The Canadian funding programs that no longer exist

Here is how it gets you. Say you want to digitise your operations, or hire a researcher, or break into an export market. You search. You land on a page on a federal government website — not a blog, not an aggregator. The real thing, with the government’s own wordmark at the top. It tells you the program covers up to $15,000, describes the two streams, walks you through how to apply. So you build a quarter around it. What it does not tell you is that the program stopped accepting applications in February 2024 and ended entirely a year after that. It still does not tell you.

This is now the ordinary condition of Canadian business funding information. Programs get announced with a press release and a launch event. They end quietly, in a line item in a departmental results table, and the marketing pages stay up. Between 2024 and 2026 an unusually large number of federal and provincial programs closed, and the wreckage is still sitting in your search results.

What is actually gone at the federal level

Two on that list deserve a note, because they are not the same kind of dead. CanExport SMEs is not gone; its application intake ended on 31 August 2026 and the department says future intake periods will be posted when available. AgriInnovate is closed to applications but the program itself runs to 31 March 2028. A closed intake and a closed program look identical on a search results page — and they are completely different things for you to plan around.

What is gone provincially

Ontario Creates replaced two of its best-known programs with one. The Interactive Digital Media Fund and the Film Fund were merged into the Intellectual Property Fund, which launched in January 2025 with a Linear Content stream and an Interactive Content stream. Both legacy pages now say the IP Fund has replaced them, but pages elsewhere on the same site still describe the IP Fund as something that will launch.

Quebec did something more drastic. Effective for taxation years beginning after 25 March 2025, it abolished seven separate incentives — the R&D salaries credit, the university and public research credit, the research consortium fees credit, the private partnership pre-competitive research credit, the technology adaptation services credit, part of the design credit, and the tax holiday for foreign researchers — and replaced them with a single credit, CRIC, at 30% on qualifying expenditures above an exclusion threshold up to $1 million and 20% above that. Watch the name: Finances Québec calls it the tax credit for research, innovation and commercialization, while Revenu Québec, which administers it, calls it the credit for R&D and pre-commercialization. Search one name and you will not always find the other.

Alberta eliminated its Investor Tax Credit and its Interactive Digital Media Tax Credit in Budget 2019, along with its provincial SR&ED credit. Alberta has no current equivalent of either — the Innovation Employment Grant is the nearest thing on the innovation side. PEI’s Advanced Marine Technology Tax Rebate has expired. And Ontario’s Regional Opportunities Investment Tax Credit is still alive but has a date on it: the 2026 Budget confirms it expires 1 January 2027, so expenditures have to be incurred by the end of this year.

Some things went the other way

The picture is not uniformly bleak, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of stale advice. British Columbia did the opposite of a sunset: it raised the Interactive Digital Media Tax Credit to 25% of eligible salary and wages from 1 September 2025 and removed the program’s expiry date entirely. Ontario’s OIDMTC still pays 40% on eligible labour and marketing for non-specified products. Nova Scotia’s Innovation Equity Tax Credit still pays investors 35%, and 45% in oceans technology and life sciences. The federal SR&ED enhanced expenditure limit went up, not down.

Which is the actual point. Programs move in both directions, and they move often enough that a two-year-old blog post is worthless to you and a five-year-old one is dangerous.

How to check before you build a plan around it

Three habits will keep you out of most of this.

Go to the administering government, not to an aggregator. Grant-listing sites are the worst offenders — they get paid for traffic and have no reason at all to take a dead program down. If a page is not on canada.ca, ontario.ca, revenuquebec.ca or the equivalent, treat it as a lead, not as a fact.

Read the page for what it does not say. A live government program page tells you when the current intake opens and closes. A page that describes a program in general terms, with a “how to apply” section but no dates, is often a page nobody has touched since the money ran out.

Separate the intake from the program. “Closed” can mean the money is gone forever or that the next window opens in March. The department will usually tell you which, but only on its own page, and usually in one sentence you have to go looking for.

So we built the directory we wanted

All of the above is why there is now a Canadian government funding directory on this site. It lists 106 federal, provincial and territorial programs — grants, loans, tax credits, equity and wage subsidies — and you can filter it by province or territory, by sector, by type of funding, or by keyword. Every link goes to the administering government’s own page and opens in a new tab. Every entry says what you get, who qualifies, and what the current status is.

Programs that we could not verify as live are not in it. CanExport SMEs is not in it right now for exactly that reason, and will go back in when a new intake is announced. The whole list is re-checked every month, link by link, against the government pages that administer the programs, because a directory that is not maintained becomes the problem it was built to solve.

It pairs with the guide to funding a startup in Canada, which covers the order in which to take money and what each source costs you. The directory is where you go once you know what you are looking for.