By: Tait A.M. Graham
Waking up in the morning means one thing when you’re a kid: cartoons. Especially those made in Canada on TV channels like Teletoon, but that channel doesn’t exist anymore. Canadian animation studios are making more money than ever, just not making shows for Canadian kids. More and more children watch streaming services and YouTube every day instead of cable, which we used to know well.
In fact, according to the Youth Media Alliance, investment in Canadian children’s programming has dropped by a staggering 35.7 per cent since 2015 to 2016, falling from $552M to $355M in 2023–2024. For a country that once had a renaissance of animation in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the pitiful state we see the industry in now is nothing compared to what it used to be. Television, once beloved by Canadian youths, have since vanished in the years passed since then, so what happened to Canadian kids’ media?
From the 1990s through the early 2010s, Canadian animation produced several widely recognized shows like Arthur, 6teen, Amazing Spiez and Bubble Guppies. Many of these shows were pioneered by animation studios like Nelvana until most of them were acquired by Corus Entertainment in the early 2000s. Currently, Chorus has a catalog of 25 specialty television services, which include Teletoon, YTV and Treehouse.
Kim Wilson is the director of the Children’s Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University and a longtime industry professional. Wilson says that funding is part of the problem, “we had a thriving ecosystem in terms of Canadian content because it was mandated on broadcasters and that’s where kids were watching content.”
In 2015, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) shifted its focus away from broadcast and into online media, which subsequently saw many shows and studios go under. “So, there was this suddenly a big, massive regulatory gap that was hugely impactful because, you know, streaming services weren’t subject to the same CanCon requirements as traditional broadcasters. So, it’s not like one replaced the other. Suddenly, there was just less content being made,” Wilson says.
Broadcasters simply no longer had to order children’s content to be created, so ended the golden age of Canadian cartoon media. Foreign imports now control most of the on-air time through outlets like Cartoon Network and shows like Bluey, leaving Canadian media on its own to struggle and continue on.
In a 2024 Media Technology Monitor report, it is stated that 83 per cent of the anglophone children surveyed watched YouTube over regular cable TV, which sits at 70 per cent.
Wilson says that it was a quick takeover, “there was a lot happening, and then, like in the teens, 20 teens, when streaming arrived, I guess you would call that the disruptor era or the disruption, you know, with Netflix and Disney Plus in particular, because it really kind of changed a lot of things in terms of cord-cutting.”
Even Marie McCann, Senior Director of Children’s Content at CBC Kids, had to shift to streaming. “About 10 years ago, there were a lot of debates about YouTube. Should we put full episodes on YouTube or not? And through time, we were able to come to the conclusion that putting our content on YouTube was part of us being a public service,” she says.
Instead of only having a selected schedule of shows, services like the aforementioned YouTube and Disney+ offer more content for less money and allow higher enjoyment.
Now, the overall North American animation industry has gone up by billions of dollars in the past years. However, that fact is only about the industry itself and not about how Canadian kids shows are being produced for Canadians. What it really shows is that a large portion of our animation tool belt is being used to benefit other countries.
Even though Canadian animation now brings in over $1 billion a year, the nature of the industry has drastically changed. American entertainment behemoths now employ Canadian companies to animate tales and shows they don’t own.
The change was gradual at first, then abrupt. As streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ expanded their content collections, they looked to Canada’s highly qualified and reasonably priced animation workforce. The so-called “‘service work’” of delivering the technical animation for series that were conceived, produced and cast in another country kept Canadian studios occupied.
Intellectual property rights, creative freedom and most importantly, employment opportunities for Canadian writers and voice performers remained south of the border.
This explains how industry profits can rise as children’s programming in Canada falls. Money comes in, but culture disappears. While the infrastructure that formerly supported uniquely Canadian storytelling in the writers’ rooms, the voice recording studios, the creative development teams and many more slowly vanish, studios manage to make a profit by catering to international clients.
Canadian studios themselves may be thriving by working for shows outside of the country, but Canadian children don’t benefit from it at all. What we’re experiencing is a cultural loss, not an economic one.
The change is noticeable as well; Canada’s most iconic studio, Nelvana, stopped production in early September 2025 after a fifty-four-year run in the industry. The Nelvana brand still exists, though they are “focusing on distribution, merchandising and managing existing properties,” says Melissa Eckersley, Corus’s head of corporate communications, in a September 2025 Globe and Mail article.
Corus Entertainment notably bought out Nelvana in a massive deal on Sept.18th, 2000, for a whopping $540 million dollar cash and stock deal. In the Writers Guild of Canada’s 2024 Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Report, it says that there has been a 79 per cent drop in half-hour-long children’s animated series episodes.
The solution was supposed to be something called Bill C-11. The bill was already passed back in 2023, which required streaming services to contribute and promote Canadian content to Canadian audiences. However, it’s been nearly two years, and the effect it may or may not have had remains to be seen. The CRTC is still developing new ways to deal with streaming giants and fund current kids’ shows at the levels that previous shows once had.
