Arts & Culture Commitments

• Reintroduce legislation to reform the Broadcasting Act to ensure foreign web giants contribute to the creation and promotion of Canadian stories and music.
• Protect Canadian artists, creators, and copyright holders by making changes to the Copyright Act, including amending the Act to allow resale rights for artists.
• Modernize the institutions (Telefilm, National Film Board, Canada Media Fund) and funding tools that support Canada’s audio-visual sector, including video games, in order to make funding platform-agnostic and open to more traditionally underrepresented storytellers, while favouring Canadian productions over foreign ones and ensuring that Canadians are better equipped to own and benefit from the content that they produce.
• Support Canadian feature films by permanently increasing funding to Telefilm Canada by $50 million.
• Support Canadian television productions by doubling the government contribution, over three years, to the Canada Media Fund.
• Provide the Indigenous Screen Office with $13 million per year, permanently, so more Indigenous stories can be told and seen.
• Update CBC/Radio-Canada’s mandate to ensure that it is meeting the needs and expectation of today’s Canadian audiences, with a unique programming that distinguishes it from private broadcasters.
• Provide $400 million over 4 years to CBC/Radio-Canada so that it is less reliant on private advertising with a goal of eliminating advertising during news and other public affairs shows.
• Develop a new $50 million Changing Narratives Fund to empower diverse communities, including BIPOC journalists and creatives, with the tools to tell their own stories and promote diverse voices in arts and culture and across media.
• Move forward on supporting productions led by people from equity-deserving groups working in the Canadian audiovisual industry.
• Ensure that Indigenous voices and cultures are present on our screens and radios.
• Extend the Compensation Fund for Canadian audiovisual productions from March 31, 2022 to December 31, 2022 to provide predictability to the sector by covering the upcoming production season. This fund is a temporary measure administered by Telefilm Canada, which fills the void left by the lack of insurance coverage for filming interruptions and production shutdowns due to COVID-19.
• Implement a COVID-19 transitional support program to provide emergency relief to out-of-work artists, craftsmen, creators, and authors who are primarily self-employed or independent contractors.
• Introduce a new EI benefit for self-employed Canadians, delivered through the tax system, that would provide unemployment assistance comparable to EI and lasting for as much as 26 weeks. This could provide support of nearly $15,500 when it is needed most. Self-employed Canadians seeking to access this benefit would only be responsible to contribute the portion they would normally pay if they were a salaried employee.
• Ensure the realities of artists and cultural workers are considered in upcoming reforms to the Employment Insurance (EI) system.
• Require digital platforms that generate revenues from the publication of news content to share a portion of their revenues with Canadian news outlets.
• Forge an international coalition to work on a new UNESCO Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Content Online.

Read the Liberal Party's full election platform.

• Repeal and replace Bill C-10 with legislation that updates the Broadcasting Act to deal with the realities of an increasingly online market and the need to provide businesses with certainty and consumers with choice.
• Require large digital streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video to reinvest a significant portion of their Canadian gross revenue into producing original Canadian programming, of which a mandated proportion must be French language programming.
  • If they fail to do so on their own in a given year, they will be required to pay the difference into the Canadian Media Fund.
  • The proportion chosen will vary based on the nature of the streaming service and would be determined based on the best practices of other jurisdictions, such as those in Europe and Australia, as well as the nature of the Canadian market.
  • Content reinvestment requirements will also recognize and incentivize partnerships with Canadian independent media producers.
• Streamline and reduce the regulatory burden placed on conventional Canadian broadcasters and cable companies, including CRTC license fees and Canadian Media Fund contribution requirements, with the loss in revenue to be compensated by a portion of the revenue from the new digital services tax.
• Give Radio-Canada a separate and distinct legal and administrative structure, including ending user fees for its online streaming services and branding services like Tandem.
• Review the mandate of CBC English Television, CBC News Network, and CBC English online news to assess the viability of refocusing the service on a public interest model like PBS in the USA.
• Introduce a digital media royalty framework which incorporates the best practices of jurisdictions like Australia and France.
• Make foreign tech companies pay their fair share of taxes including sales tax and a digital services tax representing 3% of their gross revenue in Canada if they don’t pay corporate income tax here.
• Require gig economy companies to make contributions equivalent to the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and Employment Insurance (EI) premiums into a new, portable Employee Savings Account every time they pay their workers. The money will grow tax-free and can be used to pay CPP premiums or accumulate savings that will be withdrawn by the worker when they need it.

