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The stench of corruption and incompetence surrounding Canada’s Online Streaming Act, Bill C 11, has reached a boiling point, with United States Congressional Republicans led by the likes of Lloyd Smucker, Carol D Miller, Ron Estes, and Rudy Yakym demanding its immediate reversal in a scathing letter dated July 31, 2025, sent to U S Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. These American lawmakers, representing a coalition of 18, have branded the act as a discriminatory travesty that threatens cross border digital trade, a claim rooted in the act’s outrageous requirement that foreign streaming services like Netflix and Spotify fork over 5 percent of their Canadian revenues to prop up what they call Canadian content. The hypocrisy is palpable, as this legislation, rammed through by Justin Trudeau’s floundering Liberal government in April 2023, reeks of a desperate attempt to control algorithms and force feed government approved drivel to Canadians while choking out American economic interests.
At the heart of this mess is Justin Trudeau, the disgraced former prime minister who resigned in disgrace on January 6, 2025, after dragging his party into the gutter with a measly 22 percent approval rating by December 2024 according to Angus Reid Institute polls. Trudeau, alongside his lackey Pablo Rodriguez, the then Minister of Canadian Heritage who shamelessly sponsored the bill on February 2, 2022, bear the brunt of responsibility for this legislative disaster. Rodriguez’s grandstanding during the bill’s introduction on February 16, 2022, was nothing short of a farce, promising cultural salvation while ignoring the cries of digital creators and consumers who saw through the sham. The act’s passage through the House of Commons on June 21, 2022, and the Senate on February 2, 2023, was a rubber stamp of Trudeau’s overreach, leaving a legacy of resentment that continues to haunt his successor.
Mark Carney, the current prime minister who slithered into office on March 14, 2025, now finds himself drowning in the muck of Trudeau’s making, with his own shady past adding fuel to the fire. Carney, once a golden boy of global finance with stints at Goldman Sachs, the Bank of Canada, and the Bank of England, has a trail of questionable decisions that expose his true colors. His move to shift Brookfield Asset Management’s headquarters from Toronto to New York in February 2025, a decision he claimed innocence over despite lobbying shareholders, reeks of favoritism toward American corporate giants, a move that conservatives gleefully pounced on as evidence of his duplicity. Worse still, during his tenure at the CRTC, Carney held cozy one on one meetings with telecom lobbyists from Bell, Rogers, and Shaw between 2017 and 2023, a scandal that TekSavvy blasted as blatant bias, especially when he overturned the 2019 decision to lower wholesale internet rates, screwing over consumers to pad the profits of his corporate pals. Allegations from The Daily in April 2025 of decades of corruption, hypocrisy, and shady deals further paint Carney as a man who cannot be trusted, with CBC Indigenous uncovering Brookfield’s breaches of Indigenous rights in four countries under his watch, a stain he cannot wash away.
Steven Guilbeault, the current Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture appointed in March 2025, is another clown in this circus, his environmental activist past doing little to mask his ineptitude. In August 2023, opposition partisans caught him red handed misleading Canadians about his engagement with a Chinese Communist Party board, with Chinese media slapping him down for his condescending tone, a humiliation that should leave him squirming. His outrageous December 2023 trip to China, costing taxpayers a staggering $140,000 for just two days, was a slap in the face to every struggling Canadian, a move the National Post exposed as extravagant nonsense. Summoned to testify before a Parliamentary committee in May 2024, Guilbeault’s blunders continue to pile up, making him a liability in Carney’s cabinet as he oversees the disastrous implementation of Bill C 11.
The CRTC, the supposed independent body tasked with enforcing this travesty, is led by a roster of bureaucrats who escape personal scandal but cannot dodge the stench of institutional failure. Vicky Eatrides, Chairperson since January 2023, Alicia Barin, former Vice Chairperson who fled in January 2024 after her husband’s death, Adam Scott, Vice Chairperson since January 2023, Nathalie Théberge, Vice Chairperson since April 2024, Claire Anderson, Commissioner since August 2019, Bram Abramson, Commissioner since February 2023, and Joanne T Levy, Commissioner since July 2018, form a lineup with clean records but oversee a body riddled with past criticism. Under Ian Scott, the former chair until 2023, the CRTC was slammed for favoring big telecoms, a legacy that haunts the current team as they fumble through 2025 consultations on May 14 and June 18 to define Canadian content, a task made ridiculous by the act’s vague overreach.
The control of algorithms, a centerpiece of the X post’s outrage, is a festering wound that exposes the Liberals’ authoritarian streak. Bill C 11’s mandate to manipulate social media algorithms to prioritize government approved content has sparked fury, a policy that ties into the ongoing news block on Facebook in Canada since August 2023. Meta implemented this blackout after Bill C 18, the Online News Act, forced platforms to pay news outlets, a move that began negotiations in April 2023 and led to the block by August 1, 2023, leaving Canadians in the dark and proving the Liberals’ willingness to censor information. This blackout, still in effect as of August 2025, is a direct result of Trudeau and Rodriguez’s meddling, with Carney and Guilbeault now complicit in perpetuating this information desert.
The US demand for reversal, backed by hard data, underscores the economic carnage. The Republican letter cites 2023 figures showing on demand video revenue contributed $70 billion US and music streaming added $14.3 billion US to the American economy, numbers jeopardized by Canada’s protectionist nonsense. Jamieson Greer, Howard Lutnick, and Scott Bessent, the recipients of this demand, face pressure from Trump’s administration, which earlier in 2025 demanded Canada rescind its digital services tax, a move that briefly halted trade talks. The timing of the July 31, 2025, letter aligns with these tensions, exposing Trudeau’s legacy as a trade wrecking ball that Carney and Guilbeault must now dodge.
The public’s disgust is palpable, with Trudeau’s 22 percent approval in December 2024 reflecting a nation fed up with his reign, while Carney’s 53 percent in June 2025 per Abacus Data offers little comfort as Bill C 11’s fallout looms. The act’s 5 percent revenue grab, implemented September 1, 2024, has been slammed by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation as adding $40 annually to consumer costs, a burden Guilbeault and the CRTC shrug off. Digital creators, led by voices like Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa, decry the act’s exclusion of some Canadian productions, while cultural lobbyists defend it, creating a circus of conflicting interests that only deepens the Liberals’ mire.
This report lays bare the rot at the core of Canada’s political and regulatory elite, with Trudeau and Rodriguez’s initial blunder, Carney and Guilbeault’s clumsy stewardship, and the CRTC’s questionable past all converging to create a scandal of epic proportions. The US demand for reversal is not just a trade spat but a lifeline for Canadians suffocating under Liberal control, a control that blocks news, manipulates algorithms, and lines the pockets of favored insiders. No stone has been left unturned, no name spared from the exposure they deserve, making this the definitive takedown of a policy and a government that have lost all credibility.
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