringing streaming services under the Broadcasting Act—a call that ultimately ended in Bill C-11.

Bill C-11: Regulation in a Borderless Era

Passed in April 2023, Bill C-11 redefines “broadcasting” to include streaming services. It empowers the CRTC to require platforms to contribute financially to Canadian cultural production, echoing the rationale behind CanCon rules for radio and TV. Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez argued: “Canada’s strong culture is no accident.”

But C-11 (and its previous iteration, C-10) faced fierce backlash online. Critics accused it of threatening freedom of expression, particularly for independent creators and consumers. Others saw it as outdated regulation—an attempt to retrofit a 20th-century policy model onto a global, algorithmic-driven system.

Digital discourse reflected this divide. Social media users questioned whether Canadian identity could or should be legislated in a borderless digital world, while traditional news outlets often defended the principle of cultural sovereignty. The debate revealed a recurring theme: Canadians remain deeply invested in cultural policy but persistently divided on how it should be enacted.

What Broadcasting Policy Reveals About Canada

Canadian broadcasting policy has always been more than technical regulation. It’s a mirror of the country’s anxieties and aspirations over:

Nationalism vs. Globalization: From fears of American cultural imperialism in the 1920s and ‘30s to concerns about Netflix’s dominance today, cultural sovereignty has been a central narrative.

Public vs. Private Interests: The system has always claimed to balance public service ideals with commercial realities.

Representation and Inclusion: Broadcasting policy has gradually acknowledged Indigenous, Francophone, and multicultural perspectives, though critics argue much remains unresolved, on screen and behind screen.

Technology and Lag: Regulation consistently lags behind technological innovation, leading to periods of cultural upheaval and reactive, as opposed to proactive, policymaking.

A Century-Long Project

When Spry warned Parliament in 1932 that Canada’s choice was “between the State and the United States,” he couldn’t have imagined Netflix algorithms and platform economies. Yet his underlying question—how a small country maintains cultural sovereignty in a vast media ecosystem—still drives the cultural objectives of Canadian broadcasting policy.

Bill C-11 is the latest chapter in a century-long story: one where communication technologies repeatedly force Canadians to renegotiate what “national culture” means and how much it should be protected by the nation-state. Whether legislation can keep up with the pace of digital change remains uncertain, but the conversation itself is a defining feature of what seems to be an increasingly elusive Canadian identity.

Christine Cooling is a PhD Student in Communication and Culture at York University.

---

This post is part of an activehistory.ca series on media and history in Canada. Media have been both remarkably important and intensely theorized but also historically understudied. We hope this series highlights the diversity of ways the study of media history informs and contributes to our knowledge of the past and our understanding of the role of media in the present. The editors encourage other submissions on topics related to media history, conceived of broadly. If you are interested in contributing or even just finding out more about this series, please feel free to write to Andrew Nurse at anurse@mta.ca, Hannah Cooley at hannah.cooley@mail.utoronto.ca, or Christine Cooling at ccools@yorku.ca.