Government blocked streaming sites for public servants as a ‘people management issue,’ documents show

Although streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video weren’t straining the government’s network, federal officials decided to block them because they were perceived to be a “people management” issue, according to internal documents obtained by CBC News.

Last December, the agency responsible for IT services, Shared Services Canada (SSC), blocked access to paid subscription streaming sites, including Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV+, Prime Video, Disney+ and Crave for 45 government departments and agencies.

At the time, a spokesperson for SSC said “streaming services are not considered work tools and offer no business value for the Government of Canada.”

Documents released as part of an access to information request provide more insight on how the decision was made.  

In an October 2024 email, SSC president Scott Jones wrote to officials at the Treasury Board, saying he wanted to “raise a couple of issues,” including the use of personal phones and streaming services among bureaucrats. 

He wrote about a recent meeting of deputy ministers, where they discussed the use of streaming services in federal buildings — and voiced his support to block them.

“While streaming may ultimately impact the bandwidth available to the [Government of Canada], it is also more importantly a people management issue,” he wrote.

“In the current context and with public perception of the public service as it is … there is value in engaging [deputy ministers] on these issues and in committing SSC to take some action.”

Soon after, SSC moved to block the streaming services.

This email and others were obtained via an access to information request made by Matt Malone, an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa, and shared with CBC News.

Thousands of hours of streaming

The request, which sought documents detailing the rationale behind the decision to ban streaming services on government networks, includes a report on traffic to the streaming sites in September 2024, broken down by department.

The report shed a more fulsome light into how much streaming was being done on government networks, compared to the agency’s official statement when the sites were banned.

In a November 2024 statement, Shared Services Canada said that “network traffic monitoring shows limited traffic to these sites from government systems.”

The report on streaming is presented as a bar chart, showing total volume of streaming per terabyte (TB).

The amount of data used depends on the quality of video streamed. As an example, Netflix offers four data usage settings — ranging from low quality to ultra-high definition.

If users were streaming on standard definition, one terabyte would equal at least 1,000 hours. If they were streaming on high definition, then one terabyte equals at least 340 hours of video. 

The departments with the highest streaming included the Department of National Defence at over three terabytes, Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) with almost three terabytes and the Privy Council Office with about 1.5 terabytes of volume per month. 

The report includes the “top 10” departments with highest traffic to streaming websites in September 2024, including Global Affairs Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (East), Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat, Canada Revenue Agency and Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada.

All of those departments reported about 0.75 TB of streaming volume in one month.

Given the number of civil servants employed by the government, this volume is fairly minimal. For instance, PSPC alone has about 19,000 employees.

Cybersecurity expert Eric Parent says the numbers presented just by volume of data don’t paint a full picture.

“The metric we’re missing is how many users, how many users are actively on [streaming] and for how long,” he said. 

The report also shows almost 10 TB of streaming done on the federal government’s guest Wi-Fi.

In a letter to colleagues, a director with SSC said the streaming numbers across the government could have been relatively low in part because they used a program that throttles the speed of streaming to prioritize different internet traffic on government networks.