Where Canada’s business money actually goes.
Plain-language data stories, built from all 1.3 million records in the federal Grants & Contributions disclosure. Who gets the money, how much, in what, and where it pools — decoded.
Canada’s business money is changing lanes
The $35B foreign battery-plant wave is cresting. Defence, AI and tariff-response are the new federal priorities — and the cheques are months old.
The $15,000 country
Half of all federally-funded businesses got $15k or less — while the top 0.1% of recipients took two-thirds of every dollar. The “average” is a mirage.
Two Canadas of funding
Per business, the Atlantic and the North reach far more companies than Ontario or Quebec — yet Ontario alone holds two-thirds of the dollars.
Most companies win it once
71% of businesses that ever won federal money won once and vanished. A 5% club learned to stack programs into more than 100× the funding.
How we built these.
Every story starts from the same source: all 1,303,899 records in the Government of Canada’s Proactive Disclosure of Grants & Contributions, deduped to the latest amendment of each agreement. We focus on for-profit recipients, remove consumer pass-throughs and anonymised batch rows, and group businesses by their federal business number where reliable. Where a story compares against the wider economy — like funding reach per business — we pair the disclosure with Statistics Canada / ISED business counts. Methodology notes sit at the foot of each story.
Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada · GrantCompass Funding Intelligence · June 2026