Radio-Canada pauses Amazon partnership after public backlash, demonstration

ICI RDI will be temporarily unavailable to subscribers on Amazon Prime Video; CBC News Network deal remains in place.

Barely a week after its announcement, CBC/Radio-Canada’s partnership with Amazon Prime Video was temporarily suspended following a surge of public criticism. Around 7 a.m. on Friday, two dozen activists gathered outside the network’s Montreal headquarters to protest the new agreement, which would make its 24-hour news channels available through the Amazon streaming service. The small but purposeful demonstration coincided with the broadcast of the weekday morning program Tout un matin.

Speaking to The North Star, the demonstrators, who represented the CSN as well as the workers’ collective Alliance Ouvrière, echoed a wider unease across the country about the American conglomerate’s encroachment.

Félix Trudeau, president of the STTAL-CSN, Canada’s first Amazon warehouse union, found the partnership especially troubling given the company’s decision to close its Quebec warehouses last year in response to the successful unionization campaign:

“I find it incredibly cynical, because when we were running a more active, more intense boycott campaign [last year] and it was all over the media, the government was saying it would cut contracts and talked about breaking off from Amazon. Now, a year later, we can see that it was all just empty promises. It was hollow. As soon as they feel like they can go back to business as usual, they do. It’s a real stab in the back for the laid-off workers.”

A major concern is the company’s tightening grip on Canadian public life. It holds a commanding share in e-commerce, logistics, and media consumption and, as some also pointed out, both provincial and federal governments depend on its cloud computing service (AWS).

Bertrand Guibord, general secretary of the Conseil central du Montréal métropolitain–CSN and a philosophy teacher at Cégep Marie-Victorin, spoke to the risks of ceding control of Canadian media distribution:

“The image we have of it is the online store, but that’s not what Amazon is. It controls a vast portion of international physical and digital logistics. Relying on it to distribute information is to weaken ourselves; it only gives it more power over public discourse. It would be naïve to think it won’t use that power to cause harm. The facts have shown that it will. Amazon isn’t just any company – it’s a giant, likely more powerful than most states on Earth. Yet here we are, trusting it to circulate information.”

Describing the partnership as part of “the whole idea of the commodification of information”, Stéphane Thellen, director of the teachers’ union at Cégep du Vieux-Montréal, emphasized that, while the state-owned broadcaster is “not perfect”, CBC/Radio-Canada stands as “a public service funded by public money”, and it operates within a regulatory legislative framework. On the wider media landscape, he said: “We know how the GAFAM entities – Meta, and so on – are siphoning off the entire information ecosystem […]. So it’s particularly concerning to me.”

Nicolas Chalifour, an executive member of the teachers’ union at Cégep Édouard-Montpetit who was active in the boycott campaign, added:

“I find it revealing of a kind of disconnect between politics and institutions from even the most basic misconduct. […] A partnership between a Crown corporation and Amazon amounts to publicly funded contempt for labour laws. It is doing business with those who shamelessly exploit workers and trample on their rights. It is unacceptable.”

On the afternoon of March 13, Radio-Canada announced it would put the partnership on hold until its news programs are available on its own streaming platform, ICI TOU.TV. Since CBC News Network is available on the CBC Gem platform, it will remain available through Amazon Prime Video.

“This is about more than a contract,” says Trudeau. “It’s about who controls the information we access, and that can’t be left in the hands of an American multinational. Certainly not Amazon’s. Today is a win for our cause, and it wouldn’t have happened without everyone who kept the pressure on.”