Just when you thought Bill C-11 wasn't controversial enough, comes this: a demand from Quebec that foreign streaming services imported into Canada offer, finance or make French language programming targeted at La Belle Province. 

In an intriguing column in the Globe, former CRTC Vice-Chair Peter Menzies openly speculates on what this might mean to streamers coming here from the U.S. The Bill already mandates that more Canadian content be produced, paid for and be made more prominent by the likes of Netflix and Disney+ as the price of admission to this market. Would forcing them to include French-only content, which would arguably serve a far smaller audience, be a step too far? 

Menzies position is that it could, as they say in England, throw a spanner into the works. 

"Mathieu Lacombe, Quebec’s Minister of Communications and Culture, is planning to introduce his own legislation this year in an effort to force digital platforms to offer more French content.

He hasn’t yet said which of a provincially appointed committee’s 32 recommendations will be implemented, but according to The Canadian Press, the goal is clear: to end what the report’s authors call "the hegemony of English-language content on such platforms as Apple TV and Spotify.”

Quebec’s plan to introduce its own streaming rules will be a minefield for the CRTC