Canada

Canada is a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy in northern North America, a member of the G7 and the Commonwealth, with a population of roughly 40 million. Recent IMF estimates place nominal GDP at around US$2.5 trillion in 2026, with GDP per capita around US$60,000. The country operates as a bilingual federation under the Constitution Acts of 1867 and 1982, with English and French as both official languages and a federal structure across ten provinces and three territories. Confederation dates from 1 July 1867; the 1982 patriation removed the residual authority of the United Kingdom Parliament over Canadian constitutional change and added the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Head of State is King Charles III, represented in Canada by the Governor General, Mary Simon, who took office on 26 July 2021 as the first Indigenous person to hold the position. The 2025/26 cycle has been defined by exceptional political turnover at the federal level. Then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation on 6 January 2025 following the December 2024 resignation of Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, prorogued Parliament until March, and was replaced by Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, who won the Liberal Party leadership on 9 March 2025 and was sworn in as Canada’s 24th Prime Minister by the Governor General on 14 March 2025. Carney called a snap election on 23 March 2025 and the vote on 28 April 2025 returned a Liberal minority government with 167 seats, short of the 172 needed for an outright majority, with the Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre taking 24 additional seats and 42 per cent of the popular vote. François-Philippe Champagne serves as Minister of Finance and National Revenue; no Deputy Prime Minister was appointed in Carney’s initial post-election cabinet; and a new Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation portfolio was created in the May 2025 Cabinet reshuffle and assigned to former journalist Evan Solomon.

The State Media Monitor 2026 dataset includes one Canadian public-media organisation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation / Société Radio-Canada (CBC/Radio-Canada), classified as Independent State-Funded (ISF), a classification that has applied across the SMM’s 2022 to 2026 cycles. CBC/Radio-Canada operates as a federal Crown corporation under the Broadcasting Act 1991, delivering bilingual programming across English (CBC) and French (Radio-Canada) services in television, radio, digital, northern and Indigenous-language services, including CBC North and Radio-Canada Nord, with Marie-Philippe Bouchard as President and CEO since 3 January 2025 and Michael Goldbloom as Chair of the Board.

The 2025/26 cycle’s developments for CBC have been substantially pro-independence. Liberal Leader Mark Carney pledged during the April 2025 election campaign to lift CBC funding by an initial CAD 150 million annually and to enshrine the appropriation in the Broadcasting Act through a statutory funding mechanism. Budget 2025 tabled by Champagne on 4 November 2025 proposed the CAD 150 million increase for CBC/Radio-Canada for the 2025 to 2026 fiscal year, although the statutory funding mechanism had not been enacted by the close of this review period. If legislated, the reform would move CBC/Radio-Canada from the annual voted-appropriation process toward a more stable statutory funding framework. The Conservative Party policy of defunding CBC English-language services while preserving Radio-Canada in French, articulated by Poilievre across multiple election cycles, was unsuccessful at the April 2025 election but remains the principal alternative policy scenario for CBC English services.

Press-freedom conditions in Canada are robust in comparative terms. In its 2026 World Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders ranked Canada 20th of 180 countries with a score of 78.76, an improvement of one place from 21st in 2025 with the country now the leading ranking in the Americas following Trinidad and Tobago’s decline to 32nd. RSF nevertheless flagged declining outlet diversity, with more than 600 Canadian news outlets lost between 2008 and 2025 according to the Local News Research Project, legal pressures on protest coverage, and online harassment of journalists, particularly female and minority reporters. The wider Canadian media landscape includes the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and the National Post among privately owned dailies, alongside the commercial broadcasters CTV and Global News.

The Online News Act 2023 regime, administered through the Canadian Journalism Collective from 2024, distributes approximately CAD 100 million annually contributed by Google to eligible Canadian news outlets; CBC/Radio-Canada is among eligible news organisations under this regime, with the exact amount it receives separate from the headline contribution figure. Meta has continued to block news content on Facebook and Instagram in Canada since the Act’s commencement.

National AI governance, including the May 2025 creation of the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation portfolio, provides the federal policy context within which CBC’s published Approach to Artificial Intelligence and November 2025 News division guidelines operate as a self-regulatory governance arrangement under the broader Broadcasting Act mandate.

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