In the final weeks of the USMCA negotiations, Canada signalled that a full cultural exception was a non-negotiable issue with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wading in to emphasize the importance of the issue. While the resulting deal has garnered applause from many culture lobby groups (music, magazines, publishers, ACTRA), the reality is that the government did not obtain a full cultural exception. In fact, after criticizing the Conservatives for accepting exceptions to the cultural exception in the TPP (and making it a key issue in the CPTPP once the U.S. exited the agreement), the Liberal government similarly included two exceptions and agreed to an extension in the term of copyright that will have a far more damaging impact on access to Canadian culture than any proposed USMCA provision.
Archive for October 11th, 2018

Law Bytes
Episode 275: David Loukidelis on Why Stripping Privacy Enforcement from Canada’s Privacy Commissioner in Bill C-36 is Unnecessarily Risky Policy
byMichael Geist

June 22, 2026
Michael Geist
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Michael Geist on Substack
Recent Posts
Why Being Locked Out of Frontier AI is The Sovereignty Threat Canada Missed
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The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 275: David Loukidelis on Why Stripping Privacy Enforcement from Canada’s Privacy Commissioner in Bill C-36 is Unnecessarily Risky Policy
The Data on Australia’s Social Media Ban: The Better the Privacy Protection, The Less Effective the Ban
Shaky Ground Gets Shakier: What the U.S. Supreme Court’s Location Data Decision Means for Bill C-22

