The Referee
A regulator built for a world of scarcity, now governing a world of abundance — finding its teeth in telecom, and at risk of losing them in broadcasting.
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The Age of Consequences · The Requisite Cabinet · Part Two of Three
June 16, 2026
“The best way for a CRTC chair to survive is to ensure that all stakeholders are equally unhappy.”
— the running joke in Ottawa, as recounted by Chair Vicky Eatrides, December 2025
The Body in the Middle of the Story
In the companion to this dispatch, we followed the money under your phone bill and found a single actor standing in the centre of the whole telecom story: the regulator that banned the switching fees, sent the warning letters, set this week’s deadline, and — years earlier — forced a fourth carrier into being and watched prices fall a third. In telecom, in 2026, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission is suddenly biting. It picked a fight with the largest carriers in the country and is winning consumer price cuts the market could not deliver on its own.
That is half the picture, and it is the flattering half. Turn the body around and you find the same regulator in its older job — broadcasting — moving slowly, fighting in court, a step behind the streaming services that have overrun it. One referee, two arenas, opposite trajectories. To understand why, you have to understand what the CRTC was built to do, and the world it was built for. Because the world changed, and the tool did not change with it.
What the CRTC Is
The CRTC is an independent, quasi-judicial tribunal that regulates Canada’s broadcasting system and its telecommunications carriers in the public interest. The phrase quasi-judicial is the load-bearing one. It is not a government department taking orders from a minister day to day. It holds public hearings, takes evidence on a public record, and issues binding rulings the way a court does. It administers the Broadcasting Act and the Telecommunications Act, and more recently the Online News Act and the anti-spam law.
Two domains live under one roof: the pipes — telecom, where the fee fight and the wholesale rules live — and the content — broadcasting, where Canadian content rules and the new fight over streaming live. The same commissioners sit on both. That single fact is the source of the split trajectory: the body governs a competitive market it can prod toward lower prices, and a cultural system it is struggling to hold together against forces larger than itself.
Born Analog: The Three Acts
The CRTC’s difficulty is best read as a history in three acts, and the dates tell the story on their own.
Act one, 1968. The Commission was created — first as the Canadian Radio-Television Commission — into a world of spectrum scarcity. There were only so many broadcast frequencies and cable channels, so a licence to use one was a privilege the state granted. And because it was a privilege, the regulator could attach conditions to it: carry Canadian content, contribute to Canadian production funds, serve the public. The entire bargain made sense because the channels were finite. Scarcity was the source of the leverage.
Act two, 1991. The Broadcasting Act was rewritten for the multi-channel cable universe — the five-hundred-channel world — with a stronger emphasis on Canadian content and the reflection of Canadian society. Still scarcity, only more of it. The bargain held: more channels, but still licensed, still bound.
Act three, 2023. The internet erased scarcity entirely. Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, Disney+ — an effectively infinite number of channels, none of them holding a Canadian broadcast licence, none of them asking Ottawa for a frequency, none of them bound by the old bargain. The leverage that came from scarcity evaporated, because there was no longer anything scarce to ration. Parliament’s answer was the Online Streaming Act — Bill C-11 — which received Royal Assent on April 27, 2023, and handed the CRTC the task of building, in the chair’s words, the broadcasting system of the future: a framework where the online services contribute equitably to Canadian and Indigenous content, as the licensed broadcasters always had.
The tool was built to limit who gets on the air. The new problem is that everyone is on the air, and the limiting power has nothing to grip.
The Chairs and Who Fills Them
The Commission is led by a Chairperson, who is also its Chief Executive Officer, sitting above two Vice-Chairpersons — one for broadcasting, one for telecommunications — and a panel of regional commissioners, up to thirteen members in all.
The chair is Vicky Eatrides. She was appointed by the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Pablo Rodriguez, to a five-year term effective January 5, 2023, succeeding Ian Scott. Her background is not the broadcaster’s or the broadcaster-lawyer’s that often filled the chair; it is the competition enforcer’s. She practised regulatory law at Stikeman Elliott, then spent roughly twelve years at the Competition Bureau, rising to Senior Deputy Commissioner in charge of enforcing the Competition Act, before serving as an Assistant Deputy Minister at the federal industry department. That lineage matters for reading her tenure: a chair trained to break up market power and police anti-competitive conduct will, unsurprisingly, find her stride on the telecom side — the fee bans, the wholesale rules, the pressure on the giants. The teeth in telecom are, in part, the teeth of a competition lawyer.
Beneath her, the appointed seats: Alicia Barin as Vice-Chairperson, Broadcasting, on a five-year term effective February 8, 2023; and Adam Scott as Vice-Chairperson, Telecommunications, effective January 16, 2023. The regional commissioners on the current roster include Bram Abramson for Ontario, Claire Anderson for British Columbia and Yukon, Ellen Desmond for the Atlantic region and Nunavut, a member for Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and Nirmala Naidoo for Alberta and the Northwest Territories. A note for the record: in some of the Commission’s own 2024 and 2025 communications, Nathalie Théberge is described in the broadcasting vice-chair role; the formally appointed Vice-Chair of Broadcasting per the appointment order and the Commission’s briefing book is Alicia Barin. We name the appointed seat and flag the ambiguity rather than paper over it.
