Lawyer weighs in on legalities, best practices after Ottawa restricts use of streaming services by public servants
When the federal government quietly blocked streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ across 45 departments last December, the move was driven by what officials called a “people management” issue.
Shared Services Canada (SSC) announced the move after thousands of hours of streaming were logged in a single month, with the Department of National Defence alone accounting for over three terabytes of data, said the CBC.
Previously, a spokesperson for SSC said "streaming services are not considered work tools and offer no business value for the government of Canada."
And SSC president Scott Jones noted that “while streaming may ultimately impact the bandwidth available to the [government], it is also more importantly a people management issue," said the CBC.
So, how should employers navigate the issue of streaming services used in the workplace?
As Toronto employment lawyer Andrew Monkhouse explains, Canadian employers are on solid ground when it comes to restricting or blocking access to streaming platforms on workplace devices or networks, but need to be careful about monitoring.
“Legally, employers are generally allowed to limit or block any website in the office through workplace policies,” he says.
“It would only be in exceptional circumstances that such workplace policy changes...
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