OpenMedia

OpenMedia is Canada's primary community-driven digital-rights campaign organization, working to keep the internet affordable, open, and free from surveillance. Founded in 2008 in Vancouver by Steve Anderson, OpenMedia engages tens of thousands of Canadians in advocacy on internet policy, surveillance, privacy legislation, and artificial intelligence governance — translating complex technical and legislative fights into accessible public campaigns that mobilize non-technical citizens to shape how technology is deployed, regulated, and held accountable. Where Citizen Lab occupies the research-and-forensics end of the Canadian digital-rights field, OpenMedia occupies the grassroots-mobilization end: it produces the petitions, public consultations, community education programs, and legislative submissions that concentrate public pressure on the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and Parliament.

Founding and structure

OpenMedia was established in 2008 by Steve Anderson in Vancouver as a non-partisan, non-profit advocacy organization committed to a media and communications system built on access, choice, diversity, innovation, and openness. Matt Hatfield serves as Executive Director. The organization operates a community-driven model, framing itself as accountable to its members rather than to funders or institutional partners and measuring its scale through mobilized membership rather than organizational headcount. It operates across North America, with the bulk of its legislative work focused on Canadian federal institutions. Four pillars structure its campaign selection: access (universal, fast, open, affordable networks), democracy (ensuring rights and public voices count in technology governance), free expression (opposing censorship), and privacy (preventing mass surveillance).

StopTheMeter and the internet-access campaigns

OpenMedia's first landmark campaign was StopTheMeter.ca, opposing usage-based billing (UBB) — the practice by which Canada's major telecommunications carriers sought to bill wholesale internet service providers, and ultimately consumers, by data volume rather than flat-rate monthly access. The petition became "the largest online appeal of its kind in Canadian history", reaching 514,741 signatures as of November 2015 and drawing support from independent ISPs including TekSavvy, the Liberal Party of Canada, the New Democratic Party, and the Harper government. The campaign caused the CRTC to reexamine its billing decision, the first major regulatory reversal attributable to coordinated digital grassroots pressure in Canada. OpenMedia also ran SaveOurNet.ca, a coalition campaign for internet openness, and VoteNet.ca, a 2011 federal election initiative making affordable internet access a voter-contact issue.

Surveillance and privacy campaigns

OpenMedia has maintained a sustained campaign presence against government surveillance legislation. The organization ran StopStingrays.org, a public awareness campaign on IMSI-catcher surveillance devices used by law enforcement, and StopWatching.us in response to NSA surveillance disclosures. In 2025–2026, OpenMedia made Bill C-8 (federal cybersecurity legislation) a major campaign focus: more than 10,000 members engaged across the combined C-26 and C-8 campaigns, and Executive Director Matt Hatfield testified before the Senate in May 2026 pressing for four safeguards: data purpose limitation, a necessity-and-proportionality standard replacing the bill's weaker threshold, automatic secrecy expiration dates for government orders, and judicial authorisation requirements before cybersecurity orders take effect. On Bill C-22 (the Lawful Access Act), OpenMedia joined a coalition of over 25 civil-society organizations warning that the bill would constitute "the most expansive invasion of Canadian privacy rights in modern history," and submitted a brief to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security demanding withdrawal or major overhaul of its surveillance provisions.

AI governance and democratic accountability

OpenMedia has made artificial intelligence governance a significant campaign focus in 2025–2026. The organization runs a campaign urging MPs to establish AI regulatory frameworks before harms entrench, called "Stop Canada's 'Buy Now, Regret Later' AI Future." In April 2026, Executive Director Matt Hatfield testified before the Senate Standing Committee on Transport and Communications on AI threats to democratic participation, arguing that AI-generated content flooding public consultations — Canada's 2025 National Sprint on AI Strategy received 11,300 responses with no verification that participants were real Canadians — was "quietly hollowing out the systems that make our democracy work." The testimony advanced four recommendations: a verified civic engagement platform authenticating Canadian residents without collecting personal data, cryptographic authentication for journalism, algorithmic transparency legislation requiring platform disclosure of recommendation systems, and government data reform.

OpenMedia has also engaged the legal gaps around generative AI and biometric data. A May 2026 analysis examined Canada's lack of legal protections for individuals' faces and voices in the age of AI generation, proposing a hybrid legislative model combining Copyright Act amendments recognising faces and voices as protected intellectual property, PIPEDA reforms requiring explicit opt-in consent for biometric scraping, and mandatory watermarking and metadata transparency standards for AI-generated content. The organization also coordinated a BC tour of the Tactical Tech-created Glass Room Misinformation Edition exhibit from December 2025 through October 2026 — visiting New Westminster (with 200+ middle and high school students), Surrey, Vancouver, and North Vancouver — creating community engagement opportunities on misinformation, algorithmic influence, and AI-generated disinformation, and hosting a Misinformation Moment panel featuring educators, politicians, and health advocates. OpenMedia launched a 2026 summer fellowship with AI, online harms, and democracy as its three core focus areas.

Place in the movement

OpenMedia is the entry in this corpus representing the distinctive model of Canadian internet-policy grassroots campaigning: large-scale public petitions, coordinated legislative submissions, community education, and member mobilization directed at the CRTC and Parliament. Its closest international analogues — Electronic Frontier Foundation on long-arc legal infrastructure and Access Now on technical assistance and coalition coordination — operate on different models and do not replicate OpenMedia's community-campaign approach for the Canadian institutional context. The structural work OpenMedia does — translating internet-policy fights framed as technical regulatory matters into accessible citizen-action moments and sustaining that engagement across successive legislative cycles — is the mechanism by which Canadians outside the technology industry participate in shaping telecommunications regulation and AI governance. The StopTheMeter victory demonstrated that large, well-organized public petitions can reverse CRTC decisions; the AI governance campaigns of 2025–2026 are applying that same petition-and-testimony model to a new legislative frontier.