For three years, two foreign battery plants swallowed most of Ottawa's business funding. That wave is cresting — and the newest dollars are flowing somewhere else: to defence, AI, and the tariff frontlines.
Every government funds the future it fears. Read the newest cheques and you can see which future Canada is bracing for now.
Federal business funding has pivoted. The clean-economy and EV-battery wave peaked at $35B in 2022–24 and is receding. Rising in its place: $1.5B of new defence money in 2026 (up from near-zero), $819M of tariff-response funding since 2025, and $918M to AI and compute in 2024–25.
Every federal business dollar since 2016, by theme. Change the lens: strip out the battery megadeals, or break open the broad “innovation & regional” mass to see what’s actually inside it.
Hover any year to break it down. Themes are derived from each agreement’s program, title and department. Dollars are committed amounts by agreement start year; 2025–26 are still filling in as disclosure catches up.
Disclosure runs months behind, so every 2026 figure here is a floor, not a ceiling. Yet defence and tariff money have already out-booked all of 2025 — and defence alone has out-committed its entire prior decade.
Each lane shows committed dollars for 2024, 2025 and the partial 2026 to date. “Still rising” means the incomplete 2026 total already meets or beats the full 2025 total — these can only climb as more agreements are disclosed.
Two foreign-owned gigafactories — Volkswagen's PowerCo and Stellantis-LG's NextStar — plus Umicore's cathode plant. Committed in 2022–24 and paid out for years, the battery boom single-handedly reshaped the dataset. In 2025 it began to recede.
Near-zero through 2024, then a step-change: as Canada scrambles toward NATO's 2% target, a new procurement-linked envelope is pushing serious money to domestic munitions, naval and combat-systems suppliers. Most of it landed in a single recent burst.
As the AI race turns national, Ottawa is writing nine-figure cheques to keep model-builders, chip and quantum capacity, and next-gen network R&D on Canadian soil — a theme that barely registered before 2024.
The fastest-appearing line in the entire dataset. Stood up in 2025 as U.S. tariffs hit, it routes money to exposed manufacturers — a single Ford cheque anchors it, with a regional initiative spreading smaller relief to tool-and-die, steel and paper firms.
The largest awards dated 2025–26 — the freshest signal of where federal money is heading. Filter by theme.
Defence, AI, tariff relief — these programs are months old, sparsely advertised, and already moving billions. The companies that win them are the ones who see the wave coming. That's the whole job of GrantCompass.
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