Who Owns the Canadian Story? A Leadership Lens on Streaming, IP, and Sovereignty

Hi, I'm Nola Simon. I'm the host of the Hope and Possibilities podcast. Thank you for tuning in. Like I'm a radio announcer. Listen to that. I wanna talk about intellectual property and the adaptation of Canadian stories. So whether that's individual scripts that are being created by showrunners and screenwriters who are Canadian, or the adaptation of books and articles or whatever by people who happen to be Canadian. Examples would be, Sterling Point was developed for Prime Video.

Every Year After was based on a Carley Fortune book. There's another one coming out that's being adapted next year, I think. And then Heated Rivalry was a book series that's developed by a woman named Rachel Reid in Nova Scotia. Now, there's also a Netflix series, which again, is an original creation called Below. And it's starring Josh Hartnett and set in Newfoundland. It's currently number one in 53 countries, and the production has said that $90 million was invested into the Canadian economy as a result of that production.

So that sounds great, right? What's the true value of the intellectual property involved with that? So the $90 million, a lot of it is actually coming from the Canadian government to stabilize and make the investment in Canada attractive, to fund tourism, to fund jobs. We understand that making it easier and facilitating the investment in Canada instead of elsewhere brings jobs and has that short-term payoff in terms of what's getting invested into the Canadian economy and that local area.

They're sourcing props, they're hiring people to build sets. It's all a local benefit. But that $90 million is the smallest piece of the whole puzzle. The true value is the intellectual property. If you look at the Rachel Reid books, HarperCollins is crediting, as of first quarter of 2026, the sale of her book, Heated Rivalry, plus the other books that she has in the series, with an 8% rise in the sale of books for HarperCollins that quarter.

And if you do the math, that's $40 million. Now, Rachel Reid didn't get all of that, obviously. It depends on what her contract is that she has. I have no idea. But HarperCollins is American, and HBO is American, so Heated Rivalry was developed for Crave initially, and then it was licensed to HBO. How much has that made? What's the true value of that above and beyond the $12 million that it cost to produce initially and the $3 million they were paid to license to HBO?

These are all the reported figures. I have no idea if they're true or valid. That's just what's coming up in the industry reporting. The true value long term in terms of licensing and additional series… It has to be higher. It has to be much, much higher than the original investment, right? So we're probably looking at hundreds of millions. But who owns that?

That's Americans. Even though it's originally a Canadian story produced by a Canadian in Canada, the value of that storytelling is now American. They own it. Now, again, I don't know the details of the contract. I don't know if she can renegotiate this as more and more books come out and, hopefully she's got good agents and lawyers and everybody to support her on that side. But same with Below. That $90 million is a fraction of what it's truly worth.

I've noticed in the industry reporting they report what things cost to make, what the salaries of the actors are, how much they've invested, how much is going back into the local economy. They do not talk about what the overarching value of the project is. I can't even find numbers on Stranger Things, which has been around for, what, a decade, and is like the premier flagship Netflix show. You would assume it's in the billions at this point, but there is actually no number.

I could find numbers on how much it costs to produce the last season, and it was crazy with all of the CGI and special effects and the actor salaries at that point. It was like $400 and $500 million of rough reporting that I could see. So in terms of profit, it has to be in the billions. There is no number to show that. So all of these things are tied up in non-disclosure agreements. It is top secret. So how does that help us understand what the true value is when we're negotiating, right?

And even as a government, how are streamers required to actually disclose to the government how much they're earning from these Canadian stories? And this is where it actually has become a trade issue with the current geopolitical situation between the U.S. and Canada. The U.S. has decided that our online streaming legislation, which requires a 5% investment of profits back into Canadian content, Indigenous content, French language content, is a trade irritant because they don't wanna have to pay that. They don't want to invest in our discoverability for different languages.

They like the deal as it stands under the legislation that existed prior to 2023, and that's something that is bothering them. And I find this so interesting because if you look beyond the normal period of 18 months to three years that it takes to actually develop this intellectual property, we're really only now seeing the value of these Canadian things that started being filmed back in 2024, 2025, 2026 since that legislation came into effect.

