OTTAWA—Ever since the ink dried on the original 1988 Canada-U.S. free trade agreement, Canada’s cultural industries — publishing, broadcasting and film production — have been protected.

Canada insisted on it then.

Canada insisted on it again in 1994 when the continental free trade agreement was broadened to include Mexico.

Ottawa also insisted on cultural protections in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement and in the Canada-EU free trade agreement.

And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he’ll insist on it now, threatening to “walk away” from a deal if Canadian cultural protections are eroded in a new NAFTA.

He told an Edmonton radio station Wednesday that protecting Canadian “sovereignty” and Canadian “identity” is one of his “red lines.”

In fact, since the start of NAFTA talks in August 2017, Trudeau’s government set out three “no-go” zones: Canada’s quota system that controls dairy, poultry and egg production, a dispute settlement system to resolve complaints about unfair anti-dumping and counter-vailing duties, and the so-called “cultural exemption.”

“We can’t imagine a situation in which an American TV company or network could come up and buy radio stations or buy CTV, for example,” Trudeau said Wednesday in an interview with CHED. “That would not be good for Canada, it would not be good for our identity, it would not be good for our sovereignty. So ensuring that we continue to control our news, our broadcasts, our airwaves and our media is really — keeping it in Canada and independent — is something that’s really important to us.”

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Here’s what the exemption means in practical terms.

Despite any obligation to drop trade barriers and allow goods and services to move freely in the NAFTA zone without discrimination, the barriers that protect Canadian cultural industries from being swamped by U.S. entertainment giants are allowed to stand.

It means the Canadian government may legally restrict or limit foreign ownership of culturally sensitive companies like radio or television stations, or magazine or book publishing firms. It allows Canada to regulate and subsidize the production of Canadian content on the airwaves to boost Canadian producers, distributors, artists and performers without having to provide the same subsidies to foreign companies.

But it was drafted in a pre-digital, pre-Internet age, and while Canada has said it is open to “modernizing” NAFTA, it continues to insist on a “robust” exception to free trade for cultural industries.

A Canadian government source with knowledge of the talks said that for the Americans, on the other hand, “it has proven to be a sticking point” — even more so now that progress has been made on other issues (like rules for the auto industry).

The emergence of the cultural exemption as a bone of contention at this stage in the talks surprised those who have followed NAFTA closely.

Laura Dawson, director of the Canada Institute at Washington’s Wilson Center, watched all of the consultation hearings Congress held last year prior to the start of the NAFTA re-negotiation.

She said it was never brought up except in one context: pushback by Americans who complained about the Canadian regulator’s decision to end the practice of swapping out American ads for Canadian ones in the big broadcast, a decision that undercut the NFL and Superbowl producers’ ability to sell ads at a higher price.

Dawson sits on a deputy minister’s trade advisory committee and hasn’t heard it flagged as an emerging concern at the NAFTA table in the past year, and says it’s hard to know where the real pressure from the U.S. is coming from without knowing what American negotiators are pressing for.

She notes that the digital revolution has allowed American content “to reach Canadian audiences anyway…so a lot of those original cultural exemptions have been negated by technology.” Dawson said Canada has also looked at other policy instruments to protect Canadian cultural industries, such as the deal Ottawa did with Netflix to develop Canadian content.

“It’s hard to know if there’s any real issue, or what Canadians should be pushing back against,” she said. “Are these things that really have been made redundant by changes in technology? Is there still a public policy case to be made that you shouldn’t allow foreigners to own bookstores in Canada, because what we ended up with is a whole lot of Chapters stores — which are terrific — and no Barnes and Nobles stores, because it kept American investors out?”

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Lawrence Herman, a former Canadian diplomat who practices international trade law, said in an interview that although things have changed “mightily” since the original deal of the 1980s, the cultural exemption “is critical for Canada” in order to protect Canadian broadcasting, publishing, rules on Canadian content, and support for Canadian performing actors and artists in the recording industry. Herman cannot imagine any Canadian government giving it up because of its “symbolic and substantive value.”

“We live next door to an entertainment juggernaut that could easily roll over the whole Canadian cultural sector,” he said.

Correction — Sept. 6, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that misstated the given name of Laura Dawson.

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