SOCAN and ACCORD (an umbrella collective of Canadian music organizations, of which SOCAN is a member) continued to advocate for Canada’s songwriters, composers, and music publishers before the Government of Canada, during a public consultation on Nov. 3, 2025, regarding the operation of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) on trade.
We emphasized the importance of maintaining the cultural industries exemption of CUSMA to protect Canada’s cultural sovereignty. The cultural exemption is imperative to maintaining Canadian cultural policies that encourage the development of Canadian songs that reflect Canadian attitudes, opinions, ideas, values, and artistic creativity. With the implementation of the Online Streaming Act, the cultural exemption protects the resulting regulations and decisions from the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) to encourage financial contributions to, and the promotion and recommendation of, Canadian content.
We also said that no AI training exceptions allowing text-and-data mining should be introduced into CUSMA. Currently, the use of copyright-protected works is important for the development of generative AI models. However, this is being done without obtaining consent from, compensation for, or credit to rights holders for the use of their works. In effect, human creators are currently fueling advances in generative AI models without sharing in any of the benefits. We urged the Government to maintain the policy objectives of the Copyright Act: that is, to foster creativity, and to ensure creators and their representatives continue to have the means to control how their works are used, by whom, and on what terms.
We also argued that – because digitization has fundamentally transformed how the cultural economy works, and how cultural goods are disseminated – any proposed CUSMA clauses on digital trade must be scrutinized with this transformation in mind, to ensure there are no consequences that would have the effect of limiting Canada’s ability to act to protect and promote its cultural industries.
SOCAN will continue, as always, to advocate at the Government of Canada and the CRTC for the rights of, and fair compensation for, our members.