Three separate fights, three separate parts of the CRTC’s mandate, all opened the same way in the same few months: a rule gets written, and the regulated party immediately works around it, out-litigates it, or challenges the math. Where they diverge is what the CRTC does next. Twice, it gave ground. Once, when the regulated parties pushed harder than usual, it didn’t.
That is not a jurisdiction problem. The CRTC has jurisdiction over all three of these. It is an enforcement problem and as of this week, it’s an open one. Not a settled one.
Case one: the streaming tax.
On July 17, a Department of Justice lawyer told the Federal Court of Appeal that the government intends “to eliminate the base contribution requirement on streaming services and to provide government funding to replace those contributions.” That sentence kills both the CRTC’s new 15% Canadian programming expenditure requirement, and the original 2024 rule requiring Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and Spotify to put five per cent of Canadian revenue into Canadian production funds. Two years of proceedings, a Federal Court appeal, a payment stay in place since December 2024 – all of it was heading toward a courtroom that will now most likely never rule, because the government ended the case before anyone had to decide it.
The five per cent contribution was projected to generate roughly $200 million a year. It collected zero. The replacement is $600 million a year in taxpayer funding – three times the ask, while the platforms keep every dollar they were never made to pay.
Case two: wholesale internet.
In May, the CRTC finalized Telecom Order 2026-77 – the rates independent ISPs pay Bell, Telus, and SaskTel to access their fibre networks. The entire point of a wholesale rate is to let a smaller competitor undercut the incumbent. Instead, a coalition led by TekSavvy found the CRTC’s own cost factor was wrong: the wholesale rate came in higher than the incumbents’ own retail price. An independent provider using the CRTC’s rate would have to sell fibre internet at a loss or price above Bell and Telus – competition made mathematically impossible by the regulator built to enforce it.
TekSavvy filed in July asking the CRTC to fix its own arithmetic and cut the markup from 30 per cent to 15. That request is sitting in a docket. The rate the CRTC set to create competition is, for now, the rate preventing it.
Case three: junk fees.
On June 12, the CRTC banned activation and modification fees – the charges that penalize a customer for switching carriers. Within weeks, Bell and Rogers had a new $40 “device handling fee,” and Telus had turned its SIM fee into $15 plus $10 shipping, all reclassified as optional purchases, rather than switching penalties. The CRTC opened a show-cause proceeding in response, threatening fines up to $10 million against the companies and $25,000 against individual managers.
The deadline for Bell, Rogers, and Telus to respond was July 30. On July 29 – one day before it hit, and the same week as the streaming letter – the CRTC suspended it.
Telus asked the CRTC to split the proceeding in two and remove specific investigators, claiming early compliance letters showed bias; Bell and Rogers backed the request. On August 14, the CRTC rejected all of it in a single ruling: staff letters don’t prejudge anything, only Commission members make findings, and “the case to be met has been clearly articulated.” Intervention submissions are due August 31. Final replies follow in September. A $10 million fine is still on the table.
This is the one case, so far, where the regulated parties pushed and the CRTC didn’t move.
The pattern.
Three domains. Three rules written this year with real teeth on paper: a mandatory revenue contribution, a wholesale access price, a fee ban with fines attached. In every case, the regulated party’s first move was the same – work around the rule, in market, within weeks. What happened next is where the three split. The streaming contribution got litigated into a two-year stay and then mooted entirely by the government’s own hand. The wholesale rate correction has been sitting on a docket since July with no ruling. The junk fee proceeding is the one that didn’t stall – it has a hearing schedule, a rejected delay tactic, and a fine still attached. Not one of the three has produced an actual enforced consequence yet – a dollar collected, a rate corrected, a fine paid. But only two of them have been quietly allowed to drift.
This is not an argument that the CRTC has no jurisdiction. It has jurisdiction over all of it – broadcasting, telecom, streaming. The argument is narrower and harder to dismiss: the CRTC’s enforcement capacity does not reliably scale to the size of who it is regulating. A $10 million fine is a rounding error to Bell, if it’s ever levied. A foreign streamer out-litigated a Canadian regulator for two years and got the case mooted before a court ever ruled. A wholesale rate built wrong has cost independents months while the correction sits untouched. None of that requires the CRTC to be incompetent or captured. It requires only that the parties on the other side of the table are usually larger, better resourced, and less patient than the institution regulating them. Usually – not always. September is where that qualifier gets tested.
That is a different and more useful claim than “abolish the CRTC.” The Do Not Call list works. Accessibility rules mostly get followed. Those functions involve compliance costs small enough, and penalties credible enough, that nobody bothers fighting them. The moment the stakes are large – a mandatory contribution, a wholesale price that actually threatens incumbent margin, a fee ban that touches recurring revenue – the regulated party’s first move is always the same workaround. Whether the CRTC’s second move is to hold the line or to give ground has, until this month, gone one way every time.
What to watch.
The policy direction on streaming contributions, whenever it actually lands. TekSavvy’s request to fix the wholesale fibre cost factor, still untouched on the docket. And the junk fee proceeding – the one thread now moving toward an actual penalty decision, with interventions due August 31 and final replies in September. Whichever of the three produces a real, collected consequence first – a fine paid, a rate cut, a contribution collected – is the test case for whether this institution can compel compliance from anyone with more resources than it has, or only from parties too small to bother fighting back.
Right now, the score is still zero for three. But for the first time this year, one of the three didn’t fold when pushed. September says whether that was a decision or a delay.
