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Comment by gustavus | Hacker News Reader

Wow what is Canada's end game here? First they tell the search engines. Engines they have to hand over part of their revenue to legacy media. Now they're going after all the streaming services. Like what is their actual end game? Rather than trying to do something to improve their own economic situation, their solution is just a parasitically leech off of other countries. Large businesses. I mean there's a case to be made for ensuring that massive conglomerates better than appropriate tax burden, but there's got to be a better way than just hamfistedly slapping arbitrary revenue numbers on every service offered in the country, especially when it's already more expensive than across the border. I guess what I'm really asking is who is John Galt?

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The point is right there in the first line.

> Major online streaming services operating in Canada will be required to contribute 5% of their Canadian revenues to support the domestic broadcasting system

Canada has a long history of mandating a certain amount of attention and money goes toward supporting Canadian content.

This seems entirely consistent with that.

In the past they were able to leverage Federal control over the airwaves to achieve this (eg. selling off spectrum) but with the internet they need to come up with new revenue models to achieve the same levels of support for Canadian content.

Canada's economy is kept afloat by inflating a housing bubble and playing all sorts of dirty tricks with taxes. Now that Mexico is taking a lot of Canada's business, Canada becomes less and less relevant to US, expect more of this shenanigans.

This was Trudeau/Freeland's idea of "getting back at the man for nafta 2"

Pretty much, that's why my retirement saving has only 10% Canadian assets.

Transfer all money to the government and spend it subsidizing bombardier.

more like subsidizing Bell and Rogers, these days

They will need a lot of cash to bail out the banks from the real estate collapse.

> their solution is just a parasitically leech off of other countries

From TFA:

> Major online streaming services operating in Canada will be required to contribute 5% of their Canadian revenues

I think his comment contains a speech-to-text error. I assume it is supposed to read "their solution is just a parasitically leech off of other countries' large businesses."

as opposed to other countries' corporations leaching off their economy by taking the profits to tax havens.

Doesn’t seem that different than the US government subsidizing US manufacturing and enacting tariffs on Chinese goods.

It’s a society trying to incentivize investment within the society, because the society’s products/services are not cost competitive with products/services from another society. If it is due to economies of scale, there is almost no way to incentivize that other than to penalize the outside products/services.

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