YouTube Wants Ottawa to Count Creators as an Industry. Here's What That Would Change.
YouTube Canada wants a Statistics Canada industry code for creators and a BDC lending stream that values channel cash flow. The data would help. It might also show how few creators get paid.
C-Tribe Editorial
Ask Statistics Canada how many people in this country make a living as YouTubers, TikTokers or podcasters and it cannot tell you. There is no box for them. Creators get filed under performing arts or advertising services, and that, YouTube argues, is why Ottawa keeps missing them. The company is asking the federal government to give creators their own industry code and a dedicated lending stream at the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC).
"We just do not have great data on the impact of the creator economy in Canada," YouTube Canada head Nicole Bell told The Globe and Mail. On financing, she argued that creators "are not small businesses in the traditional sense. Having something more structured and focused on the specific needs of this group will help them scale up their businesses."
What Is YouTube Asking Ottawa For?
More than a loan program. The asks come from a report called Canada's Creator Consultation, built on an Abacus Data survey of 2,596 Canadian creators conducted between May 18 and June 18. Bell laid out four pillars in a Google Canada post on October 28: a North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code for creators through Statistics Canada, a permanent version of the Canada Media Fund's digital creators pilot, a BDC financing initiative, and a business and intellectual property toolkit from BDC and the Canadian Intellectual Property Office.
The BDC request is specific. YouTube wants "a dedicated lending stream for digital media entrepreneurs that evaluates rolling digital platform cash flows and intellectual property when assessing creditworthiness." That second half is the real ask. A creator with a catalog of videos earning steady ad revenue has an asset, but most lenders do not know how to value it.
The report adds a longer wish list, including an all-party Parliamentary Creator Economy Caucus, a federal Creator Economy Envoy, a CRA tax guide for creators, access to export programs through CanExport and Export Development Canada, and provincial film tax credits extended to creator productions. It asks for the Canada Media Fund pilot to be funded at "$20 million annually."
How Big Is Canada's Creator Economy, Really?
That depends on who is counting, which is YouTube's point. The company says its creator ecosystem "contributed over $2 billion CAD to Canada's GDP and sustained 35,000+ full-time equivalent jobs" in 2025. The report does not say how that figure was calculated, so treat it as YouTube's own estimate.
For comparison, YouTube's 2021 impact report put the contribution at $1.1 billion and 34,600 jobs, according to iPhone in Canada. That same 2021 report found more than 90% of watch time on Canadian content came from outside the country, which makes creators one of Canada's quieter cultural exports.
The creators surveyed describe a sector that feels invisible. In the consultation, 60% said they have "no voice" in shaping policy, 57% said the creative industry fails to recognize their value, and only 8% said they get adequate access to loans or capital.
Existing programs are small by comparison. The Canada Media Fund's third round of its digital creators pilot invested $394,000 across 20 creators, the fund announced in February. BDC does have a creative industries focus and says it lent $113 million to more than 1,000 businesses in a year, beating a $30 million target, but that money mostly went to established companies such as post-production houses.
Are Other Countries Treating Creators as an Industry?
Some are. In the US, Reps. Beth Van Duyne and Yvette Clarke launched a bipartisan Congressional Creators Caucus in June 2025 to understand "how these developing small businesses are operating, what struggles they face." India went further. Information and Broadcasting Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced "a 1 billion-dollar fund for the creator's economy" in March 2025, according to the government's All India Radio.
Canada sits awkwardly in between. When Ottawa wrote its policy direction for the Online Streaming Act, it told the CRTC to "ensure that individual users' and social media creators' content cannot be regulated," The Wire Report noted. That kept creators free of Canadian content rules. It also kept them outside the funding and recognition system built around those rules.
What Is the Catch?
Two, at least. The first is distribution. Across YouTube globally, "the top 10% of channels generate approximately 94% of views," media analyst Evan Shapiro found in a 2025 analysis of 4.6 million channels. A 2026 survey of 5,055 creators by CreatorIQ and Influencers.club found 67% earned under US$10,000 a year, Net Influencer reported. A loan program helps the creators already earning, and a Statistics Canada code would show just how few of them there are. Both outcomes are useful, but neither looks like the boom in the pitch.
The second is who is asking. YouTube benefits when its creators grow, hire and make more videos for its platform, and it has spent years fighting Canada's streaming rules in regulatory and court proceedings. Platform dependency is the risk lenders will price. A creator's "rolling cash flow" can vanish when an algorithm changes, a policy shifts, or a channel gets demonetized, and none of that is in the borrower's control.
Why Should Creators Care Anyway?
Because being counted is how money gets allocated. Musicians, filmmakers and game developers all have industry codes, trade associations and dedicated funds because someone once measured them. Creators, many of them young and from communities that traditional media and finance have overlooked, do the same kind of work without that infrastructure.
The Peak summed up the tension: the sector is real, but most of the people in it earn very little. A NAICS code costs Ottawa almost nothing and would give everyone, YouTube included, an honest number to argue over. A BDC lending stream deserves more scrutiny, and the strongest version would cover creators on every platform, not just YouTube. Start with the data. The rest of the policy should follow from what it shows.
