Why Netflix Is Putting Canada On Screen
Shaftesbury founder Christina Jennings is executive producer of Netflix’s The Granville Girls, an adaptation of Cat Cahill’s Colorado-set Gilbert Girls novels that relocates the story to the Canadian Rockies.
Photo credit: Netflix/Anthony Fascione/The Canadian Press
Cat Cahill’s Gilbert Girls romance novels take place in a Colorado mountain valley, where young women find work along a newly built railroad and at the fictional Crest Stone Hotel. Netflix’s television adaptation keeps the railway, the hotel, the women and the romance while relocating the story to the Canadian Rockies.
Commissioned in October 2025, The Granville Girls is an eight-episode series from Toronto production company Shaftesbury, with Canadian screenwriter Adriana Maggs as showrunner. Its central character, Emma Daniels, becomes a “Granville Girl” working at the Granville Hotel as the railway pushes through the mountains. Cahill, an American author, continues to describe the original novels on her website as stories set in Colorado.
The relocation raises a larger question about Netflix’s changing relationship with Canada: Why is Canada suddenly valuable enough as a cultural identity that Netflix is moving an American story here rather than using Canada simply as the place where an American story is shot?
From production location to commissioning market
Canada has been useful to Netflix for years. The company’s first original production filmed in Ontario in 2012, and when Netflix announced plans for a Canadian office in February 2021, it said it had spent more than C$2.5 billion on productions in the country since 2017. Canadian crews, studios and locations continue to support international series whose stories are set elsewhere, including My Life with the Walter Boys, Virgin River and Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Alongside that production business, Netflix began developing a Canadian commissioning operation. In 2021, the company announced that it would establish an office in Canada and hire a dedicated content executive to work with Canadian creators. At a CRTC hearing in November 2023, Netflix Canada content director Tara Woodbury described spending her first six months travelling the country to meet independent producers, writers and directors and learn more about regional storytelling. Those conversations, she said, helped produce the team’s first two series greenlights: the Arctic comedy that became North of North and Mae Martin’s Tall Pines, later released as Wayward.
Woodbury also described the model Netflix was trying to follow. Local Netflix offices in markets including South Korea and France had developed programs rooted in their own countries that later travelled internationally. She cited Squid Game and Lupin as examples and told the CRTC that Netflix wanted to find Canadian stories that could do the same.
The timing makes one explanation unlikely. Netflix’s push toward Canadian commissioning was underway years before the trade tensions and surge in Canadian consumer nationalism that followed the deterioration of Canada-U.S. relations in 2025. The Canadian office strategy dates to 2021, and by 2023 Woodbury was describing a development process that had already produced two series orders.
A Canadian slate takes form
The change became considerably more visible to viewers in 2025, which Netflix describes as the launch year for its Canadian slate. North of North, created by Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, became what Netflix has called its first series commissioned from Canada. The comedy centres on a young Inuk woman in the fictional Arctic community of Ice Cove and was filmed mainly in Iqaluit with substantial local involvement. Wayward, created by Martin and produced with Sphere Media, followed.
Netflix has since continued adding projects with recognizably Canadian settings. The adaptation of Carley Fortune’s This Summer Will Be Different keeps Toronto and Prince Edward Island central to the story. Jesse McKeown’s Below, scheduled to premiere Oct. 8, is set and filmed in Newfoundland. The Granville Girls goes a step further because its source material did not begin in Canada at all.
Netflix says audiences are responding to Canadian programming. In September 2026, while promoting This Summer Will Be Different, the company said viewing of Canadian content among its Canadian members had increased almost 20 per cent since the Canadian slate launched in 2025. It also said almost 65 per cent of Netflix members worldwide watched Canadian content during 2025. Those figures come from Netflix, and the company did not explain in that announcement exactly which titles it included when defining Canadian content.
The strategy fits the company’s wider approach to international programming. Netflix reported that 70 per cent of viewing in 2025 involved members watching a title produced outside their own country. In May 2026, co-CEO Ted Sarandos described the company’s international approach as beginning with locally specific programming rather than trying to manufacture stories designed to feel globally generic.
Canada already has much of the production infrastructure needed to support that strategy. Netflix says its activity contributed C$6.5 billion to the Canadian economy between 2021 and 2024 and involved more than 35,000 cast and crew. The economic figure comes from a model developed with Deloitte assistance and published by Netflix, so it is best understood as the company’s estimate rather than an independent government measure.
