Although internal documents obtained by CBC News show that while streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have not distorted the government’s network, federal officials decided to block them because they were considered “people management” issues.
In December, the agency responsible for IT services, Shared Services Canada (SSC), blocked access to paid subscription streaming sites across 45 government departments and agencies, including Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV+, Prime Video, Disney+ and Crave.
At the time, a spokesperson for the SSC said: “Streaming services are not considered as a work tool and do not provide business value to the Canadian government.”
Documents published as part of access information requests provide more insights on how to make a decision.
In an October 2024 email, SSC President Scott Jones wrote to officials on the Finance Committee saying he wanted to “ask some questions”, including using personal phone calls and streaming services among bureaucrats.
He wrote a meeting about the Deputy Ministers who discussed the use of streaming services in federal buildings and expressed support to stop them.
“While streaming may ultimately affect the bandwidth available (the Canadian government) it is more important to be a matter of people’s management,” he wrote.
“In the current situation, and in the public’s perception of public services is the value of … participation on these issues (the Deputy Minister) and commitment to some action.”
Soon after, SSC moved to block streaming services.
This and other emails were requested through access to information made by Matt Malone, an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa, and shared with CBC News.
Thousands of hours of streaming
Request for a file Detailed explanation of the rationale for deciding to ban streaming services on government networksincluding the report on streaming website traffic in September 2024, and was broken down by the department.
The report’s attitude to how much streaming the government network is, and how many times the report has done to the government network compared to the agency’s official statement.
“Network traffic monitoring shows limited traffic at these sites in the government system,” Canadian Sharing Services said in a November 2024 statement.
The report on the flow is a bar graph showing the total amount of traffic per Terabyte (TB).
The amount of data used depends on the video quality of the stream. For example, Netflix provides four data usage settings – Definition from low quality to super high.
If the user streams as standard definitions, a Terabyte is at least equal to 1,000 hours. If they are streaming in HD, then a Terabyte equals at least 340 hours of video.
The highest streaming department includes three more than three terabytes, Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC), the Ministry of Defense has nearly three Terabytes and Privy Council offices, about 1.5 tons per month.
The report includes the “Top 10” divisions of streaming websites in September 2024, including Canadian Global Affairs, Fisheries and Oceans (East), Innovation, Science and Economic Development, Canada, Agriculture and Canadian Agriculture and Food, Finance Secretariat, Revenue Agency of Canada Taxation and Royal Indiana and Royal Relations and Northern Affairs.
All of these departments reported about 0.75 TB of traffic in a month.
This volume is quite small given the number of civil servants employed by the government. For example, PSPC alone has about 19,000 employees.
Cybersecurity expert Eric Parent said the numbers provided by the amount of data are not drawn in full images.
“The metrics we are missing are how many users there are, how many users actively use (streaming) and how long it takes,” he said.
The report also shows that nearly 10 tablespoons of streaming were performed on federal guest Wi-Fi.
A director of SSC said in a letter to colleagues that the government’s streaming numbers may be relatively low, in part because they used a program that invested in streaming speeds to prioritize different internet traffic on government networks.
