Canadian lawmakers are eyeing a new 5% tax on Canadian broadband connections to help fund Canadian-owned media empires. Sources tell the Globe and Mail that the new plan, which is still under development, would add hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues to the Canadian Media Fund, which is already funded by a levy on cable TV bills to help finance the production of Canadian content. The goal, apparently, is to try and counter the advertising revenue headed out of the country courtesy of Facebook, Netflix, Google and other international -- mostly US oriented -- industry giants.

"A source explained the revenue stream generated by the current cable levy is no longer sufficient in an age of cord cutting and over-the-top services that stream content over the Internet," the paper notes.

Proponents of the plan are trying to insist that this isn't a new "internet tax," but more of a streaming tax, designed to reflect the shifting market in the cord cutting era.

"People will say it s a new tax, but it isn t a new tax," one anonymous source claims. "The goal is to update the current levy on cable companies to include other services that they now also provide."

Industry experts like CBC and Telefilm executive Richard Stursberg, however, say this semantics appears to be an attempt to tap dance around a Canadian Supreme Court ruling rejecting additional taxes on broadband service.

"This is not a viable or desirable option," Stursberg tells the paper. "Further taxing of ISPs would raise the cost of service and slow the deployment of high-speed networks. This seems unwise on economic as well as cultural grounds."
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