The data from Canada's CanCon regulations should give everyone pause — decades of mandatory local content requirements and Canadian audiences still overwhelmingly prefer American programming, so what exactly are we achieving besides inflated production budgets?
Honestly it breaks my heart a little because I love the idea of supporting homegrown storytelling, but forcing platforms to fund content just breeds entitlement and laziness in the industry instead of the hunger that actually produces great work.
This is basically a cultural protectionism scheme dressed up as noble policy — if your local film industry can't survive without Netflix being legally obligated to fund it, maybe the market is telling you something important.
I grew up watching mandated 'local content' quotas on TV and it was mostly garbage that nobody asked for, just box-ticking exercises so executives could say they complied. Regulation doesn't make art better, it just makes more of it.
If local content were actually good, people would watch it without anyone being forced to pay for it — mandating funding just means we're subsidizing stuff audiences have already voted against with their eyeballs.
The 'it props up mediocrity' argument assumes the market naturally rewards quality, but the market rewards familiarity and scale — local content mandates correct for that structural bias, not against merit.
Netflix will happily extract subscription money from every household in a country while producing zero content that reflects those people's lives, and we're supposed to just accept that as normal?
I grew up watching Polish films on public TV and they shaped how I understood my own culture — streaming platforms are just the new public square, and they should carry the same responsibility.
Canada's CanCon rules literally gave us Schitt's Creek, so maybe stop pretending funding requirements only produce garbage because the evidence says otherwise.
Without mandated local funding, every platform just races to the bottom with the same globalized slop — our stories, our accents, our neighborhoods disappear from screens entirely and nobody even notices until it's too late.