Canadian-content rules are changing too
The Online Streaming Act brought foreign streaming services more fully into Canada’s broadcasting regulatory system. In 2024, the CRTC established a base contribution equal to five per cent of Canadian revenues for large online streaming services covered by the rules. In May 2026, the Commission adopted a broader framework under which applicable unaffiliated online streaming groups would have a 15-per-cent Canadian programming expenditure requirement, including the existing five-per-cent base contribution.
That 15-per-cent figure should not be read as a fully implemented Netflix obligation yet. The CRTC said the requirements would be applied to individual services through future proceedings establishing tailored conditions of service.
Netflix has pushed back against parts of the regulatory approach. During the CRTC process, the company argued for lower mandatory spending requirements and greater flexibility to recognize Canadian programming it commissions directly. In the proceeding that produced the 2026 expenditure framework, Netflix was among the foreign services supporting Canadian-programming expenditure requirements of five per cent or less rather than obligations comparable to those imposed on traditional broadcasters.
The Canadian-content definition has also changed. In November 2025, the CRTC adopted a revised certification framework that continues to consider Canadian ownership and Canadian creative personnel while introducing bonus points for certain Canadian elements. A production can receive a point for qualifying Canadian written source material. Another point can be available when the required lead characters are Canadian, First Nations, Inuit or Métis and the story takes place entirely in an identifiable Canadian location, subject to the full conditions of the framework.
That does not mean moving an American story into Canada automatically turns it into Canadian content, nor is there public evidence that The Granville Girls has received those certification points. Its American source material would not qualify for the Canadian-written-work bonus, while its setting and characters could become relevant only if the production satisfies the rest of the applicable criteria.
The timing also prevents the final 2025 CRTC definition from explaining the original Granville Girls commission. Netflix ordered the series in October 2025; the Commission issued the final revised Canadian-program definition the following month. The broader regulatory process was already underway, so Canadian-content policy formed part of the industry environment, but there is no public evidence connecting the relocation from Colorado to Canada to a particular CRTC rule.
The politics came later
Canadian consumer attitudes changed significantly during the 2025 trade conflict with the United States. In February of that year, the Angus Reid Institute found that 78 per cent of respondents were already buying or likely to buy more Canadian products in response to U.S. tariff threats, while 59 per cent were likely to boycott American-made products. Roughly one in five respondents fell into the strongest category for cancelling or boycotting U.S.-based streaming services such as Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+.
By August 2026, another Angus Reid survey found 69 per cent of respondents wanted their province to take a “Team Canada” approach in the continuing trade dispute, putting national interests ahead of provincial ones.
Those surveys establish a market in which Canadian origin can carry greater consumer weight than it did when Netflix began building its local commissioning operation. They do not establish that Netflix changed its programming because of Canadian political sentiment, and the chronology strongly suggests the commissioning strategy began for other reasons.
Netflix’s own public statements point toward its international programming model instead. By 2023, company executives were already saying that stories rooted in local places and experiences could travel globally. The Canadian production industry gave Netflix an established base from which to pursue that strategy, while regulatory changes added financial pressure and incentives around Canadian programming. The later surge in Canadian consumer nationalism arrived after the strategy was underway and may have made visible Canadian identity more commercially useful, although Netflix has not publicly made that connection.
When Canada stays Canada
Below provides one recent example of how the company is presenting Canadian place as part of a series rather than hiding it. McKeown has said he had been visiting Newfoundland for years and wanted to set a project there, while Netflix’s own promotion of the series discusses the province’s fishing culture, landscape and regional speech. Lead actor Josh Hartnett told Netflix that he learned about Newfoundland history and dialect while preparing for the role.
With North of North, the relationship between the story and its location is more fundamental. Aglok MacDonald and Arnaquq-Baril developed the series around an Inuit community, and Woodbury told the CRTC in 2023 that the creators came to Netflix wanting to tell a story about their home. Netflix says hundreds of people in Iqaluit participated in the production.
The Granville Girls offers a different case because its source material already had a setting. The novels were in Colorado. The television adaptation is in the Canadian Rockies.
Publicly available material establishes that the relocation happened, but it does not establish who first proposed it, who made the final decision or whether regulation, financing, creative considerations, audience strategy or some combination of those factors played a role. Those questions sit at the centre of the larger change Netflix is making in Canada: after years in which this country often served as somewhere else on screen, Canadian places are increasingly being allowed to remain Canadian.