Read the CPC's full election platform.

• Improve and re-table Bill C-10, An Act to amend the Broadcasting Act, for the future of the creation of French language, especially the essential amendments of the Bloc who ensured the protection of Canadian content and Quebecers, “discoverability” and the enhancement of Quebec arts and the production of French-language content.
• Tax the income of digital giants to a rate of 3 per cent, as France is already doing.
• Impose on the web multinationals negotiations with Quebec content creators and Canadians to establish equitable income sharing.
• Pledge to stand behind Quebec culture in order to ensure the sustainability and predictability of the programs and cultural and tourism subsidies, while the sector, its creators, its distributors and its small major events, will still suffer the consequences pandemic over the next few years.
• Demand the amounts collected in taxes from digital giants be redirected to a fund dedicated to the arts and to Quebec culture as well as to our media.
• Maintain funding for culture by increasing Telefilm Canada's budget to develop high-quality online scripted series.
• Review of funding to the Canada Media Fund; adjust the allocation of funds to 60% for Canadian productions and 40% for Quebec productions (currently funds are allocated at a ratio of 70% to 30%).
• Ongoing support for artists' incomes by maintaining the Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) for arts and cultural workers, while suspending it for sectors no longer needing it.
• Establish a special status for artists, combined with measures offering them greater financial security, for example income averaging.
• Review exceptions and exemption laws to ensure online service providers are responsible for their role in the distribution of content while increasing efforts to fight piracy and enforce copyright to ensure the raw material is adequately remunerated for its content.
• Increased support for creators and creation to adapt to new digital markets.

Read the Bloc Québécois's full election platform.

• Make sure that Netflix, Facebook, Google and other digital media companies play by the same rules as Canadian broadcasters. It means that these companies need to pay corporate taxes now, support Canadian content in both official languages, and take responsibility for what appears on their platforms.
• Modernize the Broadcasting Act fairly in order to create a level playing field between Canadian broadcasters and foreign streaming services, to rebalance negotiating power for Canadian independent producers and the Canadian cultural sector, and to ensure Canadian programming is owned by Canadians. In addition, we will prioritize partnerships with Canadian independent producers, increase funding for Telefilm and enhance financial support for the Canada Media Fund.
• Increase funding for CBC and Radio-Canada.
• Make sure that arts and cultural institutions receive stable, long-term funding to grow and promote Canada’s diverse cultures and histories.
• Recognizing the special challenges faced by people who make a living in the arts and culture industry, we’ll make life more affordable by putting in place income tax averaging for artists and cultural workers.

Read the NDP's full election platform.

• Increase funding to $1 billion over 3 years to all of Canada’s arts and culture organizations including the Canada Council for the Arts, Telefilm Canada, orchestras, theatres, galleries and publishers.
• Increase support for community arts programs and facilities across Canada by establishing stable base funding at a set percentage of the federal budget.
• Protect Canada’s cultural identity during trade negotiations and ensure arts and cultural representation on international trade missions.
• Enact Copyright reform as envisaged by the current Heritage Committee report.
• Reform the Canada Revenue Act to allow arts and culture workers to benefit from a tax averaging plan that will take into account the fact that lean years often precede and follow a good year when a show is produced, a book is published, or a grant or a prize is won.
• Ensure the viability of our cultural infrastructure in consultation with Arts Service Organizations, professional associations, trade associations and unions across the creative sector.
• Increase funding to all federal agencies including the Canada Council for the Arts, the National Film Board and Telefilm Canada to initiate programs to support creative programming that addresses the climate crisis.
• Proceed with regulating the powerful platforms and streaming services through the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) as envisioned in Bill C-10.
• Ensure that the CRTC maintains and updates their Canadian Content (CanCon) regulations and definitions.
• Provide stable base funding for the CBC so it can continue to provide quality Canadian content television and radio programming in both official languages, as well as programming both in and to encourage the learning of Indigenous languages.
• Call for an Independent Commission to undertake a comprehensive study of the concentration of media ownership in Canada in comparison to other western countries and recommend how to diversify media ownership and strengthen the depth and breadth of news reporting, especially local news, in Canada.

Read the Green Party's full election platform.