When the government announced plans last month to kill the CRTC’s Online Streaming Act ruling, it left a critical question unanswered: was the target only the Commission’s decision to increase streamer contributions to 15 percent, or did the reversal extend to the original base contribution decision requiring foreign streamers to contribute five percent of their Canadian revenues? A new court filing confirms it is both. In a letter to the Federal Court of Appeal dated July 17, 2026, first reported by the Wire Report, Department of Justice Senior General Counsel Michael Morris advised the court that “the Government’s intention is to eliminate the base contribution requirement on streaming services and to provide government funding to replace those contributions.” The entire contribution framework the CRTC has built since 2024 is therefore dead, with taxpayers covering the costs while the government develops a replacement.

The disclosure came in response to a direction from Justice David Stratas, who is overseeing the legal challenges to the base contribution launched by Amazon, Apple, Spotify, and the Motion Picture Association-Canada. On June 29th, the court advised that it “has seen press reports, including another one today, about the Online Streaming Act, S.C. 2023, c. 8 and the possibility that it and the measures made by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission under it might be amended or revoked.” The court demanded a status report on the government’s plans, noting that if the basis of the proceedings “disappears or fundamentally alters,” it would call for submissions on whether the cases are moot. Given the government’s stated intention, mootness now seems like the likely destination for litigation that has been underway since 2024, including a stay of the base contribution payments that has been in place since December of that year.

The letter goes further than the government had been willing to say publicly. The June 3rd announcement promised a policy direction requiring the CRTC to “review and revise” its decision alongside $600 million in annual support for the audio and audiovisual sector. A Miller spokesperson later told the Toronto Star that the government would direct the CRTC to eliminate base contribution requirements “directed outside the audio-visual sector to the broader cultural ecosystem,” language that suggested some of the base contribution might survive. This court submission confirms that the entire contribution framework is gone. However, eliminating the current framework does not mean the government envisions no contributions at all. Miller has told both the Globe and Mail and the Star that the contribution level “won’t be zero,” and his office responded to the Wire Report story by insisting that the government “will not repeal the Online Streaming Act” and would instead craft a direction providing “greater flexibility for those contributing to the broadcasting system.” The plan, it would appear, is to scrap the existing contribution framework crafted by the CRTC and start over with new approaches to calculating contributions and rates more in line with global standards, which as I noted last month, typically run in the 4 percent range rather than the CRTC’s 15 percent.

Getting there is going to take some time. The government expects its direction to be published for consultation in the Canada Gazette Part 1 “in the coming weeks.” That starts a process that is neither fast nor optional: the minister must consult the Commission, table the proposed direction in both the House and Senate, and allow a comment period of at least 30 days before finalizing the order. When the government issued its last policy direction on this same law, the draft appeared in June 2023 and the final version did not take effect until late November. There are also real questions about whether a policy direction, an instrument designed for broad policy guidance to an independent regulator, can be used to effectively vacate a specific CRTC contribution decision. Once the direction is in place, the CRTC, which just months ago decided to maintain the base contribution, will be required to unwind it and launch renewed proceedings on what comes next. Add in the prospect of new legal challenges and the reality is that the contribution framework promised when Bill C-11 was enacted in 2023 remains years away.

The problems with the current model were never limited to the contribution rate, since the system also raises difficult questions about which payments and investments count toward a mandated contribution, who owns the rights to the resulting productions, whether foreign streamers can access the funds they pay into, and how discoverability requirements will be implemented. Patching the old broadcast contribution system onto the Internet was never a good idea, and starting over creates an opportunity for a much-needed full reset and the chance to provide more sensible answers to those questions.