The Triangle: Independent Court, Government-Appointed Judges, Government Directions
Here is the structure that every argument about whether the CRTC is captured or political must run through, and it is genuinely a triangle.
First corner: it is independent. It adjudicates on a public record and issues binding decisions without a minister’s sign-off on each one. Second corner: its members are appointed by the federal Cabinet — the Governor in Council — on the recommendation of the relevant minister, Canadian Heritage for broadcasting matters and the industry department for telecom, and they can be removed by Cabinet for cause. The judges are government appointments. Third corner: the government can issue binding policy directions that set the terms within which the Commission must act. On November 14, 2023, it did exactly that, issuing an Order to the CRTC laying out how it must implement the Online Streaming Act.
So: an independent court, staffed by government-appointed judges, operating under directions the government can set. None of those three facts is sinister on its own — it is how most expert regulators are built. But the triangle is the permanent tension at the centre of the institution, and it is why the chair can say, with a laugh, that the job is to leave every stakeholder equally unhappy. Independence is real, and it is bounded. The CRTC steers, but the government draws the channel.
And it is not a small ship. The chair runs an organization of roughly 687 full-time staff on a budget near $107 million, funded largely by fees levied on the very telecom and broadcasting companies it regulates, topped up by parliamentary appropriation. The regulator is paid for, in significant part, by the regulated. That is common in expert regulation and worth naming plainly.
Losing the Teeth: The Streaming Fight
Now the other arena, where the trajectory reverses. Having been told by Parliament to make the streamers contribute, the CRTC ruled in June 2024 that foreign online streaming services must pay 5 per cent of their annual Canadian revenues into a fund for Canadian content, including local news. It was the cross-subsidy principle again — the profitable newcomer made to support the system that serves the public — transplanted from telecom into broadcasting.
The streamers went to court. The Federal Court of Appeal granted a stay, meaning they need not pay until the appeal is heard, and the matter remains unresolved. And while the framework is litigated, the damage to the old broadcasters it was meant to protect keeps accruing. In April 2026, CPAC — the service that carries Canada’s political proceedings — announced it was cutting two flagship news programs and about fifteen per cent of its staff, citing declining revenue and, pointedly, the delay in modernizing the broadcasting system. The regulator built to protect Canadian broadcasting is moving too slowly to save one of its most public wards.
The chair’s defence deserves to stand at full strength, because it is the strongest version of the institution’s case. Eatrides has said plainly that the CRTC would like to move faster, but that implementing the new rules is complex, that it must weigh genuinely conflicting interests, and that the work must be done in a way that survives a court challenge — getting it right over getting it fast. There is real wisdom in that. A quasi-judicial body that moved at the speed of the news cycle, and lost in court for it, would protect no one. The slowness may be the system working, not failing. The countervailing fact sits beside it without needing embellishment: CPAC cut its newsroom while the framework was still being litigated. The cost of getting it right is borne, in the meantime, by the very broadcasters the system exists to protect.
The Chair’s Stratum
This publication audits the chair, never the soul — the fit of the seat, not the worth of the person. By the requisite-organization measure, the question is the time-horizon and complexity of the work the role actually demands, and whether the holder is operating at that level.
The CRTC chair’s task is not a one-year or three-year task. It is to rebuild the entire regulatory framework of Canadian broadcasting for the digital age — a project whose consequences run a decade and more, against fast-moving global platforms, conflicting domestic interests, an active court challenge, and a binding government direction overhead. That is genuinely long-horizon, high-complexity work: the work of designing a durable system under uncertainty, not administering an existing one. The role sits high, and it demands a holder who can hold a decade’s arc in view while taking fire from every side in the present quarter.
On the record — and this is conduct, not character — the chair’s play has the shape of that level on the telecom side: a competition enforcer’s instinct for market power, applied with evident effect against the giants. On the broadcasting side, the same long-horizon caution that protects the framework in court reads, to its critics, as a regulator outpaced by the abundance it was sent to govern. Whether that is prudence or paralysis is the open question, and the honest move is to hand it to the reader rather than pronounce it. The chair is operating at the stratum the role demands. Whether the role, as Parliament built it, can grip the world it now faces is the deeper question — and that is a question about the tool, not the hand that holds it.
The Scarcity Machine in an Age of Abundance
Bind it all to the referent. The symbol the CRTC carries is guardian of the public interest in communications. The referent is more strained: a 1968 institution designed to ration scarcity — a finite set of licences — now asked to govern abundance, an infinite content universe whose largest players are foreign, unlicensed, and beyond the reach of the old bargain. The mismatch is not a failure of will or a flaw in the chair. It is a structural anachronism. The instrument was built to limit who gets on the air; the new problem is that everyone is already on it.