Wilson knows that there is a challenge with wanting to create what once was.
“I’m not a big fan of saying, oh, let’s go back to this golden age,” she says. “It’s like, how do we make something work for how the world is today?”
She thinks that any fix has to address how streaming platforms show content. “It’d be great if we said, yeah, Disney+ and Netflix. You’re here. It’s great, but your algorithms should prioritize Canadian children’s content for Canadian users,” Wilson argues.
“If we ever accept that Canadian kids will grow up on American and global content, we’re essentially saying Canadian identity stops at childhood, and that’s a bit of a cultural surrender,” she says.
McCann over at CBC Kids describes how the public broadcaster adapted to reach children where they actually are.
“We know the kids are there. We’re trying to follow their consumption practices, and we’re making great Canadian content for them, and we’re making it available to them on the platforms they’re using,” she explains.
Still, McCann recognizes the true challenge facing Canadian content in the streaming era. “With the massive tsunami of content that is available for kids and everyone, there is an important role that government or regulators could play in making sure that content that is made specifically for Canadian kids is at least somehow surfaced to them,” she says.
Without something intervening, she worries that Canadian shows will simply be lost in the infinite scroll of foreign programming.
Wilson thinks that the cost of passivity is mounting with each year that goes by. “You know, every year we wait, we lose another cohort of kids who will grow up valuing Canadian storytelling. We lose more talent, maybe to the brain drain, and we lose institutional knowledge as studios close. I do think there’s an urgency here in terms of kids growing up and not having the Canadian content that they’ve seen,” she warns.
The issue is not just funding, it’s figuring out how to preserve an entire gear system of creators, actors and stories.
The children have increasingly shifted to social media platforms in recent years, resulting in them encountering less Canadian content, says Matthew Johnson, Director of education at mediasmarts.
“Over the last 15 years has been a shift from young people primarily using online spaces that were designed for children towards primarily using online spaces designed for adults particularly social media and streaming sites,” he says.
“Content for older children or for adults no longer are really relevant things like limits on who could go to see what kinds of movies or when things were aired obviously these things still exist in those contexts, but because young people can now access pretty much any content on the internet with a single click,” Johnson says. “It is much more possible for young people today to encounter content that they’re not ready for or that they’re not looking for and as well because so much of young people’s media consumption happens through personal devices today rather than larger shared devices It’s harder for parents to co-view with them It’s harder for parents to supervise what they’re consuming.”
The dominance of American content in the Canadian animation market has more of an effect than just money, it also raises concerns about how young Canadians see themselves on screen.
“We do know for instance that when young people see diversity represented on screen it is most often represented from an American perspective, so for instance, even if young Black Canadians are seeing Black people on screen they are seeing them from an American lens, which of course is very different from the background the culture and the experience of Black Canadians,” he says.
Johnson emphasizes that this creates a viscous cycle “when we already don’t have a really clear sense of Canadian identity and we don’t see a coherent Canadian identity being reflected in media, that creates a vicious cycle where our sense of Canadian identity gets progressively weakened. And I think there is evidence that we’re seeing that the much greater exposure to American media that has occurred over the last couple of decades I think you could make a strong case that that’s associated with Canadians now more identifying with their regions or with other aspects of their identity rather than with a broader Canadian identity.”
There is also a concern about the fragmentation of the broad audience of children in general not seeing the content that is developed for them.
“We’re past the era of a monoculture there was a time when putting a certain image of a Canadian identity on in a Wednesday at 8 o’clock would reach a significant portion of Canadians would have a really strong impact that’s simply not happening anymore. No matter what our attention our audience is much too fractured,” he says.
However, the stakes are higher than before as with the migration to the internet that almost all children have access to poses the threat of algorithmic radicalization.
“Young people that are old enough to be in our research, they experience racist content, sexist content, sometimes hate content fairly often online, and we know that this is upsetting to them certainly in a small number of cases,” Johnson says. “This is going to be persuasive It is we do know there’s evidence that a lot of the radicalization of people who wind up involved in hate groups and hate movements does start online particularly in video sites that have algorithmically delivered content because it’s very easy for those to pick up on the initial signs of engagement with that content and gradually deliver more and more extreme content and it also connects them with communities where other forms of social radicalization can happen.”
Waking up on Saturday mornings no longer mean sitting in front of the TV and watching YTV or Teletoon. Kids across Canada wake up and open Netflix and YouTube to binge-watch their favourite show or creator. They watch hilarious Irish YouTuber creators, Australian shows about cattle dogs and maybe a little bit of Cocomelon. What isn’t being perceived by their eyes are shows set in their own communities and told in their own voices.
The Canadian animation industry hasn’t died, cash is flowing more than ever. The studios are busy, and the animators are working hard to provide content meant for someone else watching from some other screen, not for Canadians.