On 27 April 2023 – 2 years, 4 months and just over 2 weeks ago – the Online Streaming Act or Bill C-11 received Royal Assent. C-11 made a series of major changes to Canada’s 1991 Broadcasting Act. The most hotly debated of these changes was C-11’s explicit recognition that online streaming services that carry “broadcast programming” are part of Canada’s broadcasting system and are therefore within the jurisdiction of the CRTC.
But there were other changes.
For instance, while the CRTC has made funding to pay for public-interest participation in telecom proceedings available since 1979, the 2023 Broadcasting Act has now also given the CRTC explicit authority to provide public-interest participants in its broadcasting proceedings with financial support. The CRTC’s approach until now has been to provide sporadic – 4 times in 13 years – funding to the Broadcasting Participation Fund/Fonds de participation à la radiodiffusion (BPF/FPR), a Fund established in 2011 and that issues payments for the applications it approves within four months.
In May 2025 the CRTC invited comments on how to strengthen support for public participation in its broadcasting and telecom proceedings.
Is such funding needed? Can’t Canadians intervene for free anyway? Yes, Canadians can always let the CRTC know what they think. But ever-more concentrated ownership in broadcasting means that very few Canadians can match large companies that hire lawyers, accountants, researchers and other experts to make their submissions. Providing financial support to participants that use the same approach but in the public interest helps to level the regulatory playing field just a bit.
But doesn’t the CRTC serve the public interest anyway? Unfortunately, neither the Broadcasting Act or the Telecommunications Act actually tells the Commission to put the public interest first. Courts have held that these statutes require it to make decisions that implement Parliament’s legislation, meaning that it must balance a range of interests or use “a polycentric adjudication process”: the public interest is just one of many opposing interests.
The change to the Broadcasting Act means the CRTC may be able to keep the BPF going after ten consecutive years of teetering on the brink of closure. At the beginning of September the BPF announced it will not accept any new cost applications after October 26 this year. And even if the BPF stays open (and the CRTC lets participants in its broadcasting processes apply for costs through its adversarial telecom process), the CRTC has not changed the rates that public-interest participants may charge for their work since 2007 – when a litre of gas cost Canadians an average of $1.02.
FRPC’s submission in the 2025-94 proceeding on supporting public-interest participation asks the Commission to stabilize the BPF’s funding, to raise the rates that the CRTC has not changed since 2007 for public-interest participation and to provide a faster, more transparent, one-stop applications process that focuses on whether those filing cost applications have made responsible and professional submissions in the CRTC’s processes which focus on the public interest.