Which is why the two arenas pull apart. In telecom, the CRTC governs a market — and a market can be prodded with bans, wholesale rules, and a forced fourth competitor, all of which a competition-trained chair wields well. In broadcasting, it must govern a culture against global platforms that never asked its permission, with tools forged for a scarcity that no longer exists. Same referee. Same chair. The teeth find purchase on the pipes and slide off the infinite channels.
That is the state of the body standing in the middle of your phone bill and your television both. If you came to this from the telecom dispatch, you now have the whole of it: the regulator that is winning the fight over the price of the pipe is, in the same season, struggling to hold the line on what flows through it. Read them together, and the shape of the moment comes clear.
This is Part One of three dispatches reading one moment from three angles. Read Part Two — The Referee (who watches the carriers and the streamers), and Part Three — Who Holds the Pen? (whether Canada can make the giants pay the country at all):
God is Love. Love is Truth. Truth is Consciousness. Consciousness is Brahman.
Amen. Namaste. Om Namah Shivaya.
— The Architect.
Written from love, for a sacred humanity, in the full light of consciousness, toward the greater good. 🕯️
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On the record
Nature and mandate: The CRTC is an independent quasi-judicial tribunal in the Canadian Heritage portfolio, regulating broadcasting and telecommunications; it administers the Broadcasting Act (1991), the Telecommunications Act (1993), the Online News Act, and Canada anti-spam legislation. The Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11) received Royal Assent April 27, 2023.
History: Commission established 1968 (as the Canadian Radio-Television Commission); Broadcasting Act updated 1991; Online Streaming Act 2023.
Leadership (per the Minister of Canadian Heritage appointment release of December 19, 2022, and the CRTC briefing book): Vicky Eatrides, Chairperson and CEO, five-year term effective January 5, 2023, appointed by the Governor in Council on the Heritage Minister recommendation, succeeding Ian Scott. Alicia Barin, Vice-Chair Broadcasting, effective February 8, 2023; Adam Scott, Vice-Chair Telecommunications, effective January 16, 2023. Regional commissioners include Bram Abramson (Ontario), Claire Anderson (BC and Yukon), Ellen Desmond (Atlantic and Nunavut), a Manitoba/Saskatchewan member, and Nirmala Naidoo (Alberta and NWT). Note: some 2024-25 CRTC communications describe Nathalie Theberge as Vice-Chair, Broadcasting; the appointed seat per the appointment order is Alicia Barin — discrepancy flagged, verify current roster before republication.
Federal link and resources: Commissioners appointed by the Governor in Council (Cabinet) on ministerial recommendation — Canadian Heritage for broadcasting, ISED for telecom; removable for cause; five-year terms. Government policy-direction power exercised via the Order Issuing Directions of November 14, 2023 (Sustainable and Equitable Broadcasting Regulatory Framework). CRTC 2025-26 planned spending about $107 million; about 687 full-time equivalents; funded largely by telecom and broadcasting fees plus parliamentary appropriation (per the CRTC 2025-26 Departmental Plan; the Globe and Mail reported the figures in round terms as a roughly 700-person organization and roughly $100-million budget).
Streaming drama: CRTC ruled June 2024 that foreign streamers contribute 5% of Canadian revenues to a Canadian-content fund; the Federal Court of Appeal granted a stay pending appeal. CPAC announced news-program and staff cuts in April 2026, citing CRTC delay in part. Chair Eatrides defended the pace in April 2026. All figures current to June 16, 2026; verify against primary sources before republication.
Suggested tags
CRTC; Vicky Eatrides; Online Streaming Act; Bill C-11; broadcasting regulation; Canadian content; streaming contribution; regulatory independence; Requisite Cabinet
Substack Notes
The regulator now banning your hidden phone fees and forcing wireless prices down is the same one struggling to make Netflix pay into Canadian content — and the contrast is the whole story. The CRTC was built in 1968 for a world of scarcity, where a broadcast licence was a privilege the state could attach conditions to. The internet erased the scarcity. The infinite-channel universe never asked Ottawa for a frequency, and the old leverage evaporated.
This dispatch audits the body in the middle: what the CRTC is, the three acts of its history (1968, 1991, 2023), the chairs and who fills them, and the triangle that defines it — an independent court, staffed by government-appointed judges, operating under directions the government can set. Chair Vicky Eatrides, a competition enforcer by training, has found her teeth in telecom precisely where her instincts are sharpest. In broadcasting, the same regulator moves slowly, fights in court, and watches a public broadcaster like CPAC cut its newsroom while the framework is litigated.
One referee, two arenas, opposite trajectories: a scarcity machine in an age of abundance, biting on the pipes and sliding off the infinite channels. It is the companion to our telecom dispatch — read together, they map the moment. We audit the chair, never the soul; the open question of prudence-or-paralysis we hand to you.
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The factual matter in this Dispatch is drawn from the public record. All characterizations, inferences, and conclusions are opinion, interpretation, and commentary, offered for analysis, reflection, and public-interest discussion. No assertion is made regarding the private intentions, state of mind, or character of any individual. Readers should evaluate all statements independently and draw their own conclusions.