And my concern with the other part of the storytelling is, especially like Sterling Point and the Carley Fortune series, they actually changed that story so that not all of the characters were Canadian. There's an aspect of cross-border relationships. The one character in Every Year After comes up for the summer only and then leaves. She's actually American. In the book, she was Canadian 'cause Carley Fortune is a Canadian writer. And Sterling Point has a similar type of thing. Somebody finds out that their mother was Canadian.

They didn't know she was Canadian, and there ends up being an estate issue. They have to come to Canada to resolve the estate issue and end up owning premier property in Muskoka. So what's the benefit of a company who's based in a country who keeps spewing the 51st state narrative, has a history of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism, selling the value of Canadian real estate and close relationships? What is the long-term value of that type of storytelling?

And is that something that we need to really address long term if we look at five, 10 years worth of the storytelling to normalize that ongoing perception of the value that exists in Canada, rather than supporting separate and sovereign identity? When does that cross the line into propaganda that's used to persuade politically?

You may not know this about me, but my parents are German and Scottish. My mom was born in Scotland, in Glasgow, and my dad was born in Duisburg in Germany in the 1930s. So they grew up, they were children when the war started, World War II, and so my entire childhood, and life really, has been understanding the perspectives from different sides of the war. And a great deal of my childhood was spent watching war movies. Now, obviously they were in English.

I don't speak German. But essentially a lot of those movies that came out of Hollywood about World War II were propaganda after the fact, right? And honestly, they never presented Germans well at all. To the victor go the spoils. The victors are the people who actually write the history, the story. It wasn't necessarily reflective of what it was like as a normal German family who wasn't supporting Nazism, what their experience was like. They were trying to survive.

They did what they had to do. I actually don't know the full story. But I do know that what I learned is that there's always nuance, and whatever side of the story you happen to be on, there's something that you're talking about that you perceive to be true, and that there's always a way to reach a compromise in terms of what story actually serves either side, and how you reach consensus. So storytelling has always fascinated me because it's such a tool of influence.

It's such a tool of propaganda. And when I see this come into play, when I see these strategic changes made in multiple different shows, it starts to make me wonder what the overall intention at the company level of investment actually is. And I'd love to say that these are individual companies that are strategically apart from the government, but we know that these billionaires are invited into the White House regularly.

It's not out of the realm of possibility that it's politically motivated. So again, I'm speculating. This is critical thinking. I'm asking questions. What does this truly mean? And what are the long-term impacts if we allow it to continue? And are we at a stage where we can really renegotiate how we authorize the licensing of Canadian intellectual property, how we negotiate access to our resources to film, how we invest in filmmakers who are Canadian, how we support artists, because there's all kinds of artists involved in the making of movies and TV.

How do we fund those in a way that's sustainable once that company leaves, right? So it's great that they do the individual investment, but those projects come in, and then they go. Projects come in, then they go. So it's unemployment in between there unless you're lucky, and you get onto the next project right away. But what's the continuity? What's the plan for stability? And do we have any kind of government support that is going to allow us to recreate this without involving the United States?

So how do we develop a film industry, a TV industry that's developing quality content at world-class level without actual involvement of the United States, to respect our sovereignty? These are all questions I have. I'd love to hear from people in the industry. I'm obviously a consumer. I'm not an expert at all. These are just things I've noticed while I'm watching TV and reading books and everything else that I absorb. The questions are where it really becomes a futurist scenario play, right?

What world do we wanna wake up in 10 years from now, 20 years from now? What does this look like if we make different choices and negotiate in different ways? And I think that could be really fascinating. Anyways, thank you for tuning in. Again, send me questions, nola@nolasimon.com. You could put a comment or review on any podcast, and you can honestly just subscribe. I'm just testing out what the impact is of having people subscribe. So whatever player you listen on, just subscribe and that, I'm told, actually drives me to the charts. And again, this is an experiment to say, does charting actually increase visibility, which gets more people to ask these questions and to consider how we live our future lives and work?